I post on a wide variety of issues of interest to conservatives and libertarians. There are a number of things I don't like writing about like drug liberalization, the legalization of prostitution, and legalization of lethal firearms or munitions for war. But attempts to restrain liberty lead to unintended consequences. If there is a market for people's wants and needs, prohibition policies do not eliminate markets but change their nature (e.g., hidden or black market). The artificial shortages caused by government regulations result in high prices and margins, which attract organized crime. Not to mention the ripple effect, say, of desperate addicts who will commit property crimes to sustain their habit. (I still recall while I was a UWM professor, someone had bashed in my driver-side window (this was in parking under my apartment building) to steal my crappy factory-installed car stereo radio/cassette player. I have no idea what a used car radio would have brought on the open market, but I'm sure my cost in getting the window replaced was far higher.)
The Bill of Rights is primarily based on individual and state rights, initially constraints on the federal government but also guaranteed in the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. It's self-evident that the unalienable right to life includes the right of self-defense.
Let's review some
relevant quotes:
- There exists a law inborn in our hearts that if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right” ~Marcus T. Cicero
- Animals have just one method of defense and cannot change it for another. For man, on the other hand, has many means of defense that are available and he can change them at anytime. Take the hand. The hand is as good as a talon, or a claw, or a horn, or again a spear, or a sword, or any other weapon or tool, that it could be all of these ” ~Aristotle
- Among evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptable. It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will willingly obey one who is unarmed” ~ Niccolo Machiavellie
- It is unreasonable to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life” ~Montesquieu
- Formerly under the reign of Servious Tullius VI. the right to bear arms had belonged solely to the Patricians [the “royalty,” those in control]. Now Plebeians [the common-man] are given a place in the army. All the citizens capable of bearing arms were required to provide their own swords and spears and other armor” ~Livy
I'm not going to go into a long history of the context of the right, even the duty (e.g., Switzerland) to possess and bear arms, but
one needs to look at the precedent of the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which restored the rights of Protestants, who had been disarmed by the Catholic king (but who had affirmed the rights of Catholic). You see twin aspects to the right to possess and bear arms: self-defense and the collective right of resistance to tyrannical government. For many colonists or citizens, a weapon provided a mechanism of feeding one's family (game) and/or self-defense against say, an invasion or destruction of one's property. The idea that we would "trust" in a government with a monopoly on the possession and use of arms (which is essentially what today's gun restrictionists advocate) is laughable because it makes rebellion impossible, the very nature of America's war of independence from Britain. This is a universal right and/or duty under the principle of equal protection. Do you really think that early Americans in a largely agrarian country had a 911 system in the event of armed intruders? Without a right to a weapon in self-defense, a citizen would have had no effective deterrent to the discretion of armed individuals.
To argue that you can buy arms with your money but you can't use use them for your own self-protection, for other than official militia purposes in common defense is fairly preposterous; that essentially means your weapons belong to the State. When the Roman historian Livy talks about Roman citizens providing their own swords, spears and armor, how is that even possible without a legal/white market to procure such goods and your right to acquire them?
So I've never had an issue with the wording of the Second Amendment, because I can see ownership of weapons as having multiple uses and purposes, one being to support a duty of resistance to tyranny. That the anti-gun restrictionists would try to give the State a monopoly of force is predictable and a betrayal to the cause of American liberty.
Let's be clear: by some counts there are literally hundreds of millions of personal weapons in the US. Even if the anti-gun restrictionists somehow managed to repeal the Second Amendment, the idea of confiscating these weapons would be nearly impossible, not to mention replenished with technological developments (e.g., gun designs via the Internet that could be built with inexpensive 3D printers) or a black market of foreign suppliers (as if the prohibition of drugs or alcohol has been successful government policy!) Only a negligible percentage of guns are used in criminal violence; in fact, a strong percentage of gun-related fatalities are self-inflicted.
Does that mean that we libertarians are insensitive to gun-related murders? No, we embrace the non-aggression principle and the principle of equality under the law. No one's right to life, including a victim's, is less important. But the answer is not to restrict others' abilities to defend their homes and families. For people who live in sparsely populated areas or even urban areas where police presence or responsiveness is dubious in the short term, this effectively renders them defenseless against armed intruders,who by the nature of their disregard for the property and lives of others similarly have no regard for any government restrictions on procurement of weapons and are willing to pay the steep prices of the black market.
So when the social liberal/progressive outrage broke out predictably for gun control in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting, what clear is that the leftists predictably called for MORE government AFTER GOVERNMENT FAILURE. These shootings almost never take place in the private section (yes, I'm aware of the
movie theater atrocity, the Orlando nightclub, and the more recent Las Vegas shooting. But for the most part, businesses have competitors and if they pay short shrift to securing their place of business, their customers won't feel safe doing business with them.) When you find out that alleged Florida shooter Cruz had a history with the target school, from which he had been expelled (you might think he might have been carrying a grudge?), that the FBI was aware of him, that he had openly speculated about a shooting among several , that up to 3 deputies were (cowardly?) waiting in safety outside the school while Cruz massacred teenage students.
The point here is not to scapegoat government personnel for Cruz' purported actions. But the idea that government policies can fix the issue simply is not credible. But to whom extent are public employees and administrators held responsible for failures? Will a sheriff lose his job when his deputies fail to engage the gunman? Will the principal or the schoolboard? No, "progressive" outrage is aimed at the NRA, conservatives, and their allies. There's been no explanation of why a number of pro-gun, even liberal Northern states (MN, VT) have among the lowest gun violence stats. We have seen news media like CNN even scripting their "news" coverage as quasi anti-gun public advocacy.
Wishful thinking, e.g., if we manipulate/impede the gun market or certain segments, school attacks will go away, makes for poor public policy. You don't have the progressives question why, for instance, how Cruz had allegedly legally purchased his guns with whatever background checks were in effect. You don't hear for instance classroom hardening like bullet-proof locks and plastic, deployment of door jammers, etc. "Liberals" mock Trump's suggestion that teachers who have been trained in the use of firearms be deployed in a school's safety plan. (So teachers feel safer at home than at work.) The "solution" seems to be that if gun regulations work, there's no need to worry about school safety. But when the assault gun ban expires and we don't see an explosion in the criminal use of assault weapons, we have to realize that the gun restrictionists are, at best, naive.
But, finally, just to point out the over-simplistic nature of the anti-gun forces, let's point out the worst school attack in US history: the
Bath School disaster of 1927. Kehoe, a Michigan farmer who was an electrician working at Bath School, had been given notice his farm would be foreclosed, in part due to the town's taxes on his farm. He rigged up bombs (luckily not all went off), resulted in the deaths of 38 children and 6 adults (dozens more injured). (He also blew up his farmhouse with his wife still in it, and himself in his car (and nearby pedestrians).) [In contrast, consider the scrutiny if you file for a national security clearance: it will include a criminal background check, foreign contacts and any financial exposure, emotional instability and related behavior (e.g., alcohol or drug dependencies), and financial difficulties, including bankruptcy.
