The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control)
theatlantic.comI normally might flag something like this, but there's an important point in here that has to do with our relationship to technology.
Guns fill a role in society that allows any person, no matter how weak, to execute deadly force against another. For many, this is the height of idiocy. Why would we allow individuals to have such power?
But technology is doing the same thing that guns do -- it's giving every person unprecedented power over his fellow man. DDOS attacks can bring down banks. Bio-research could unleash a deadly plague. As technology increases, the powers that one person has continue to grow.
So the issue of gun ownership is the same issue as freedom in technology. How much power should one person have? Every time somebody commits a crime on the internet, we're going to hear the same cries: why should individuals have so much power over others?
I don't have a facile or slogan-worthy answer. As a libertarian, I always want to err on the side of empowering individuals. But I can see a powerful argument to continue to take freedoms away from all of us. The issue of gun control was just the first shot fired in the larger war that is now upon us.
> Why would we allow individuals to have such power?
Who is this "we" that has either the power, right, or wisdom to overrule people on such things?
> So the issue of gun ownership is the same issue as freedom in technology
Wonderfully said.
Power is a zero-sum game. Either I have the right to { own a gun | duplicate a file | mix acid and water in a test tube | print a part on a 3-d printer } or someone else takes that right from me and holds it themself.
There are wonderful deontological arguments as to why it is wrong to take rights away from me (or you, or you, or you), but even at the utilitarian level: why should we expect better outcomes if a right is removed from individual A and given to individual B? Was Germany better off when the Jews and Gypsies had their right to firearms ownership transferred to the state? Was China better off under Mao when individuals had their right to plant, grow, harvest and sell their crops transferred to the state? Was the United States better off when each person had their right to make decisions about alcohol consumption taken away and transferred to the state?
I argue that restricting rights is wrong on both deontological AND utilitarian grounds.
The utitarian argument for these sorts of things tends to be "give me the power, and I'll make better decisions". The incentives don't usually support the fulfillment of that promise.
> "Who is this "we" that has either the power, right, or wisdom to overrule people on such things?"
The same "we" that has existed since the beginning of our species, when groups of humans decided to live together.
"We" is an expression of all people - not biased by East or West, Black or White. In all societies the price of living in a group, and enjoying the benefits thereof, are concessions to personal freedom, and the recognition of some authority that is capable of making the decision.
It's also important to note (because it's so frequently confused) that "we" is not necessarily a government. In the absence of a government, "we" will manifest itself in other formats, most frequently tyrannical.
The only way for you to extricate yourself from this (by your implication, malevolent) "we" is to live entirely without dependency on any semblance of society.
And the difficulty is in determining the limitations that we allow the "we" to impose on the individual. In most cases agreement is easy to achieve, but in some cases there is a difference of opinion that is insurmountable. Without the possibility of agreement, it may be that the only option is to separate the group into those that believe option A and those that believe option B. Then individuals can move into whichever group fits their beliefs. This would be an iterative process.
Given the way that humans have handled one group separating into another, I think this might be a devastating experiment to try. But in theory, it seems plausible that after a number of iterations you would belong to a group that fits your ideals perfectly.
The libertarian philosophical response would be that people only have the two basic rights to life and property. And one person cannot take away those rights from another. The government then exists solely to limit behavior strictly only in cases in which one of those two rights are being taken away by another individual.
The point of that argument is that no individual has the right to do with the government what he would not be right to do by himself. This means that since he can't individually limit the rights of another, he can't use the government to do it either.
This means that there are no concessions at all to personal freedom to live in a group. Not really anyway. I mean, yes, you can't take someone else's life (unless they attempt to take yours.) But that's hardly a restriction necessary only in large groups of people. It's kind-of implied as soon as you have at least two people.
In the absence of a government, "we" will manifest itself in other formats, most frequently tyrannical.
Tyranny implies government. In the absence of government, therefore, there can be no tyranny. It's not clear to most people whether society without government is possible, of course (or, rather, most would assert that it isn't).
Power is not a zero-sum game. Some restrictions of power/rights enable more power/freedom than they take away. This is obvious. The restriction (or convention, but I think the point still stands) to drive on a particular side of the road allows us to do so much more than if we did not have the restriction, our net 'power' has increased. Similarly in many other cases.
I think that many of your examples are good ones and that arbitrary restrictions of freedom are wrong, but restrictions on the possession of weapons by the general public is not arbitrary and if you want to make a utilitarian case you are going to need to talk about the pros and cons of gun control itself not more generally about freedom and rights.
There was an excellent essay George Orwell wrote in the late 40s titled The Bomb and You. It's on the relationship between technology and the power of individuals vs groups. He talks about how some weapons such as swords took a great deal of training to use well and tended to concentrate power. Other weapons such as muskets brought power to the since they were cheap and easy to use. Many modern weapons such as air craft carriers have been even more concentrating in nature, requiring the resources of a state to construct, but he was initially terrified that the bomb was an exception and would mean the end of civilization.
In time there probably will be something of that destructive power that small organizations or even individuals could create.
I see it as more of a matter of where to draw the line than a big philosophical disagreement. In practice, as far as I can tell, most people (meaning something like >90% of the public) believes in restricting possession/manufacture of some items when they cross a threshold that is deemed too dangerous to allow unrestricted individual ownership. The main disagreement is over where the threshold is.
For example, a majority of Americans think that owning a handgun should be on the "legal" side of the line, while owning a cruise missile should be on the "illegal" side of the line, and owning a nuclear bomb or stockpiles of chemical weapons should be even more on the "illegal" side. People in other countries may draw the line somewhere else, for a variety of fairly complex reasons, but afaict it's still the same basic framework everyone's operating under.
I don't think that being one in 10,000 people to "help bring down a bank", is the same as going to someone and executing him.
In the past century or so a similar thing has happened at the level of nations. Technology has allowed nations to reach the point where they are capable of causing unprecedented damage to not just other countries, but the world.
Now, maybe MAD works better with nations than it does with individuals, but maybe we've just been getting lucky.
The sea of possibilities that internet gives is clearly being used mostly for good or neutral/trivial activities. But with a gun only two things can be done: kill or intimidate; for every shooted man you need to start the discussion of who was the "good" and who was the "bad"; there is no need for those discussions with most of the internet activities.
You are also talking like a paranoid; incidences with internet used to release deathly viruses are so far only videogames stories and DDOS attacks have more similarities with an electricity outage than to killing someone. And not a single bank got broke because some DDOS attack.
The question posed at the end was interesting. The interviewer said he had asked a number of people associated with horrible shooting sprees like Columbine and Aurora if they would have rather have had a gun, and many say "no." Jonathan Rauch responds with: "Maybe the right question to ask that person was, 'would you have liked someone else ... someone who is comfortable with guns ... to have had a gun in that situation?' ... I think you'd get a different answer."
HN is a pretty cold, logical place, so while the topic's raised, I'd like to ask a question:
A year or so ago I watched a 60 minutes segment on so-called "sovereign citizens." The segment made them out to be relatively deranged, on my own cursory research supports this.
One part DID stick in my mind, though: in an interview with someone with weak ties to the movement (I believe a radio host?), the interviewee said something akin to: "The Second Amendment is not so that we can go duck-hunting." I took this to mean, (and in light of the circumstances around the American Revolutionary War, I think there's a strong case to be made) that the Second Amendment was specifically intended to protect the possibility of armed rebellion.
This is a fairly out-there idea, but then, it's called "Revolutionary" for a reason.
However, when I hear debates about gun control, this context seems to be missing. Is it such a...well...revolutionary concept that we now shy away from it? Or am I completely misunderstanding something?
That's exactly the point of the 2nd Amendment.
In fact, it goes further. The point of the preamble (the part of about the necessity of a militia) isn't there to say that the right to keep and bear arms is necessary so that the state can have an army. Rather, it's positive law saying that citizens should own guns to be able to form a militia in order to fight back against a tyrannical government.
And the start of the Revolutionary War provides more supporting context for this: the British march that begin the war wasn't intended to start a war. The objective was to disarm the citizens. The authors/signers of the Constitution wanted to ensure that the state could never do that to the citizens again.
That's the point. It's not an out-there idea.
The Constitution was written by people who had taken arms against a government. It's reasonable to infer that they thought doing so was important and might be necessary in the future.
Thanks to all who've replied. I'm glad to hear confirmation. But I don't get the sense that this point is present even implicitly in the gun control debate. If the power to rebel is what's being protected, why limit assault weapons? Is an armed populace seriously supposed to take on the army with handguns?
I worry thatI might be coming across as a sock puppet with an axe to grind, so maybe I should take this question somewhere else. I'd be interested to hear any and all responses though; thank you in advance.
An intent-of-founders-based reading of the 2A would seem to support ownership of military weapons more than handguns or hunting weapons. There are several groups (GOA, vs. NRA) who support this. Yes, I think the "Sovereign Citizen" people on TV tend to be loons, but that doesn't mean everything they believe is necessarily unreasonable.
(Personally, I think our experience in Iraq shows that any real insurgency or attempt to overthrow a government would take the form of "fuck guns, bring IEDs". Most of the time, an insurgent would actually want to be unarmed entirely so as to blend in with the population. It might sometimes be worth having offensive weapons for specific tasks, but generally unless it was truly open warfare on every citizen, you would want to blend in. Small arms, especially personal weapons vs. crew-served, are basically defensive weapons, or are used to fix the enemy in place for larger weapons to destroy.)
Thanks for taking the time.
This is another time; and not even half America would be able to take out the government even if they really wanted to... back then not even tanks existed.
"This is a fairly out-there idea"
It's not an out-there idea at all. The Second Amendment doesn't say anything about hunting.
Urban dwellers are about as qualified to talk about guns as rednecks are to talk about affirmative action in Ivy league schools. For both good and bad. While everyone has a right to an opinion, the opposing sides of each issue view the other side with Ad-hominem dread. And while we should not pre-suppose from where the best ideas will come from, the fact of the matter is that neither side is likely to really respect the opinions of the other either. In the absence of true dialogue, the options are (1) do nothing; and (2) steam-roll the otherside, not taking their view into consideration. Arguably (1) is both easier and more intelligent, in that is likely to be "less wrong".
> "According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 47 percent of American adults keep at least one gun at home or on their property, and many of these gun owners are absolutists opposed to any government regulation of firearms. According to the same poll, only 26 percent of Americans support a ban on handguns."
This amazes me. I wonder how many of those 47% have had training? Or how many regularly practice firing the gun? This is one of the main reasons I'm opposed to people being allowed to own guns. Most probably don't know how to use them and in a situation where the weapon could be useful an untrained person will probably make the situation worse either by shooting another civilian or losing their cool and firing the gun and making a situation worse (e.g. in a robbery where everyone could come out safe if the thief gets the money - but some idiot with their own gun decides they will 'save the day', the thief freaks out and suddenly their are dead people).
Another reason I think guns should be make illegal in the US is the incredibly obvious evidence throughout the world that easier access to guns leads to more gun related crime. Coming from a country where guns are illegal it's very rare to hear or anyone being shot dead. Violent criminals obviously turn to other weapons such as knives but I would rather be up against a man with a knife than a man with a gun.
I am willing to bet a very sizeable percentage of that 47% fall into a "Has a shotgun in the attic which they were given 20 years ago and forgot about. Does not own any ammunition." category, or similar.
Still going to be a very large number that are more "active" gun owners, but I think 47% is likely something of an overstatement.
I could train someone with no prior knowledge of firearms, who was fairly intelligent, responsible, etc. to use a shotgun effectively for home defense in about 15 minutes on a range, and maybe an hour or so on use of force/escalation of force at a table. That's both the most morally defensible firearm ownership and the most likely positive use for a firearm, at the lowest overall cost (risk, financial cost, training time, etc.).
Concealed carry of a handgun, use outside the home, precision rifle, etc. would be a lot harder, but I'd be quite happy if most people just learned minimal home defense with a shotgun and nothing more.
Certainly shotguns are good for that. Most people I know that own guns were given shotguns (usually as wedding gifts or whatnot) for that reason. The only two firearms that I know of in my extended family are gifted shotguns in a locked gun-rack with a trigger lock and no ammunition. And my extended family is pretty much a bunch of hawks... Most firearm ownership in the States is similar to this I think. Both sensible and safe.
When we hear figures like 47% ownership, we may tend to think that all of that 47% is of the irresponsible sort that news stories eventually are made about. The reality is very boring and mundane though.
"I would rather be up against a man with a knife than a man with a gun."
I'd rather not be a helpless victim in either case.
Feels like a cheap solution, there is countries where guns are very hard to get, and in those countries guns are way less used in crimes compared to USA for example. This will result in even more guns and probably a even bigger problem in the future.
On the contrary, the cheap solution is "assume there's a way to make guns hard to get in America. See, isn't that better?" Yes, maybe it would be better, but you assumed away the hard part.
There are already 300 million guns in America, and a deeply entrenched culture in favor of keeping them. That is the initial condition we have to work with. Saying "just be more like country X" isn't a solution at all.
Totally true, one solution though could be to pay people to turn in guns, this won't work in practice probably though.
Local police departments do gun buybacks all the time in the US. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws...
Sometimes with amusing results: http://www.ammoland.com/2011/03/29/pro-gun-activists-outbid-...
Other countries have done that. Of course it won't be perfect but it's a good first step.
Keep in mind that you wouldn't need to collect every single gun. You just need to shut off the supply and make the black market ones difficult to find.
It's in the class of restricting personal liberty in the name of public safety. I don't think you'll get people to move on their positions very easily.