Guns This Week

Many have asked what the mass murders in Las Vegas should mean for  issues related to citizens’ rights to be armed.  The answer is nothing at all, and claims to the contrary reveal a depressing lack of understanding of the role of principles in the conduct of life.  People either have a right to self defense, or they have no such right. If they have a right to defend themselves, they have a right to possess   and use the means for doing so.  If they have no such right, they may be forcibly disarmed and left  to submit to whatever aggressors – official or otherwise – choose to inflict upon them. That is the fundamental question  to answer first, and it is one to be decided in terms of general ethical principles.  Only then can particular schemes, policies, and proposed rules be considered rationally.  Claims  by leftist politicians and their flacks in  the traditional media that  one terrible criminal act  “changes everything” are not only ghoulishly opportunistic, but deeply anti-intellectual.  Single events do not change general principles, and pretending otherwise is substituting emotion for serious  thought and/ or hoping to con the public into doing so.  One’s rights are independent of and not contingent upon the actions of anybody else, criminal or otherwise.

That if the right to be armed for self defense is recognized and arms are available to people, criminals and madmen sometimes will obtain arms and commit crimes should have been obvious to all before last weekend.  It is just one special case of the fact that free societies with respect for individual rights are in some ways easier marks for criminals and terrorists than tyrannical police states are.  Free people face  such risks, knowing they are saved from the greater danger and harm that a truly effective security state would bring. 

 In looking at policy and politics on guns, it is important to remember something a writer on the subject observed.  Advocates of gun control do not wish to eliminate the ownership of firearms. They wish to centralize the ownership in members of a ruling class and its agents. It is also important to consider the following question. If the advocates of gun control do not wish the peaceful citizens of this country harm, why do they yearn so intensely  to make them helpless?