Gun Rights

Firstly, I'm aware that many true believers in the right to bear arms are of the view that this "right" is a sine qua non for a full and flourishing human life because it's supposedly de rigueur to ensure that we the people can defend our liberty, which of course is a necessary condition of man's spiritual well-being. Chicken Little-style, some 2nd Amendmentites suggest that if the citizenry is disarmed then the day after tomorrow the state will pounce and impose full-blown totalitarian tyranny! This fear is refuted by empirical examples of Western societies in which private gun ownership has been restricted for quite some time without it leading to the advent of Stalinism or anything of the kind. The peoples of Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, etc. are no worse off, civil liberties-wise, for not enjoying the same easy availability of guns that Americans have come to consider a "right". (And yes, Herr Hitler banned private ownership of guns as a part of imposing his dictatorship on the German people, but his ability to transform the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich had more to do with the politico-economic conditions of the time and with Deutschland's lack of a democratic tradition and values than with a disarmed citizenry. ) Moving on, for the adherents of the libertarian philosophy the right to own a gun is an absolute, and the social consequences be damned. Dyed-in-their-doctrinarianism libertarians certainly aren't going to be argued out of this mind-set any time soon, and so I won't undertake such an exercise in futility. However, I would point out that the rugged-individualists and rustic proto-libertarians of the American Old West that many modern libertarians admire had the good horse sense to not make an absolute of gun rights. For instance, many Western towns had an ordinance requiring anyone entering the town limits with a gun to deposit it at the sheriff's or marshal's office for the duration of his stay in town. Only someone dogmatically locked into libertarian ideology could fail to see the wisdom of adopting similar restrictions on gun rights. There's something I'd like to take a brief moment to clarify here, as an aside. For some of you perhaps gun rights are a legal and constitutional issue; however, for me it's a social and ethical question, and that's how I'm approaching it. I'll leave constitutional quibbling about the meaning of the Second Amendment to lawyers and academics. I'll merely point out that the wording about a "well-regulated militia" is more significant than right-wingers who prefer a literalistic interpretation care to concede. Guns have been a non-trivial part of this country's history and popular culture, and the law has simply taken the American tradition of private gun ownership and codified it into a legal "right". However, of course, no such right is written in stone, or in anyone's scriptures, or in the consensus gentium, nor is it even unambiguously written in the founding legal document of these United States. The "right" to own a firearm is merely a historical idiosyncrasy of our society, nothing more. Other societies don't recognize the right of their citizens to possess carbines and M-16s and .45s not because these societies are less in love with liberty, or less inclined to allow their citizens to possess a means of self-defense, but because they don't share the American historical experience. Anyone whose common sense and conventional wisdom hasn't been too profoundly molded by acculturation in the American love of guns can readily acknowledge that this is clearly the case. Guns are instruments of death, anti-life objects that take a whole lot of legal & moral specious special pleading to be cast in the sublime light of a hallowed "right". But then this is no problem for confirmed NRAers, who have a corner or their minds, a nook in their worldview where they religiously maintain a little ideological altar or shrine to that holy conservative icon, gun rights. It's a mental sanctum in which they venerate their own sectarian interpretation of the Second Amendment. And pretty much all of their thinking and passion on gun issues emanates directly from this psychological place of quasi-theological dogmatism, which is why it can't really be impacted or countered by rational argument. In other words, I'm speaking of Second Amendment fundamentalists. It's of course notoriously difficult to sway people from the psychological stance of fundamentalism. When even a seemingly irresistible logical argument meets an immovable psychological stance such as fundamentalism head-on, well, logic will simply, quite often, be deflected by rationalization and/or denial. Gun enthusiasts are a case in point. They cognitively cling to and take rhetorical shelter behind their intellectually dishonest and defensive shibboleths, e. g. that a gun-control practicing society is doomed to succumb to statist tyranny and that the more guns there are floating around in society the safer you and I are from the bad guys, and if confronted with arguments and evidence to the contrary they glibly dismiss them. Nevertheless, I've argued in round one (for the benefit of the reasonable and open-minded members of DDO) that gun ownership is not a universalizable entitlement, i. e. a "right", it's more in the category of a privilege, one that society should exercise all due caution in granting to its citizens. Also, gun ownership is not an essential requirement, such as freedom of conscience and expression, for human beings to maximize the potential of a human life, therefore it cannot be legitimately claimed as a human right. Nor have gun advocates demonstrated to the satisfaction of reasonable people that the proliferation of legal firearms in society is conducive to public safety. Nor is private gun ownership necessary to guarantee the survival of our democratic way of life (societies in which democracy persists without an armed-to-the-teeth electorate empirically refute such a notion). And now I'll add one more argument, what I'll call my Rawlsian argument. Ask yourself, if you were standing behind a veil of ignorance and about to be born into a society without knowing for a fact whether you personally would be benefitted or harmed by the easy availability of guns, would you really choose to live in a society of radically deregulated gun ownership, i. e. a society full of guns that can find their way into virtually anyone's hands? That is, would you really reason that such a society, one with lax or no gun laws because gun ownership is viewed as a right, a society in which everyone therefore has license to go about strapped (which is what gun rights extremists advocate) would be the one most likely to guarantee your personal security? If your answer is no, then you can't very well consider gun ownership to be a genuine right. Rationally restricting access to guns, rather than treating gun ownership like a fundamental and sacrosanct right, is certainly what most sane & sensible folks would choose if they approached the gun question in such a Rawlsian fashion. Let me be blunt, the law is a form of social control. When the law and the powers that be grant the people any rights it's usually not a matter of benevolence and idealism but rather a matter of appeasement. The Bill of Rights is no exception, the Bill of Rights was one big bill of appeasement to get the Constitution ratified. Today our Second Amendment gun rights are still largely just a matter of appeasing conservative voters and the mighty gun lovers lobby. This is truly all that gun rights boil down to, political appeasement, not real, Rawlsian rights. It's time for such realpolitik appeasement to end, its cost in human lives has become too expensive.