Winter Tourney: Gun Rights

Since the topic was a bit vague, I'm going to argue: 1) Gun rights do not exist, and 2) Banning guns is good. Since the topic is gun rights, though, you should vote Con even if I only prove that gun rights don't exist.The topic of discussion is gun rights, and it's best to frame that discussion in terms of whether the government has the authority to ban or restrict firearms. As Ronald Dworkin notes in Taking Rights Seriously, rights are "trumps", meaning that a right is something that prevents a government from compelling its citizens to do something (for instance, forfeit their firearms), even if that government is serving the public good by doing so. Obviously, if there is a "right" to firearm ownership, then no government can ever take that away, and so the debate hinges on this. We need to know where our rights come from, so that we can then say what our rights are. It is meaningless to say "I have a right to this" without appealing to some reason you have that right--as Dworkin would say in Justice for Hedgehogs, there are no "morons" (moral particles) that magically give you the right to own a firearm. Instead, we say that there are reasons that something is a right. I will present a framework that both explains why rights exist, and what these rights are. Unsurprisingly, my rights framework is not going to include the right to own a firearm, and if you think my framework is justified, you must side with me. Equal Respect and Concern Imagine this: You can save five lives right now. You're signed up to be an organ donor, and all it would take is an untimely demise to save the lives of five people who badly need your organs. An acquaintance, who is a true moral paragon, realizes this, and promptly kills you to save the five. Intuitively, we know that the acquaintance has done you wrong, and we know utilitarianism clearly fails here. But why do we know this? What have you been denied in this example that is so important to you? It's not your life; the lives of those five people matter, too. It's not your autonomy; it seems odd to say that it's good that someone has the autonomy to let others die. What you have been denied is your right to equal respect and concern. Per Ronald Dworkin, respect means that others should allow you to make your own ethical decisions (defined as how you achieve your idea of the good life), while concern means that others must treat you as equal in worth to them (Justice for Hedgehogs). In the "mandatory organ donation", you have been denied equal concern--your acquaintance made judgments about how valuable your life was in relation to others, and used that judgment to end your life. There, after all, is no objective measure of who deserves to live more. If you could save the lives of five Nobel laureates, would that make you okay with being murdered? If you were going to discover the cure for cancer with just one more day of research, would that make you more upset at being murdered? In this first round, I'll leave the justification for this rights framework at this: It is intuitive. This is more powerful than you might think. It could be true that some moral principle says that we ought to murder other people, whenever and wherever we can. This would absolve your acquaintance of any wrongdoing. But it's wrong, and it's wrong to you, the reader, because of your conviction that it just is. You might say that murder denies, say, your natural rights. But when you're asked why you believe in those natural rights, this chain of questions will inevitably lead you to the conviction that it just is right. Therefore Dworkin believes that the good morality will include coherence backed by conviction (Justice for Hedgehogs). Your morality must be coherent because incoherence cannot be sincerely held as moral (at that point, you're just saying "I don't like drunk driving in cars. I like drunk driving in SUVs"). Your morality must be backed by conviction because if you don't really believe something is right and you do it anyway, you're hypocritical, and not really making a moral decision in the first place. If someone tells you eating Cheetos is wrong, and you stop doing it not because you believe them, but because you don't want to argue with them, abstaining from Cheetos not a moral decision at all. The right to equal respect and concern is the fundamental right of all people, endorsed by our intuition and personal conviction. This requires that we are treated as equal to others, and that we are free to pursue our own conception of the good life, provided it does not conflict with the first principle. The Right to Arm Bears Guns kill. Other than hunting rifles, they're explicitly designed to kill people. Per our framework, the questions we must ask are this: 1) Do we ever have a right to kill people, 2) Do we have the right to own things designed to kill people, and 3) Does a gun ban unfairly prevent people from achieving a good life? 1. Obviously, it is morally permissible to kill people at some times. When we're in danger, when someone is attacking us, when the threat to ourselves is so great that only killing can save us, killing is obviously justified. But we are also aware that killing is generally wrong, and that it would be wrong for humanity to increase its capacity to kill each other. There is no right to nuclear weaponry for self-defense. The first question necessarily leads to the second. 2. The question can be answered with a question: What is the difference between a gun and a nuke? A gun can kill people. A nuke can kill a lot of people. That is the difference. We allow guns in the US because they don't kill that many people. What sort of premise says we have a God-given right to own killing machines if they aren't that dangerous? Obviously, knives are fine and they can kill, but it would be ludicrous to talk about our right to own a knife. The actual right we have that underpins the (mistaken) notion of gun rights is the right to self-defense. Self-defense is easily extracted from the fundamental right. A government that denies its citizens the ability to defend themselves in times of danger does not treat their lives with concern, for it unfairly allows criminals to live la vida loca at the expense of law-abiding citizens. The question is: Does the legality of guns enhance self-defense? Before I address that: 3. No. The right to equal concern has greater weight because of the lethality of guns. Self-Defense? http://www.cbsnews.com...; Guns have little correlation with crime rates--except for the US, both firearm and non-firearm owning countries had low homicide rates. But, in the US, the firearm homicide rate was over ten times higher than the other average country. "Self-defense" is clearly having a perverse effect--our right to self-defense has been interpreted such that you're more likely to be shot to death in the US than anywhere else. Firearm ownership does not enhance the right to self-defense. Your chances of being murdered are not decreased by legalizing guns; they are either unaffected or increased. Guns enhance the killing potential of criminals, so the right to self-defense is not enhanced by guns. Since there is no right protecting ownership of firearms, we may decide a ban based on whether it serves the public good. Especially in the US, banning guns would reduce the capabilities of criminals and thus of crime, so favor a gun ban. Conclusion The right to equal respect and concern is the intuitive right from which all others flow. From this, we have the right to self-defense, but guns do not enhance or protect that right, and there is thus no right to bear arms that follows. Especially in the US, guns detract from the public good, and should be banned.