The NRA would take away our right not to own a gun
by Alan Cohen
Continuing my stream of gun-control-related posts, a brief reflection on the implications of the gun rights folks’ positions.
Briefly, they are arguing that the solution to gun crimes is more guns in the hands of everyday folks. Rep. Louie Gohmert on Newtown: “I wish to God [the Sandy Hook principal] had an M-4 in her office locked up — so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands.” The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre today: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
What this means is that they wish to push for a society where there is not only the right to own whatever guns we can imagine, but that not owning one becomes dangerous and an abdication of moral responsibility. What if a school principal doesn’t like guns, or is not a good shot? Would they have us move toward a world where she could lose her job?
As with most rights, your rights can interfere with mine. Your right to smoke interferes with my right to breathe tobacco-free air. The Westboro Baptist Church’s right to free speech interferes with the rights of families to have quiet dignified funerals. As in a recent court case here in Canada, the religious right to wear a veil in court interferes with the right of the accused to confront the accuser and to a fair trial. These can be hard questions for societies to negotiate.
Up until recently, the right to bear arms did interfere with the right to life (for murder victims) but did not interfere with the right of others not to bear arms. But these recent statements suggest the gun rights folks would like to move us to a world where, though there is a theoretical right not to bear arms, no one would feel safe without one, and some people might be obliged to have them at work. Personally, I’m happy up here in Canada where people would be disturbed if I carried around a handgun, rather than feeling pressured to.
It’s worth noting that the gun manufacturers are a major force behind many gun rights organizations. Hmmm, I wonder what they would feel about a world where more and more people were obliged to buy their products? The gun rights folks like slippery slope arguments. Well here’s one for them: if we don’t stop this craziness now, we’re moving toward a world where no one can feel safe unless they have a gun, effectively depriving us of the right to live without guns.
maketheworldworkbetter 
I hear lots of fingers pointed at gun manufacturers but I don’t buy it (oh dammit, I just made a pun, I should “pun”ish myself”) Oh please help me.
Anyways, now that I’ve gathered myself, didn’t the Bushmaster brand AR15 just get shut down voluntarily? I could be wrong but I’ve heard something along those lines.
I’m a gun owner. I carry a pistol with me anytime I’m with my little girl. I also own an “assault rifle”. I’ve never ever argued for the arming of anyone that doesn’t want to. Arming those with no familiarity or desire to develop an aptitude with guns is a recipe for disaster.
I think most gun owners would agree with you. I’m not saying I think there is a lot of effort on the part of average gun owners to push this, but I do think it is a consequence of relatively extreme (by international standards) gun rights laws.
I don’t mean to sound to conspiratorial about the gun manufacturers. I’m sure they’d love to have everyone buying their guns, but I think most of the people pushing for a more heavily armed society genuinely believe it will help prevent crime and are not looking to profit. But I aslo think the gun manufacturers have been savvy about working through gun rights organizations to advance their interests.
My understanding about Bushmaster is that it was not shut down, but that Cerberus Capital Management sold it to avoid political conflict. I imagine they’ll still be made.
I think that makes sense. A business wants to make money. I wouldn’t expect a gun manufacturer to behave differently than when a cereal company puts a toy in a cereal box to get your kid to try to get you to buy it.
I just think the NRA, which I disagree with on the putting guards in schools issue, exists in large part because gun owners don’t feel like they have a voice. We get demonized and have a lot of nasty things said about us. We feel like we are doing something legal and anti-gunners are aggressing against us.
I’m not a conservative. I’m a libertarian. I’ve never advocated to tell anyone they had to do anything. I want gays to marry, people that want to to smoke or shoot up whatever drugs they want. I don’t think we should be able to tell people they can’t ride in the back of trucks. But it feels like the same people that want to outlaw “assault rifles” are the same ones that are interrupting the only voice I have in the NRA (which really sucks).
If you, like myself, believe that the second amendment was intended to be “liberty’s teeth”, then in a post Patriot Act world and one where I can’t rely on my vote (Bush v. Gore anyone?) then it feels like the government is backing us all into a corner and now are coming for my teeth, at which time we the people will have no defense.
I’m not sure I agree about the second amendment (see this article, for example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-gun-control/2012/12/21/6ffe0ae8-49fd-11e2-820e-17eefac2f939_story.html?hpid=z2), but I do agree strongly that people who use and like guns are often misunderstood by those who don’t. I grew up in the country, and my father had a couple seldom-used guns. Most people around us had guns that were used more regularly. I know these are good people – murder and crimes were the last things on their minds, and guns were a part of their way of life. When people talked about gun control, they felt their culture and lifestyle was being attacked.
At the same time, I’ve also lived in cities a lot. In an American city, guns are not seen as part of a rugged, individualistic lifestyle, but rather as tools of crime and violence. Most people who live in cities don’t feel gun heritage the way people in the country do, but they do see the consequences of lots of guns on the streets. If I am walking home at night and someone holds me up with a gun, I am unlikely to be able to get out my own gun in time to use it, and am likely to die if I try. So it would seem the best solution is for the criminal not to have the gun – this is what would make me feel safe as I walk home. Most city people thus see serious gun control as a no-brainer because the consequences for their lives are concrete. And there is a sense that country people don’t care about all the people getting murdered in cities when they insist too much on gun rights.
What I would like is for these two sides to understand each other better rather than just fighting battles. There is a sensible middle ground that will make no one perfectly happy, but that should be acceptable to everyone if everyone really understood the arguments of the other side. Unfortunately, the country is so divided I don’t see much hope of that soon…
I think that’s a mighty poor refutation by WaPo of the argument that 2A exists to resist a tyrannical government. New Hampshire for example expressly places a right of revolt in their bill of rights. When you look at the federal Bill of Rights you’ll find that it wasn’t some list of rights that a bunch of visionary men came up over a few beers; it was a reactive list based on express violations by the British.
1A exists as a response to the British shutting down partisan presses. 3A is the clearest example of all: saying that you can’t force the quartering of soldiers, hardly an abstract right. 4A was a response to the British entering the homes of colonists without a warrant in order to ensure that the proper taxes were being paid. 6A works because the British were taking colonists into Newfoundland to find favorable juries for prosecution.
That leaves us with 2A. It was a response to the efforts by the British to seize arms and powder; arms and powder being stockpiled to protect against the British who were becoming increasingly belligerent.
Frankly there may well be a legitimate case for the regulation of handguns since they generally are not military arms. Assault rifles though are those falling under 2A protection.
The reason Oswald and McVeigh weren’t vindicated following their acts is that they weren’t popular acts. That is a silly argument. The people didn’t want to revolt. However, when the people do, they need the arms to do it.
However, you’re absolutely right about the city/urban split. Unfortunately because we immediately demonize each other there is no way to have a proper conversation on the issue. Frankly I’m not sure how we are supposed to tell our children to resolve their issues peacefully then turn around and accuse Obama voters of being Marxists and baby killers and those people calling Romney voters backwards zealots, advocates of the subjugation of women and people who step on the poor.
However, there is an answer to this: federalism. The needs and desires of the city are not the needs and desires of rural areas. Therefore the desires of a Michael Bloomberg should be allowed to run New York. Have your handgun ban there. But that isn’t what is wanted here in Idaho.
Either way, good conversation.
Yes, nice to be able to have a good exchange with someone who doesn’t agree with everything we write…
It’s interesting that you see more of a possibility to regulate handguns than assault rifles. If you gave me the choice, I’d choose to regulate handguns in an instant. They are less responsible for the dramatic mass killings, but they are the ones causing so much mayhem in cities. Something like two-thirds or three quarters of gun murders are due to handguns. Concealed weapons are much more useful to criminals on a day-to-day basis.
I don’t agree that federalism is a solution to the urban-rural divide. It would work well for Idaho, which is almost completely rural in terms of culture, but it would not work for places like New York, Texas, California, and Georgia, where there are both large urban centers and large rural populations with very different cultures. The largest problem is borders. If you can sell any guns you want in Idaho, criminals can get them in New York, unless we have some sort of border inspection system at state boundaries. Such a system would be completely impractical and far too expensive, crashing the US economy.
In other words, there is no realistic way for Michael Bloomberg to have the New York he wants at the same time you have the Idaho you want. I think compromise is the only reasonable solution.
As for the second amendment, there are two questions. First, how should we interpret it? Second, how much should that matter today?
For the first question, I think the answer is ambiguous. That is, I think there was a strong sentiment among people at the time of the revolution that they needed to be able to rise up against their government if it was unjust – obviously, that is what they had just done, and they were willing to do it again if necessary. We’re seeing the same thing in Egypt now. In this sense, it would be a mistake to assume that the 2nd amendment carried no overtones of helping the people overthrow an unjust government. At the same time, the Constitution was written by the new people in power. They did not want people rising up against them, whatever they may have preached. I think this tension is evident in the ambiguous wording about a well-regulated militia. In other words, I don’t think there was a consensus even at the time of the founding about what the second amendment meant. How we should interpret it now, given that we don’t have a well-regulated militia, is far from clear. I would be inclined to say that the most faithful interpretation is that there should be locally controlled well-regulated militias, and that these militias should have the right to bear arms and to regulate how their members use them, but that there is no generalized right for individuals to have arms outside this context.
(Incidentally, if you haven’t read David Hackett Fischer’s book Paul Revere’s Ride, I highly recommend it. It touches on these questions, and from what you’ve written I think you’d like it. It is my father’s favorite history book, and he’s a retired history professor.)
For the second question – the relevance of the second amendment today – I would argue that there is very little. You may not agree with my reading of the amendment above, but that is exactly the point: no one agrees on what it means today. Without a consensus as to its interpretation, it seems odd to give it too much weight. Should we implement local militias today? Despite movies such as Red Dawn, it is hard to imagine a realistic scenario in which militias aid substantially in the national defence, given the nuclear deterrent and our military might. And while it is theoretically possible to imagine the need for local militias to rise up against the government in the case of a military coup, I think the military is powerful enough now that such resistance would prove futile.
More importantly, we now have 200 years of history of successful democracy. Other countries have imitated us to differing degrees, and there are now stable democracies all over the world. In almost all of the developed countries, it is hard to imagine what would need to happen for democracy to fail or for dictatorship to take hold. In fact, though democracy is messy up here in Canada where I’m living, I would argue that Canada actually has a more stable (if younger) democracy than the US.
I think it made a lot of sense for the founders to be open to the possibility that their experiment in democracy wouldn’t work – it was new, after all. But it has worked, brilliantly. So well that the fear that motivated the second amendment seems to me outdated. The US has (as far as I can tell) the world’s oldest continuous constitution. When I look around the world at all the other successful democracies, I think they have substantial advantages over us in having been able to write their constitutions more recently, and thus to better reflect modern technology. The second amendment seems to reflect a view of warfare that hasn’t applied for 100 years.
I wrote a couple posts on these questions a while back:
I’m guessing you’ll disagree with me on this. Still, I’d argue that the US is due for a constitutional convention. We are the only country that views our constitution more as a sacred document than as a tool to achieve shared societal goals. I fully believe that the US Constitution was a monumental event in history, something that changed the whole world for the better. But I think this was precisely because it was a document adapted to its time, and that the proper lesson to take from it is that we also need to adapt it to ours.
I don’t it’s just me that’d disagree. I imagine there are more than a few Mujahadeen and Viet Cong that might disagree. Many people also seem to imagine this world where the military gets into lockstep, throws a salute then starts carpetbombing U.S. cities.
Those drones don’t fly without operators. Those airplanes need maintenance. It’d be impossible to have the federal government nuke its own cities and maintain hearts and minds, the two key elements to defeating an insurrection.
You must remember that those trained veterans don’t all of a sudden become worthless when they leave the service. When ordered to engage in a civil war men would leave by the tens of thousands. They would leave, and they would take their weapons with them. It would be a logistical nightmare the likes of which our military hasn’t dealt with before. This is no longer a country with a geographical split where people are born and die in the same town. They will not fire on their fellows.
But on a more practical level, this is bureaucracy. More effectively in times of strife when the local judge, policeman, ect has to make a decision on whether his life is worth the lousy government pension it will be harder to find people willing to oppress their countrymen.
As to the federalism bit, you may be right. I’ve argued that exact point to the pro-gun crowd when they point out that gun violence is highest in cities with tight gun control. If you look at D.C., it doesn’t take much to drive to Virginia where there are very loose gun laws. But, with that in mind, does it not make a case, especially when we look at how every election ends in a 51%-49% split, that perhaps a peaceful succession might just be the answer? It doesn’t really solve the problem for a libertarian like myself, but it does for the vast majority of Americans.
But even were I to grant that it were a good utilitarian argument (and I don’t 🙂 ) that a firearms ban was effective, then simply from an idealogical and symbolic perspective it’s offensive. It’s dehumanizing to deny a person the single most powerful tool to aid in self-preservation.
As far the militia stuff goes, we should have militias, but we’ve given the job of our protection to a standing army. Both a literal standing army for our foreign defense and a domestic standing army for our protection from crime in a militarized police force. The founders in near unison warned us of the dangers of a standing army, and we live in that world now.
But keep in mind that many of those “well regulated” militias consisted of men arriving once a month on the villiage green, doing a handful of drill movements and then spending the rest of the day getting drunk together. These weren’t highly trained crack troops.
And, surprisingly, a don’t think a ConCon is that awful an idea. And despite what many conservatives will have you believe, Jefferson had many a liberal tendency. He advocated the renewal of a constitution with every generation, believing that we should not be able to be ruled by dead men. Incidentally, I’ve actually rewritten a constitution as a project in law school. I imagine it’d be seen as far more offensive by conservatives and liberals than the one we currently operate under here.