Where the Right is Wrong: Gun Control
I will begin by quoting from a person who cannot be mistaken as a 2nd Amendment-hating, pinko- communist by the conservative movement: Ayn Rand. After a lecture she gave at the Ford Hall Forum in 1971, she engaged in a “Question and Answer” period in which she was asked about gun control, to which she gave the following response:
“I do not know enough about it to have an opinion, except to say that it’s not of primary importance. Forbidding guns or registering them is not going to stop criminals from having them; nor is it a great threat to the private, noncriminal citizen if he has to register the fact that he has a gun. It’s not an important issue, unless you’re ready to begin a private uprising right now, which isn’t very practical.”
After another lecture at the Forum in 1973, she was again asked about gun control and provided the following response:
“It’s a complex, technical issue in the philosophy of law. Handguns are instruments for killing people – they are not carried for hunting animals – and you have no right to kill people. You do have the right to self-defense, however. I don’t know how the issue is to be resolved to protect you without giving you the privilege to kill people at whim.”
(My thanks to Jason Crawford, for providing the transcript of these answers.)
One of the fatal failings of contemporary conservatism is the lack of any rational basis for the right to own a military-grade weapon. Most of the support comes from a whimsical level, in which peoples’ identities revolve around owning a gun (whether it is the Bible-thumping, pickup driving rednecks or the video console, glorified Hollywood violence junkies). When confronted for a rational basis, the one proffered is usually any combination of the following:
· They have an inalienable right to own a gun, as provided by the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
· It is necessary to stockpile military arms, in case it becomes necessary to overthrow the established government (like the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War).
· They have a right to use it for sport.
The first argument fails on the premise that the Constitution is not an intrinsic primary from which political rights are established. An action is not good or evil just because the Constitution defends or prohibits it, especially since the Constitution is subject to amendments (else one would have to conclude that slavery was good, prior to the 13th Amendment). A Constitution is a special type of law under which the people place restrictions and prohibitions on their government (as opposed to a statute, where the roles are reversed). Whether such restrictions and prohibitions are good (protecting the rights of each individual) or bad (infringing on such rights), is a question of ethics. Thus, in defending a right, one must appeal to an ethical code, not the concrete which enshrines it.
The second argument also fails because the stockpiling of military arms is justified when the people no longer have peaceful recourse for changing their government, such as through the free expression of political opinions and ballots. The Minutemen of the 1700s were justified in stockpiling arms, since the British Parliament were exercising authority over the American Colonies and colonists had no say whatsoever in the composition of the Parliament. The only means available to them at such juncture, short of the Parliament self-correcting, was a violent revolution.
This is not the case within the United States today, which was constructed by such Minutemen and other Founding Fathers in such a way as to make the violent overthrow of a government unnecessary, when the citizens desired change. In doing so, they saved thousands of lives over a nearly 250-year period from needless bloodshed.
As an aside, if there should ever be a time when the government does need to be violently overthrown, it is not necessary to stockpile military arms beforehand. While conservatives may not like his politics, they can learn a lot from Josip Broz (aka “Tito”), who successfully defeated both the Germans, Italians, and their rump Yugoslavian governments (who had combat aircraft, tanks, and artillery) during World War II by starting with simple firearms and makeshift weapons.
This, then, leads to the question of what is a rational basis for the “right to bear arms”? This right stems from the primary that each individual has inalienable rights, which exist and are recognized as an ethical outgrowth of the primacy and nature of their existence. An individual’s existence depends upon his rational mind, which can only practically be applied by acting upon his thoughts within reality, free of interference from anything other than reality itself. It is from this basis that the slogan “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [or property]” can rest: his life as the primary, his liberty to sustain his life, and his pursuit of happiness (property or none) to give his thoughts practical effect.
To protect these rights, individuals must recognize and respect the same rights in other individuals. This requires them to protect their rights through law, as opposed to whim. To enforce such law, a government must be established and maintained solely for such purpose; else either society takes two different paths towards the same end: (i) tyranny, through the absolute domination of a government; or (ii) anarchy, the subjective domination of any person or gang who can exert more force than another. The end of both is the destruction of individual rights (and the inevitable destruction of man).
To prevent such end, a government – whose ultimate power is directed by its people - must have a monopoly on the use of force in enforcing such laws. It is from this basis that it can be rationally concluded that an individual does have the right to bear arms, but only such arms as are necessary for his self-defense and preservation.
The question of which arms he can or cannot have depends upon the design and purpose of the gun. A manual or semi-automatic handgun with a low firing capacity (no more than six rounds), while it can be used to murder someone, is also designed as a tool of self-defense – a legitimate exercise of a person’s rights in circumstances where there is no time or means for a government to enforce the law. The same concept applies to rifles and shotguns (so long as they have a low firing capacity) which, in addition to self-defense, can be used for other legitimate purposes (e.g., hunting and sports).
Weapons such as nuclear bombs, tanks, missiles, and other artillery are not designed for individual self-defense, but for killing people (and in large numbers). A person is not going to defend themselves from being raped, robbed, or a home invasion by whipping out the howitzer they keep in the pantry. These weapons are tools for self-defense, but only within the context of a government protecting its citizens from attack by another entity.
The same also applies to arms which can be carried by an individual, whether it is a nuclear bomb which can fit inside a backpack or, most notably and critically, assault-style rifles. By “assault”, I mean any firearm that has a high-round magazine or which is automatic. Despite looking similar to a hunting rifle and being fired by only one person, these types of weapons are not designed for self-defense or hunting, but for killing many people (they are called “assault” weapons because they are designed for assaulting enemy fortifications).
Whether they know it (like most anarcho-libertarians) or not (most conservatives), by insisting that individuals have a right to own an assault rifle they are, as Rand observed, staking the claim that they have a license to kill other people. Because of the nature of the gun, it not only gives them this license, but also a means to take the law into their own hands and exert, by force, their will on other people (i.e., to violate another person’s rights).
This is exactly what we are seeing with these daily mass shootings in the United States. It is also what we are seeing with the re-emergence of right-wing militia groups and leaders (e.g., Ammon Bundy), who believe in imposing their own interpretation of the Constitution on others outside of the confines setup by said Constitution.
By holding that individuals have a right to military-grade weapons, conservatives are actually supporting the disintegration of society into an anarchistic state. Due to its nihilistic nature, anarchy itself is only a temporary state of being and history has demonstrated that, to save itself from nihilism, society turns to dictatorships for protection (the transition from the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte being one example). The irony being that conservatives, who rail against the tyranny of Marxism or “wokeism” (whatever that means), are actually supporting the establishment of tyranny by way of anarchy.
Beyond military-grade weapons, there are justifications for putting some limitations on the ownership of firearms which have a legitimate purpose for individuals. Prohibiting the ownership of such as punishment for a violent crime is completely justified. So is prohibiting (temporarily or permanently) the ownership by someone who is mentally incapable of responsibly handling such weapon (I am quick to state that such incapacity must be determined objectively at with high standards; not everyone with a mental illness, such as OCD and ADD, is incapacitated). It is here that such ancillary matters, such as registration and background checks are justified.
It is also important to note that the principle opposing ex post facto laws should be observed. If assault weapons are to be banned, individuals who legally obtained such before such ban should not have their property confiscated or be put into prison. A government can provide incentives to remove assault weapons from general circulation, such as a buyback program or providing tax incentives for supplying the guns to an ally in need. But a government should not punish an individual for an action taken which was lawful at the time it was taken.
Conservatives are in the right in observing that it is the individual who pulls the trigger who is the killer (guns are not the One Ring which has a will of its own) and killers will always find a means to their desired ends, gun or no gun. Liberals are wrong on several points of gun control, particularly the fundamentals. However, conservatives are advocating against individual rights when they advocate for unfettered ownership of military-grade weapons – and this is why they are wrong.
