Cui Bono is Latin for “Who benefits?” This phrase is part of the vocabulary of legal analysis.
So … who benefits when the Journal-News of White Plains, NY, publishes the names and addresses of licensed gun owners?
Does the public in general benefit? No. Licensed gun owners are convicted of gun-related felonies at about the same rate as police officers, so they pose no hazard. They are not, in general, peace officers, so one should not seek them out for help in a crisis.
What about criminals? Does this information help them to commit crimes? Probably yes. If someone wants to rob a house and to avoid an armed confrontation, it helps to know where the guns are. This knowledge emboldens the burglar and housebreaker. On the other hand, if someone wants to steal a gun, this information tells him where to look. (Or tells her, if we want to be P.C.) This information is likely to increase the number of guns in the hands of criminals. In either case, the law-abiding public loses and the criminal wins.
So who does benefit, besides the person planning to commit a crime? The one person who wants gun crime to go up: the gun control advocate! Far from wanting gun crime reduced, the gun control advocate wants it increased. Does this sound crazy?
The statistics show that everywhere gun laws have been liberalized (in the true sense of the word) to allow responsible people to keep and carry weapons, crime has gone down. Conversely, crime has gone up in big American cities, and in England as a whole, in the wake of gun control laws.
Thus a rational person would conclude that putting more guns in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens would reduce crime. Since gun control advocates favor removing guns from such people, we can conclude that either they are not rational or their primary motive is not reducing crime. In fact, both are true: their primary goal is disarming people. It is almost certain that in as large a nation as ours, there are a few politicians and a few criminals who simply prefer a disarmed and helpless citizenry. But in all likelihood, most gun control advocates hold their position in the belief, held against all evidence, that disarming law-abiding citizens will make society safer.
The rain it raineth on the just,
And also on the unjust fella.
But mostly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.
———The Journal of Irreproducible Results
Such beliefs are sometimes called “religious” but a better word might be “superstition.” The desire to disarm the just in order to constrain the unjust is an example of magical thinking, a voodoo fallacy that can stand neither logic nor empirical evidence. So, of course, logic and empirical evidence are banned from the discussion.