Gun Rights

Let's get real, shall we. How, pray tell, dear gun rights advocates, is it, exactly, that private gun ownership is a plausible part of the solution rather than a fairly glaring dimension of the problem of violent crime in our society? For instance, the easy availability of guns allows drug-dealing gangs to dominate entire neighborhoods. How is it that the remedy for this situation is going to come out of the barrel of a gun? Should the "good people" in drug/gang-ridden communities form armed private militias to combat the gangs with firepower purchased at their local gun stores?! Of course the real remedy for the scourge of drugs and drug-related crime lies in recognizing it as a societal, psychological, and spiritual ill, and treating it accordingly. Guns have no part in such an approach. And please, spare me the old canard that if we disarm the law-abiding citizenry the guns in the possession of criminals will continue to proliferate. Most crime guns start out not as black-market items, but rather as legally bought & sold weapons. Shady individuals acquire them through straw-man purchases from licensed sellers in states with lax gun control laws and resell them on the streets New York and Boston; burglars steal them from our homes; and, of course, crooks & thugs buy them off-the-books from ethically-challenged dealers. Mm-hmm, it's an absolute myth that most illegal firearms were smuggled into the country by "gun runners". The black market is supplied mostly from legal sources, dry up these legal sources and you will significantly decrease the availability of guns to criminals. Of course this is a hard sell to many folks, even when we have this information our fear of crime and its perpetrators distorts our common sense so that it tells us, quite counterintuitively, that the bad guys will always have just as many guns as they currently do, no matter how strict our gun laws are. There are fear-informed beliefs that quite convincingly feel like reality, and then there's genuine reality, telling the difference isn't always easy. In this case, reality is that the constitutionally-protected legality of private gun ownership in the United States is certainly a factor in producing a well-armed criminal element. Repealing and restricting gun rights is a necessary if frightening step in the direction of a safer society. Ruggedly-individualistic gun enthusiasts, however, would still prefer to live in a society in which we all go about with a firearm on our hips, manfully inflicting summary justice on evildoers and making society safe one dead evildoer at a time. But is such a position logical or psychological, ethical or egoistic? Moving on, let me set forth an argument that private gun ownership is seriously antithetical to democracy. The 18th century democratic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out that the original sins that lead to social inequality are the excessive privatization of what should be community property, and that institution called the law. He argued that the only way to endow the law with some redeeming legitimacy is to make it codify and serve, in as equitable a fashion as possible, what he called the "general will" of the people, i.e. their general interests and common good. Now then, does the conservative laissez-faire approach to enhancing public safety, by in effect privatizing the community's role in maintaining it, i.e. delegating this role to heat-packing private citizens who issue on-the-spot death sentences to criminals, does this promote social equality or, potentially, the private power of the citizens with the most and the biggest guns; does it promote democracy or the street tyranny of gun-toting individuals and vigilante mobs? Permitting private ownership of guns does indeed potentially promote the erosion of social democracy by privatized might that should, by all rights, belong to communities qua communities, not to rugged and vigilantistic individuals as such. The so-called right to bear arms, as many 2nd Amendmentites conceive it, arguably threatens our very democracy and all of our other democratic freedoms & values, and therefore cannot be considered to be a democratic right at all. It is, rather, merely an anti-democratic foible of the American Constitution, like the reserved powers clause of the Tenth Amendment that gave a wink to slavery. And, just like slavery, it delegitimizes our pretense of democratic government. This democratic, Rousseauist argument recognizes that liberty is a socially-achieved state of human existence, not one that can be achieved and preserved by each of us existing as armed atomized actors on society's stage, as veritable Dirty Harry wannabes. This is something that staunch gun rights advocates, with their right-wing concept of freedom, often fail to grasp. Alas, although gun rights proponents pride themselves on being common sense realists, somehow an ironclad-in-its-commonsensicality argument for their position remains something of a chimera. That is, it's claimed to exist but has never been substantiated – you might say that it's an intellectual bigfoot, like bigfoot all of its reported sightings prove to be hoaxes and all of its footprints fakes. Nevertheless, gunniks remain rationalizingly invested in their arguments, so I'll conclude by briefly reviewing them, and in the process reviewing the arguments for my position. Gun rights fetishists assert: 1. That a society full of private gun owners is necessary insurance for a free society. On the contrary, the sort of armed and loaded-for-bear individualism that some right-wing 2nd Amendmentites go in for is decidedly antithetical to the democratic communitarianism that is the ethos of a genuinely free and egalitarian society. How so? Well, not that the movies are generally a good source of accurate historical data, but simply rent a couple of Westerns from Netflix and you'll get an idea of how a gunslinging individual, or an overgreedy cattle baron with many guns at his disposal, can dominate a whole town and deprive its citizens of their freedom. Or think of the urban neighborhoods whose residents are terrorized and tyrannized by the guns in the possession of mercenarily individualistic gang members. Quite simply, the effect of guns can be destructive of community and of people's ability to enjoy their freedom. 2. That gun ownership is a right because self-defense against criminals is a right. Yes self-defense is a right, but I don't agree that the easy availability of guns promotes my personal security. Guns are indeed a factor in much of the crime that goes down in our society, and this fact can't be handily disposed of with glib platitudes such as "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". When it comes to crime, well, guns certainly aren't the whole problem, but they're more a part of it than they are a part of the solution. 3. That the Constitution of the United States grants & guarantees our right to own everything from a starter's pistol to a fully automatic AK-47. Sorry, but this is just a matter of interpretation (an extreme interpretation that many legal scholars would respectfully disagree with). And certainly there's no natural and universally-recognized civil right to privately own a gun. American gun rights are a quirk of American culture and history, and not much more. As soon as we start thinking along the lines of the Kantian categorical imperative we realize that it's ethically untenable and socially insane to unconditionally universalize gun rights; and that, ergo, gun ownership is more aptly thought of as a restrictable privilege and a heavy responsibility, not at all an uncurbed right such as freedom of belief. Moreover, gun ownership is not at all a sine qua non of human flourishing – people can and do lead very free and fulfilling lives without owning firearms – and thus not a human right. I rest my case.