[2258] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
More on ACP and Joseph McNamara
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Wed Mar 4 22:20:28 1998
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 17:28:33 -0800 (PST)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 17:26:21 -0800 (PST)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: More on ACP and Joseph McNamara
I heard back from Stanford law prof Kathleen Sullivan. She says that she
and Prof. Epstein were invited just yesterday to brief Congress on
encryption. "We're not committed to any stance, including any stance the
industry has taken previously," she says. Including the crypto-in-a-crime
provisions the industry supported last year.
One thing to keep in mind is that the ACP effort is headed by former White
House counsel and Gore aide Jack Quinn. Needless to say, he surely knows
where his long-term interests lie: with the vice president, who has been a
strong supporter within the administration of restrictions on encryption
exports. At today's press briefing, Quinn talked a lot about privacy, but
pointedly refrained from criticizing the export controls that flow from an
executive order signed by Clinton and strongly backed by Gore. Quinn now
has to be searching for not just a way to cut a deal, but to cut that deal
in a way that avoids making the Clinton-Gore team look incredibly idiotic.
Let's just hope that the deal doesn't help out businesses, and President
Clinton, to the detriment of Americans' privacy.
-Declan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 16:51:40 PST
From: Eugene Volokh <VOLOKH@law.ucla.edu>
To: declan@well.com
Subject: Joseph McNamara
> Joseph McNamara
> Hoover Institution
> Former chief of police, San Jose
To return to the always intriguing crypto / gun control
connection: Joseph McNamara is a noted gun control advocate, and the
author of what gun rights people call (in his honor) "The Police
Chief Fallacy."
In 1986, he testified before a congressional committee that guns
were not useful for self-defense by ordinary citizens:
"We urge citizens not to resist armed robbery, but in these sad
cases I described, the victims ended up dead because they produced
their own handguns and escalated the violence. Very rarely have I
seen cases in which the handgun was used to ward off a criminal."
Statement of Joseph D. McNamara, Hearing Before the House
Committee on the Judiciary, 99th Cong., 1st & 2nd Sess. on
Legislation to Modify the 1968 Gun Control Act, pt. 2, p. 989
(Feb. 19, 1986), quoted in Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms
and their Controls 175 (de Gruyter 1997) (a *very* reliable
source).
The fallacy, as Kleck points out, is that McNamara's database is
cases *he has seen* in which he *knows* that a handgun was used, which
is a dramatically skewed sample: If a citizen scared away an armed
robber with a gun, he might not call the police, or might call the
police but not mention the gun (especially if he wasn't sure that it
was legal for him to possess or use the gun under those
circumstances). Even if a citizen told the police that he used a gun
in self-defense, the police chief isn't very likely to hear about it.
But when a citizen uses a gun in self-defense and "ends up dead,"
chances are that the police chief *will* hear about it. So McNamara
might have noticed 90% of the unsuccessful defensive gun uses, but
only 10% of the successful ones -- no wonder his subjective
perception is that unsuccessful uses are more common.
In fact, the data (reliable data, not just anecdotes), which Kleck
collects in his book, strongly suggests that defensive gun use
against armed robbery substantially *decreases* the chance that the
victim will get injured (and decreases by even more the chance that
the robber will get the money).
Hardly entirely on point, but still, given the rhetorical link
between gun control debates and crypto debates, I thought I'd mention
it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law School, (310) 206-3926 fax -7010
405 Hilgard Ave., L.A., CA 90095
