Code:
if (con(lex) == TRUE)
{
if (ben > cos)
jus = TRUE;
else
jus = FALSE;
}
Does the law violate the Constitution? If yes, it is unjustified.
If it is Constitutional, do the costs exceed the benefits? If yes, it is unjustified.
If it is Constitutional and the benefits clearly exceed the costs, it can be justified.
Most prohibition or censorship laws (mala prohibita of alcohol, marijuana, "Lady Chatterley's Lover", guns, Popeye cartoons, boy scout knives, etc.) fail one or both tests.
My home county banned alcohol til 1968. I recall rampant bootlegging of beer and questionable quality booze (colored moonshine in bottles with broken seals, etc.) and frequent reports of fights, knifings or shootings at bootleg joints with colorful names like The Sugar Shack and The Bloody Bucket. Kinda fueled my cynicism about the talk about gun control in the 1960s: I read Mad Ave Adman Carl Bakal's book "No Right to Bear Arms" as just a prohibitionist tract replacing demon rum with mail order gun.
Prohibition of alcohol or even "shoulder things that go up" might pass the Constitutional law test, but I doubt if they pass the cost-v-benefit economics test. (Banning "shoulder things that go up" just does not pass the common sense test but that's another issue.)
As far as mala in se acts go, everything that can be done wrong with a gun is already against the law--murder, armed robbery, assault, reckless endangerment. Enforcing mala prohibita laws aimed at guns or gun owners just diverts law enforcement time and money from enforcing mala in se laws. There are more gun owners than there are gun criminals.
The NAS 2004 report in the section on gun buybacks indicates that there are 6,500 handgun murders out of 65 million handguns, or one of 10,000. Therefore, a gun buyback would have to randomly select 10,000 handguns to get one murder weapon. At the typical buyback program, most people turning in guns and most guns turned in do not match the handgun murder profile (generally buyback guns are old or inoperable guns turned in by people who inherited them and did not have any use for them; a widow who inherited a 1897 Winchester shotgun from her duck hunter husband (but no shells) is not your typical murderer). As I look at it, buyback programs are hard to justify in an economic sense. At a cost of $100 per gun ($50 to the owner and $50 to handle and dispose of the guns) the price of 10,000 guns, one million dollars, would have more measurable benefit if invested in hiring more police or providing better equipment or training for existing police: it would be more likely either to prevent crimes or to catch criminals.
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