Gun Rights

One fifth of US Presidents since the year 1900 have been shot. Two died, two survived. Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, both shot and killed. Great musicians John Lennon and Marvin Gaye, shot dead. Virginia Tech, Columbine, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, and most recently Sandy Hook, all horrendous gun massacres. In 2010, over 8000 people died as a result of violent gun crime in the US. As of 2009, there are more guns in the US than there are people. Of all the controversial positions libertarians hold, none are so hard to defend as the right to bear arms. I say this not because of any difficulty with the theory of a person's right to defend themselves, but because of the sheer emotional weight attached to this issue. Everyone's heard the statistics, and gun-control advocates are armed to the teeth with them. Being a libertarian is not easy, and you must be prepared to fight for freedom even when massively outnumbered. It is our duty as libertarians to be the guardians of freedom when all else desert it. In order to do this, we must be clear and precise in our arguments, and we must calmly assert truth in the face of fierce argument and raw, misguided emotion. I will here attempt to set out a clear argument for libertarians to offer in the defence of freedom on this sensitive issue. There are two practical and one theoretical approach libertarians may take to defend the right to bear arms. A practical argument, and I would argue the least strong argument we can use, involves the practical ability of one to defend oneself against criminals. Both aggressive and defensive actions are made more effective with the use of guns. Therefore, it would follow that if we were to remove all guns from society, there would be less aggressive and defensive action. This is a line of argument those that wish to restrict gun rights often use, but they overlook an important point. When governments try to restrict something, they often do not do a very good job of it. Just look at the war on drugs for an example. We libertarians know that governments are inherently inefficient and ineffective and this remains true in the gun debate. Any action to restrict guns actually just makes criminals lives easier because the people they commit crimes against are now unarmed and less capable of defending themselves. The criminals, on the other hand, are quite happy to break the law to access guns; after all, they already plan on breaking the law! What we might expect to see then, when gun ownership is restricted, gun deaths might decrease, but crime will rise. And this is the case when we compare the US and the UK, the UK had 59 gun deaths in 2011 compared with over 8,500 in the US. However, in the US there are 403 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, and estimates vary for the UK, but an average of these estimates I have seen puts it over 1000 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. Law abiding citizens are put in a much greater state of vulnerability than they would be if they were armed. A stronger practical reason for libertarians to fight for gun rights is armed citizens' value as a last resort defence against the government. As libertarians we believe in natural rights, and no government, under any democratic mandate, has the power to take these rights away. Governments over history, through the power of the majority, have often sought to violate the rights of their citizens. Do we think tyrannical governments though history could have been so successful in their persecution of their citizens if they'd have faced an armed militia? Do we think Hitler could have been as successful as he was in the eradication of the Jews if the 9 million Jews in Europe in 1940 had been armed? By giving the government a monopoly on weaponry, citizens lose any real ability to protect their freedom. I find this argument incredibly powerful; the idea that all the genocide committed in the 20th century could have been prevented highly intriguing at the least, revolutionary at best. The theoretical approach for libertarians to take is one we can ultimately always depend on. Despite the political jousting of statistics and hypothetical scenarios laced with emotional ranting, the philosophical grounding of the libertarian position remains unharmed. We simply have to go back and work through our fundamental roots to demonstrate why gun control is wrong. Very simply, we can state, 'I am a human being. As a human being, I have the right to live free from coercion. Therefore, no person can confiscate my property, or by force restrict my ownership of property.' There, in three sentences, we have the whole basis of libertarianism and our fundamental justification for gun rights. These three arguments, presented in a clear and humble fashion in debate, can be very effective. I don't believe the gun debate will be won anytime soon. Although this is a shame, it is understandable. As in many cases, left-wing positions often appeal to emotion rather than reason. It's far easier to react emotionally then to do the hard work of logically reasoning through a problem, and so it's easy to understand why gun control is appealing to many. Libertarians must be the teachers; it's on us to educate people about liberty, if only because no-one else will. Gun control is as emotional an issue as it gets, which is why it's so critically important we do not allow emotional arguments to drag us in. If we remain clear in our message about the virtues of liberty, enough people will come to understand liberty and freedom will be sufficiently protected.