Archives of Ontario, C.H.J. Snider fonds, Reference Code F 1194 S 15000, I0015265., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It is kinda interesting that the prohibition of alcohol was one of the biggest policy mistakes in American history. I agree with that sentiment; but, still, I don't think that we've adequately examined why it was a bad policy and applied those lessons now.
The thing is, despite the impressions may get from a lot of the media from the era or set in the era, prohibition did reduce the amount of alcohol consumption in the country. Especially if you look at the consumption of alcohol in the previous century compared to the 1920s, it was massive a drop. So, if the only goal was to get people to stop drinking so much and that's the only data that you're looking at, prohibition was a success. The reality is that making things illegal does produce a certain deterrence factor. Most people don't wanna go to jail. If you're a guy who has a couple beers a week, and we passed prohibition again, you'll probably figure that the risk isn't worth the reward.
The problem is that that's not a good way of looking at things. Even if we completely forget about the factor of values and individual liberties, flags should be raised when only one data point is used. Okay, we got people to drink less; but, more people are being gunned down in the streets. More nonviolent offenders are in jail. More people are getting sick and dying from homemade alcoholic concoctions.
This all being echoed in defense of New York's CCW permitting which is now largely considered to be unconstitutional. When Kathy Hochul points to gun death statistics as a reason why the New York policy that only the wealthy and well-connected can carry firearms, she's playing the same game.
First of all, when a politician or someone in the media starts supporting gun control by talking about gun death or broad crime statistics, you know that they're trying to mess with you. The majority of gun deaths are suicides. That's not to downplay the tragedy of those suicides; but, they know that suicides aren't what people are thinking about when we're talking about gun violence. It's a way to make the problem look three to four times larger than it really is.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that gun deaths are lower in a place where only rich people are allowed to have them and has spent a century with a policy that, if you get assaulted, your best change of survival is to pray that your assailant is one of the nicer ones because, if you use a weapon to defend yourself, you'll be going to prison anyway. This is why Hochul decided to point to the gun deaths per 100,000 statistic, which is lower in New York than in Mississippi. Of course, she opted to ignore the fact that Mississippi's violent crime rate in general is much lower than New York's.
This seems to be a mistake (or lie) being made globally. Anybody who has been active within this issue knows the repeated line that the UK has a lower murder rate than the USA and that's because they got rid of the guns and we didn't. Well, the problem is that Switzerland has a ton of guns. In fact, Switzerland has youth marksmanship competitions and Switzerland has a lower murder rate, violent crime rate, and home invasion rate than the UK. Of course, when somebody does decide to kill someone else in Switzerland, he or she usually chooses a gun; but, it doesn't happen very often.
No matter how much you may try to avoid acknowledging this fact, a citizen with a gun can stop an attacker with a knife. Hell, in the classic case of Bernie Goetz, one citizen with a gun stopped four assailants armed with melee weapons and Goetz still spent a year in jail for it because of New York's dumb law.
The only consistent way that anti-Gun people have managed to make it look like their policies work is to pick one data point that is intentionally vague and repeat it as much a