Crime
Rafael Mangual, a crime researcher at the Manhattan Institute, is out this week with an issue brief describing America’s crime problem and making policy proposals to improve the situation. Mangual notes that we are amid the largest crime wave in 100 years. He places blame for the crime wave, rightly in my view, on soft on crime policies. He states, “this general deterioration in public safety and order was unquestionably preceded and accompanied by a virtually unidirectional shift toward leniency and away from accountability in the policing, prosecutorial, and criminal-justice policy spaces.” Over approximately the last decade, America has experienced a 25% decline in the number of people imprisoned, a 15% decline in the number of people held in jail, and a 26% decline in the number of arrests effected by law-enforcement officers. In short, arrest and incarceration has plummeted and violent and property crime has skyrocketed. That is not coincidental; it is causal.
Mangual correctly identifies that most of the violent and property crime is committed by repeat offenders. As policy solutions, He recommends beefing up habitual offender and mandatory minimum sentences. He also calls for more truth in sentencing and data transparency. All good ideas. I would add to that list the scaling back of bail reform and pre-trial release programs. You can read Mangual’s paper here.
More crime
Since 2015, overdose deaths from heroin and cocaine have decreased by over fifty percent. Seemingly good news. However, overdose deaths from synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine have surged, more than making up for the drop in deaths from the other drugs. We are now at more than 100,000 annual deaths from drug overdose, sixty-five percent of which involved synthetic drugs. Synthetic drugs have replaced organic drugs because they are easier to produce and, therefore, cheaper. Lab made drugs do not require land and farming operations. They can be set up anywhere, so labor and transportation costs go down. Fentanyl is up to 100 times cheaper to produce than heroin. Meth retails for less than half as much as cocaine. Just like with all other products, low cost and ease of acquisition leads to greater adoption.
Cost-saving innovations in illegal drug production have coincided with a shift toward leniency in criminal drug laws, increasing use. Without the legal system disrupting drug operations, production and distribution costs are even lower. While solving this problem is extremely complex and difficult, a policy shift away from leniency would at least make it harder to be a drug dealer.
Textualism
The stock of a rifle is the part that you press to your shoulder when firing. A bump stock is a rifle stock designed to compress with the rifle’s recoil to “bump” the trigger against the shooter’s trigger finger. This allows for more rapid firing.
Federal law bans “machine guns” for general, public use. The law defines a machine gun as a gun that shoots multiple bullets “automatically” and “by a single function of the trigger.” The federal statute also bans any accessory that allows such actions on guns. In 2017, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms issued a rule interpreting bump stocks as an accessory turning a rifle into a machine gun, thereby making them illegal to possess.
In 2017, prior to the ATF regulation making them illegal, Michael Cargill had purchased two bump stocks. After the ban, Cargill filed suit against the ATF in Federal District Court seeking to overturn the ATF regulation. The District Court agreed with the ATF. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court, ruling in favor of Cargill. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up Garland v. Cargill. The Court will certainly rely on textualist analysis in determining whether the bump stock meets the definition of a machine gun. Does the bump stock allow firing “automatically” and “by a single function of the trigger?” We’ll see.