Whenever someone talks about “gun laws,” I get a bad feeling, especially if that person is noncommittal or, worse, adamantly in favor of such things. My problem with gun laws is that they rest on making sweeping moral judgments about the people within a given society, whereby a ruling body determines what is acceptable for those people to possess and what they may be punished for possessing. What an individual does with a given item (a firearm in this case) is irrelevant if he obtains it without permission from a ruler or rulers.
In essence, this relegates gun laws to creating thought crimes, and even that is illusory because it’s more of an assumption that “possession = bad” than a censuring of actual thoughts. Bob might store a fully automatic M4A1 under his bed, and he might have no ill will toward anyone, yet he is a criminal by the very nature of doing nothing aside from possession itself, despite having neither committed nor considered aggressive violence.
The inevitable battle cry from detractors is:
“Prevention! We must prevent gun crime!”
But I don’t understand this. A true criminal act — behavior that involves one person initiating force against another — is a crime whether a gun is involved or not. Simply placing gun possession in this category because some lawmaker dreamed it up is viciously circular.
“Stupid redneck, guns are far more destructive than baseball bats and knives!”
Yes, that is true. But if one is to focus on an evaluation of consequences, then guns statistically are used for crime prevention more often than they are used for crime commission (of course, numbers to the effect vary widely according to the political predisposition of the surveyors). More importantly, statistics notwithstanding, my self-defense takes precedence over numbers, trends and political debate. Even if a given society is literally teeming with unjustified gun-related violence, that is still not an argument against the average person’s possession of a firearm. In fact, as balances of power shift about, whether due to a government or a more underground criminal element, the importance of civilian armament increases proportionally. The fact that guns are deadly in the hands of someone with the will to kill for non-defensive reasons is an argument for guns in the hands of everyone else. The only preventive measure I will stake my life on in a threatening situation is my own ability to acquire and use the tools necessary for survival.
But individuals in governments and their apologists will not abide this. Rather, they are more concerned with regulation and thought crimes, at times even going so far as blaming the prevalence of firearms in rural areas for the failure of urban gun control attempts (I would cite a source here, but it was in a chat debate last year, and I’m too lazy to find it). Further, consider the flawed study posted at the Violence Policy Center, which makes some amusingly weighted assertions:
“In 1998, for every time a woman used a handgun to kill in self-defense, 101 women were murdered with a handgun.”
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“In 1998, for every time a woman used a handgun to kill an intimate acquaintance in self-defense, 83 woman were murdered by an intimate acquaintance with a handgun.”
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“In 1998, for every time a woman used a handgun to kill a stranger in self-defense, 302 woman were murdered with a handgun.”
Notice the key phrase: “to kill … in self defense….”
Proponents of firearm ownership, to my knowledge and myself included, do not consider the only successful defensive use of a firearm to be one in which the assailant is killed. Using a gun in self-defense can be as simple as brandishing it, even if it is unloaded. Even more effective is having a region known for citizens carrying concealed weapons, which can discourage criminals from even considering targets in that area. Also, the VPC “study” makes much of the marketing evils of gun makers toward women and the apparent trend of women largely eschewing handguns anyway. Of course, this says nothing of what might occur if more women carried guns and conveniently omits the demographics of the female victims in question. This is just speculation, but I would wager the bulk of the crimes occurred in urban areas where strict gun control is already the norm, so perhaps the women could not have acquired guns for protection even if they’d wanted to.
Until a day when it is possible to teleport heavily-armed g-men directly to the scene of a crime in a second’s notice, I foresee no sane arguments for limiting civilian access to firearms. I’ll even go so far as including machine guns, rocket launchers, grenades, tanks and aircraft in that assessment, because I do not and will not trust people who claim the right to wield such weaponry for my own good, while simultaneously denying me the ability to protect myself in the same manner. Nonetheless, for the time being, anyone who chooses to act on such a conviction is prone to see his or her life and liberty destroyed under existing thought crime legislation, while those making the laws are busy sending costumed agents into the streets and around the globe with orders to commit kidnapping and murder in the sacred name of nationalism and profit.
Anyone of a libertarian mind-set has probably had a conversation similar to this:
You: Government sucks.
Bob: Yes, but it’s necessary. People are stupid and evil, and life without government would degenerate into a chaotic dictatorship of corporate mobs and gang warfare.
Another common variant is the more succinct:
Bob: Humanity can’t be trusted with that much freedom.
The obvious problem with this line of reasoning is a heaping dose of self-defeat. If people are, as a rule, stupid, evil and predisposed to chaos and gang-based war, then the most irrational action one might take in pursuit of minimizing these consequences is the deliberate formation of such a gang. After all, those who would serve in government are members of the same human race as the rest of us. It cannot be declared that government is necessary because people are evil, while simultaneously exempting the people in government from this inherent evil.
Of course, the inevitable response to this is the catch-all solution: democracy! We keep the undesirables out of office by simply not voting them in. Power to the people . . . right?
Oh, wait. People. Stupid, evil, chaos-loving, warmongering people — who will almost certainly elect stupid, evil, chaos-loving, warmongering politicians. It seems that democracy does not solve or even manage the problem.
There are other forms of government to consider, however. Some form of technocratic oligarchy is an option, an enlightened elite exerting control through any variety of means. There’s also the possibility of dictatorship or monarchy. Still, this presents the question of why one group or class of humans is fundamentally different from all others. Further, even if these enlightened elites succeed in securing a given society in the name of reason and peace, there’s nothing to stop the stupid, evil majority from undoing any hypothetical progress in a relatively short period of time. Because, remember, the military and police and entrenched bureaucrats are likely not from the elite class, and even if they are, they will be outnumbered to a staggering and possibly unmanageable degree. Additionally, due to the aforementioned conditions, the likelihood of any given elite or group of elites successfully imposing their will upon a stupid, evil populace is quite small. Oligarchies, dictatorships and monarchies do not solve or even manage the problem.
The irony here is that, as the implications of an inherently stupid and evil human race are considered, the level of authoritarianism required in order to compensate for and combat it is essentially limitless. This leads, of course, to the very chaos and gang warfare that is so often cited as the reason we must have a government in the first place.