STUART BUCK posts on the question of whether, if the Iraqis are all armed, it doesn’t undercut arguments that an armed populace makes tyranny highly unlikely.

It might, if it were true that Iraqis are all armed. But there’s not much reason to think that they are. It’s true that a Tim Noah piece that Buck links repeats that assertion, picked up from a New York Times story. But dictatorships often pretend to arm their people against external threats, while really only arming those deemed politically reliable — typically members of the ruling party. (And the question of who has them does matter. Uday Hussein has — er, had — a newspaper, but that hardly proves that Iraq has a free press.)

That seems to be the case in Iraq, where this story from today reports:

Civilians also took advantage of the collapse of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s authority to grab weapons from an army base, said Group Sergeant Jeff Treiber.

That doesn’t sound like the action of a universally-armed populace to me. Maybe Neil MacFarquhar, who wrote the story for the Times, got his information from Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. A journalist possessed of a more critical mindset toward those in power, of course, might wonder why a ruler who doesn’t trust his own army, or even his own “elite” Republican Guard, would trust a populace that he terrorizes with guns.

(Thanks to reader Jim Loan for pointing me to Buck’s blog, which I should read more often. And I should stress that Buck’s analysis is far more sophisticated than Tim Noah’s.)

UPDATE: Nelson Ascher emails:

Hypothesis:
An armed populace may be effective BEFORE the appearence of a totalitarian government.

But if you arm them when they’re already under such control, surveillance and terror, it is not likely that they would or could revolt. Otherwise no officer in the army of a totalitarian state would issue guns to his own soldiers. Once you have a disciplined organization or state, small arms are rather useless. What is needed is a counter-organization (a party, a movement etc) that’s able to transform thousands of isolated arms in a weapon-system. That’s why many revolutions consist in turning part of the standing army against the government.

Yes, and it’s why such governments do their best to atomize citizens and make them distrustful of one another. I’ve written a little about this subject here, and Indiana University law professor David Williams has written more on it. He has a book out now that I’m working my way through — or was until a student borrowed it for a paper she’s writing for me. Here’s what I wrote a while back, in the piece linked just above:

As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed. And, of course, there is no guarantee that a free press will prevail over the long term either. Certainly some tyrannies have arisen in nations where press freedom existed–Weimar Germany, for example. Yet we do not generally require proof of efficacy where other Constitutional rights are concerned, so it seems a bit unfair to demand it solely in the case of the Second Amendment.

It seems to me that Noah is trying to make just such a demand. Nonetheless, I do think that an armed populace is effective — if not foolproof — at preventing and remedying tyranny. And I’ll bet we’ll find out that Saddam thought so too, and that, as the evidence above suggests, reports of universal gun ownership among Iraqis were about as reliable as, well, most reports from the Iraqi government.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan McArdle is skeptical of Noah’s premise, too:

Noah tries to counter this by saying that given that McFarquar was in a gun shop where transactions were taking place, the Iraqi people at least have free access to guns. But he knows no such thing. All he knows is that the people in the gun shop in Baghdad were able to buy guns from that gun store owner. We don’t know who you need to know, pay, or present in order to buy a gun in that store.

Then there’s the countervailing evidence:

I’ve read about freelancing Fedayeen who’ve been setting themselves up as local strongmen with nothing more than the small arms they’re able to conceal from coalition troops. If everyone has a gun, how come they’re letting themselves be robbed by one or two guys with some pistols? Why no posse?

I’ve also read about the crowds stabbing, beating, and in some cases, tearing limb-from-limb, the Ba’ath and Fedayeen left behind when the coalition troops move on. If they’ve got guns, how come they need to use primitive human wave techniques? (I know there’s a visceral urge to get up close and personal, but there’s an equally visceral urge, to young men with guns, to be the guy who makes the kill shot, rather than an anonymous member of a crowd. Plus it’s a lot less dangerous than being at the front of a mob storming an armed pack.)

There seems to be a fair amount of hostage taking activity — small bands of soldiers using large bands of people as shields. If you had a gun, and they had your kid, wouldn’t you rise up by then?

Yeah. Megan has more; read it all. And read the comments, too, many of which express astonishment at the willingness of Noah and MacFarquhar to draw sweeping conclusions from virtually no evidence. As one commenter writes:

That’s the entirety of evidence that Noah, no friend of the NRA, found to blunt the criticism that McFarquhar had it wrong? A guy with a record of making fanciful estimates accepts the word of retailers at face value and draws a conclusion about the entire country from observing two gun shops in the capital? And from /this/ it’s reasonable to expect a defense of ideas that contradict this, uh, “evidence”?

If I go to Palo Alto, CA — where there’s a Porsche dealership — and observe that people are doing business at the place and that the owner says sales are up fifty percent since the last gubernatorial election, is there anyone reading this blog who thinks it would be reasonable to draw the conclusion that every household in Northern California either has a Porsche or has easy access to one?

That’s par for the course when many journalists write about guns, sadly. By the way, here is another piece that I’ve written on the subject.