Guns and Laws

 

The fundamental principle about law and guns is this: people have a right of self defense to defend lives and property against attacks. Since they do, they have a derived right to possess the means to do so. The dodge that they have the right in principle but have delegated it completely to the police will not do. It is only rarely that policemen will be on hand when crimes happen. Their function is to try to catch criminals after they commit crimes. The term “first responder” is inaccurate. In most dangerous situations, a person’s first responder is himself. The best to be reasonably expected from the police is that they sometimes would be fairly rapid second responders. There is also the question of whether the police always will be on the right side. The right to self defense includes the right to self defense against tyrannical government. The coming of a tyrannical government is not a serious threat at present in this country, but an armed citizenry are an important part of  keeping  things that way.   (If someone claims people do not have those rights, then his necessary conclusion must be that operationally any attackers – criminals, Nazi secret policemen, Putin’s Russian soldiers - may do what they want with people, and their only ethical option is submission. Some on the gun banning left left may have no problem with that conclusion.)

However, the principle that people have a right of self defense does not answer all the questions about citizens and their weapons, despite what some advocates of gun rights may claim. Since the right to possess arms for self defense is derivative from the right of self defense, it applies only to arms appropriate for self defense in each context, not to any weapon anyone might want to have at any time. If a person announced he planned to put an operational 81mm mortar or .50 caliber machine gun in his back yard to protect himself, his neighbors and the authorities would be right to stop him (and to worry about his sanity), since there would be no reasonable need for such a weapon for self defense.

The difficulty is with drawing a line somewhere in the large range between the pistols, shotguns, revolvers, and ordinary rifles which are appropriate for self defense and the mortars and the machine guns which are not. It is a hard problem, and reasonable people will reach different conclusions about it. For example, are thirty round or more detachable magazines  for AR-type rifles appropriate tools for self defense, or are they items which cannot be justified as tools for self defense? The same question comes up for the AR-type rifle itself. The present answer in most of this country is that the both AR-type rifles and the magazines are legal. In gray areas it usually is better to lean in the direction of the citizen rather than the direction of the politicians and officials.  I  think the rifles and thirty round magazines probably are appropriate for self defense, but I am not sure about very large drum magazines. There are reason to consider becoming more restrictive about some things.

These questions have gotten more attention since the murders in Uvalde this week. Normal people have had normal reactions to the slaughter, while repulsive politicians have had predictably repulsive ones. It would have been less repugnant and probably more expedient for Democrat politicians to have waited for the bodies of the victims to cool before dancing gleefully over an imagined opportunity to use the crime to enact some of their agenda on guns. Beto O’Rourke’s stunt the next day and Democrats’ refusal to condemn it were more of the same, perhaps a little more grotesque.

The Democrats’ behavior illustrates a reason many people who believe in self defense are often unwilling to support any new restrictions, reasonable or not. They believe their opponents’ real objective is to disarm them completely and leave them helpless and so think it better not to give an inch. (The same sort of worry keeps many people who are pro-choice on abortion from supporting any new restrictions there, reasonable or not. They believe their opponents’ real aim is to outlaw abortion completely and so think it better not to give an inch.)