Gun Rights

Okeydokey, let's begin as all good thinkers should, by defining our terms. We all know what a gun is, it's of course a lethal weapon that fires a led projectile. However, the word & concept "right" is in need of a bit of defining. Have you ever noticed how some people will simply ask you if you believe in God, as if "God" is a universally shared theological notion requiring no clarification? Well, the same is the case with the word "rights", people carry on entire discourses about rights without ever bothering to define the word. Let's take at least a brief moment to parse this so glibly bandied word. A "right", I would argue, is essentially an entitlement and a liberty that passes the test of Kant's categorical imperative, i.e. that is universalizable, that can and ought to be made an exceptionlessly generic precept, that can and ought to be granted to everyone, regardless of color, creed, or personal merit. For instance, freedom of speech and conscience isn't based on the content of one's speech or whether one has an enlightened conscience, it's deemed to be a universal good that each and every one of us is entitled to enjoy. It doesn't matter if you're a hatemonger, a scumbag, or a former felon, your claim to receive society's sufferance to speak your mind is recognized as a right, and the denial of this right is recognized as a greater evil than its indiscriminate bestowal. Now then, can we say that this is the case with private gun ownership? That is, is the "right" of private individuals to possess a lethal firearm something that can and ought to be universalized? Would it be safe & sane to permit everyone, without exception – to allow the good, the bad, and the ugly, alike – to have a big ole phallic .44 Magnum or an AK? Come now, can we really afford, as a matter of public policy and safety, to categorically and indiscriminately bestow such a "right"? We can grudgingly acknowledge that a member of the Hell's Angels, the Bloods, Crips, and La Cosa Nostra have a right to free speech, but would we concede that an individual belonging to one of these organizations has an inviolable right to the firepower provided by the kind of artillery you can buy in an American gun store?! Under our current laws, of course, if an individual hasn't yet been found guilty of a felony or certified to be mentally unstable, he can be a gang member or a maniac and legally own an assault weapon!!!; but how, I ask, is this universalization of the right of all non-convicted-felons and non-diagnosed-lunatics to own a gun working for our society? For an answer to that question one need only Google this country's homicide statistics. No, most reasonable people not raised in America's gun culture would say that it's obviously a rather bad idea to universalize the right to bear arms to all private citizens without a rap sheet or psychiatric history, which is why the citizens of most Western nations are okay with the fact that they can't easily obtain a Street Sweeper or an Uzi. Ah, but if legal gun ownership is not such an unambiguously universalizable proposition, if it's perhaps not at all universalizable in an indiscriminate sense, if there certainly must be exceptions, people to whom it would be prudent and justifiable to deny the "right" to carry a piece, well, then ipso facto, by virtue of the universalizability standard of what constitutes a right, gun ownership is not, is most certainly not a right. It's more of a privilege, a privilege that one must earn one's eligibility to enjoy. That is, one ought to be a part of a well-regulated militia or the duly constituted constabulary on one's society to be armed with a dangerous, death-dealing weapon such as a gun. Another definition of a human right would be that a human right is a sine qua non, something indispensably necessary for human beings to enjoy the well-being and flourishing, the actualization of human potential that is our raison d'etre. Freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of assembly, for example, are all such sine qua nons, all quite arguably necessary for us to have a life worth living, this is why so many people are willing to fight and risk death to defend these fundamental entitlements. However, it's not at all so readily arguable that gun ownership is the same kind of sine qua non for our well-being and flourishing. And indeed, many of us don't really viscerally feel that it is. Say what? Well, if someone gave a war that was exclusively about securing our right to bear arms, not any of our other valued liberties, but only our right to bear arms, I strongly suspect that a good many people wouldn't be too gung ho to sign up to fight in it the way they would be if freedom of belief and speech were at stake. This is because they rationally and intuitively know that the right to own a gat isn't really up there with real, I-wouldn't-want-to-live-without-them rights. Yep, except for truly hardcore gun nuts no one is going to say "Give me my Glock or give me death". But of course "Give me liberty or give me death" has been said and reiterated a great many times. This suggests a significant difference between our Second Amendment right to own firearms and a true right, one that most ordinary citizens, i.e. non-gun-lovers seem to grasp on both an intellectual and an instinctive level. I.e. they grasp that our society being one in which millions of guns are floating around for every potentially postal Tom, dangerous Dick, and homicidal Harry to lay his hands on is not actually a part of what makes it a great society, hence the unlikeliness of them being very willing to enlist en masse to fight for gun rights. Gun rights are merely a social and legal construct of the American gun culture, not an authentic freedom that we're unalienably endowed with by our Creator, and deep down we all know this full well. I know of course that Second Amendment types will rationalize that guns do enhance our well-being by affording us protection against crime. But if societies with severely restricted access to guns have much lower homicide and violent crime rates, then clearly deterring and being safe from crime can't be reduced to making guns easily available to the citizenry. Nor are guns merely neutral inanimate objects that have nothing to do with generating high crime stats. Certainly there's much more to crime & violence in America than the legality of guns (such as economic factors and the fact that American culture is quite violent!), but guns do make their contribution. Well, guns obviously provide the means to carry out various crimes, such as drive-bys (there aren't too many drive-by knife throwings after all) and armed robberies (which in many cases are a good bit easier to pull off with a sawed-off shotgun than a club). But the role of guns in crime isn't merely a matter of being the means for the commission of bad acts. Having the means can contribute to motivation. That is, people are generally more motivated to attempt something when they possess the ideal means, and a gun is often the ideal means for perpetrating murderous mayhem. Although villains are still responsible for their choices, guns aren't mere passive participants in lawbreaking and gangbanging, they help to spur individuals having evil thoughts to act upon them and are therefore arguably not entirely conducive to our well-being and, once again, not sine qua nons of human happiness that would make their ownership a human "right". To Summarize, 1. Gun rights are not universalizable and unconditional, therefore they're privileges, not rights per se. 2. Gun rights aren't necessary conditions of human freedom & flourishing, ergo they aren't intrinsic human rights. 3. Guns play too much of a supporting role, as it were, in crime for us to rationalize treating gun rights as an ideological sacred cow. Ergo, gun rights are a consensual cultural fiction, not a fact.