The Washington Post has an interesting article about what has happened in the city since the Supreme Court declared the city’s gun ban unconstitutional in the landmark Heller decision in 2008.  Basically, hundreds of residents have registered thousands of firearms. More than 2 years have passed and the predicted mayhem is not here. DC Mayor Fenty called the court ruling an “outrage” and said the ban was necessary to stop residents from intentionally or accidentally killing one another.  Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign says the debate over the ban is not over yet.  Several more years of data gathering will be necessary.  And so the debate rolls on!

For more on this subject, check out the Cato book on the Heller case,  Gun Control on Trial  by Brian Doherty.  Still more here, here, and here.

Gun Owners in the District of Columbia is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There is a new review of Brian Doherty‘s book, Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle over the Second Amendment, over at The American Spectator.

The review captures the uphill battle that the Heller litigants faced in the District of Columbia:

When an employee on the Taxicab Commission once suggested that taxicab drivers be able to arm themselves for self- defense, a spokesman for then mayor Anthony Williams said, “The proposal is nutty, and obviously, it would not be entertained seriously by any thinking person.” After D.C. readjusted its laws in the wake of Heller so that guns were no longer prohibited but regulated to the point of making ownership exceedingly difficult, Mayor Adrian Fenty justified it thusly: “I don’t think [the people of D.C.] intended that anybody who had a vague notion of a threat should have access to a gun.” Apparently the mayor doesn’t know or doesn’t care that once a threat is real, it’s probably too late to go through all of the city’s regulatory hoops.

Cato held a book forum for the event, which is available here.  Also check out Reason TV’s videos of Brian discussing this historic legal battle, both before and after the decision came down.

New Doherty Book Review is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In today’s installment of Cato Unbound, Reason senior editor Brian Doherty defends “folk activism” (that’s what we do here at Cato, in case you’re wondering) against Patri Friedman’s complaints of ineffectiveness.

Doherty argues, in effect, that Friedman’s effort to simply go out and float a boat upon which one can do whatever floats one’s boat is parasitic on earlier “folk activism” aimed at persuasion. It is hard to find 20,000 people who will commit to moving to New Hampshire for the cause of liberty and, as Brian points out, it’s even harder to find people who will now commit to moving to a man-made island. The viability of projects like Seasteading seems to depend on the success of prior evangelism.

That said, one of the merits of Friedman’s “dynamic geography” is that it is not really a “libertarian” project at all. As he writes in his Unbound lead essay:

Because we have no a priori knowledge of the best form of government, the search for good societies requires experimentation as well as theory — trying many new institutions to see how they work in practice.

I think there’s good reason to expect competing sea-top jurisdictions to settle on a scheme of governance more libertarian than what the world’s current nation states have to offer. But I also think there’s little reason to expect a seastead to embody the system of most libertarians’ dreams unless a lot of libertarians coordinate and settle there. In that case, it’s really clear that creating a libertarian society from whole cloth depends on the prior existence of libertarians, which depends on the success of the folk activism that produces them.

For more on seasteading, check out yesterday’s Cato Policy forum with Patri Friedman and today’s podcast interview.

New at Cato Unbound: Brian Doherty Defends ‘Folk Activism’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog