Gun Control

I'm very concerned by ongoing calls to ban or strictly regulate the individual ownership of firearms, mostly because it betrays a pathological naivity on the part of most people making these calls (not to say that there aren't any naifs on the gun rights side).

Last night a lady stood before a reform Jewish congregation in Santa Monica and encouraged congregants and visitors to sign her petition to remove the gun show loop hole. She then said it was non-violent. I wonder if she thinks the officers enforcing that law will be armed. If they will be, well, there's a propensity for violence. Defensive violence, maybe, but it's still violence. And if we're going to allow for some defensive violence, why allow only one particular class to use it?

I always wonder if people who want to ban individual ownership of firearms want to also ban police and military ownership of firearms. That might be nice, if it were ever to happen. But it probably won't. Even in the UK, where the police don't cary firearms, there still are SWAT teams and other special units who do cary and use firearms, and there is a military, whose members - yes - cary firearms. To be fair, there are far fewer gun related deaths in the UK than there are in the US - something which I admit here.

There is one consequentialist consideration which I didn't mention in my earlier post, and that is disparities of power. The state has a much greater capacity to inflict lethal violence than its subjects do. Banning individual ownership of firearms exacerbates that power disparity. This doesn't always result in totalitarianism. Or rather I should say not every case has resulted in totalitarianism yet. What we can say is that the classic cases of totalitarianism (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia) involved weapons control - or, what Anthony Gregory calls victim disarmament.

People who think the U.S. would be significantly different should take a hint from Oscar Grant, Waco, internment camps, and any other incident from that long list of abuses by the U.S. government. A government that abuses an armed populace can't be trusted to rule a disarmed populace. Of course, the biggest problem is that the government is too powerful to begin with. But until the government's destructive capacities are rolled back, and they never will be, I would say that individual residents of this country should be allowed to keep armor-piercing weapons (though, no, we hardly ever are allowed such a privilege).