Enquiry

From the Times:

Interpreting the Second Amendment broadly, a federal appeals court in Washington yesterday struck down a gun control law in the District of Columbia that bars residents from keeping handguns in their homes.

This is certainly welcome news to me, though it is just a small step in in the right direction, still short of concealed carry. Several years ago some family members of mine were mugged on a DC street, just going out for a walk in their neighborhood, because a few outlaws with guns – imagine that! — could be pretty confident everyone they saw was disarmed and decided to take advantage of that fact.

One point I don’t see stressed very often is that we need not just gun freedom, but a more universal gun culture supportive of that freedom. It seems to me that gun culture is a fringe sub-culture in the so-called blue states, and is more closely associated with southern states and especially rural culture, with gun control being more prevalent in cities.

These cultural differences result in wide disparities in gun laws between different jurisdictions, DC and Virginia being a key example. This, in turn, results in power imbalances with people in some jurisdictions being disarmed and powerless, and others not.

Supporters of gun control often seem to accept this argument, if obliquely, blaming gun crime occurring within gun-controlled districts on the supply of guns emanating from other, pro-gun jurisdictions. The logical conclusion for their argument is that gun control must be universal, which would eliminate the external availability of guns for criminals to take advantage of.

Unfortunately, that still does not eliminate power imbalances. The major overlooked power imbalance is that between the citizens and government. A central but oft forgotten justification for the right to bear arms is that should the government become a tyranny, the citizens should be able to overturn it. That was, after all, how the US was formed.

I’ve seen this point ridiculed on the grounds that citizens armed with pistols and rifles are no match a modern military replete with tanks and bombers. Yet the insurgency in Iraq shows that a decentralized guerilla force possessing mostly small arms can make things difficult, perhaps impossible for a larger adversary. And, I should note, I favor allowing private citizens to own any of the same weapons the government can own, which might well be a much better way of making governments receptive to arms control!

Other power imbalances remain under universal gun control. Consider other weapons — knives, swords, clubs, tasers, chemical sprays, etc. If jurisdictions again vary in their treatment of these, it will again necessitate a universal ban to prevent permeation from more liberal to more restricted jurisdictions. The problem is that many everyday objects (vehicles, kitchen knives, or the good old pipe wrench) can become weapons, the regulation of which will be ever more costly, perhaps impossible to enforce, and require the state meddling in the lives of citizens in ever more authoritarian ways. This is already happening in Britain.

At the far end of the spectrum, even with no weapons anywhere, the strong can still physically dominate the weak with brute force. I’m not sure how the state could ban some from being stronger than others, though I’m sure the British will eventually tell us.

The answer is to go in the complete opposite direction, eliminating almost all restrictions on weapons. Some environments are tightly controlled by necessity, such as the entrance to a courthouse, or a commercial aircraft. There it would make sense to disarm people. Overall, however, we should strive for a universal gun culture, where the widespread disparities in gun ownership disappear, and with them the power imbalances that lead some to use their weapons for wrongful advantage.

That doesn’t mean guns are a panacea, or there are no costs to this strategy, or that everyone must be armed. But I’d like to get to the point where it is not considered unlawful, unusual, or threatening that any citizen, in any particular place, would choose to bear arms.