Not The Best Model

Earlier today, I wrote briefly about a small town in Georgia that wants to force citizens to keep firearms in their homes so that no one will ever fall victim to violent crime again.

Councilman Duane Cronic says that all the guns will make criminals think twice about breaking into houses or shooting people … just like in the one other small town that enacted a similar constitutionally questionable ordinance:

The law would give every family the right to protect themselves and their property “without worrying about prosecution for protecting themselves,” Cronic told the meeting. He said the proposal was modeled on a similar law in nearby Kennesaw, Georgia, that has been on the books since 1982.

Things were going great for Kennesaw … right up until a guy shot up a truck rental facility in January 2010, killing three and grievously wounding two more.

So much for all the safety that people are getting from their mandatory gun ownership in Kennesaw.

HT: Marcus Sanborn.

Of Dogs, Ovens, Movie Theatres, Restaurants, Bathrooms, and Gun Shows: A Clarification

Whenever I post something about an irresponsible gun owner who does something impossibly stupid, as I do on occasion because there are more than one or two, pro gun folks always tell me that one or two bad apples don’t spoil the bushel. People who get shot by their own guns, they tell me, are obviously irresponsible gun owners. And, since most gun owners don’t get shot by their own guns, most gun owners must be responsible.

But, of course, that’s bad reasoning.

The reason I post these seemingly ridiculous stories is that, right up until the moment the guy’s dog shot him, the NRA considered him to be a responsible gun owner. The difference between what the public knows of responsible gun ownership and irresponsible gun ownership is luck. If the dog hadn’t kicked the gun that was on the floor of the guy’s truck, we’d never know that a “responsible gun owner” was driving around with a loaded gun — safety off — on the floor of the passenger seat.

In other words, there could very well be lots of irresponsible gun owners out there. We just haven’t heard about them yet because they haven’t yet been accidentally shot. Yet.

A Fine Line

In response to my recent post about the fact that no one has a right to be a vigilante, a number of people have argued that I’ve conflated vigilantism and self-defense. The most prominent of these is David French in the National Review:

Of course we give up the right to settle our own grievances, but we don’t give up the right to protect ourselves and our families before the police can arrive. Defending oneself from a home intruder or mugger is not the same thing as exercising a “right to punish criminal behavior.” You are not being punitive; you are being protective.

Thus, most people agree with me that vigilantism isn’t a natural right, but continue to disagree about self-defense. This simply isn’t a distinction that Locke makes in the Second Treatise and to make that distinction today so we can protect a supposed right to self-defense while stopping short of endorsing vigilantism is to misread Locke.

While there might very well be a difference in one’s mind when one prepares to shoot someone to protect oneself rather than to punish the other, the difference is negligible from a Lockean standpoint: Both are examples of people acting as judge, jury, and executioner. The gun owner, rather than a dispassionate third party, is the only person making the determination about life and death for another person.

There might be times when this is an unavoiadable scenario — and so self-defense is preserved as a possible legal defense for homicide — but one of the main reasons human beings chose civil society over the state of nature is to minimize these incidents.

On a less theoretical note, I think it’s important to note that there’s a very fine line between self-defense and vigilantism, as some gun owners today understand themselves to have the legal right to take the law into their own hands whenever they feel themselves to be threatened … whether at home or in public.

The relatively recent proliferation of “Stand Your Ground” laws — since 2005, about half of the states have passed such laws — has moved our understanding of self-defense from the home, where it was traditionally understood that one could defend oneself, to the public sphere, where one previously had a duty to retreat first and respond with violence second. And it has seemingly increased homicide rates in those states.

Perhaps the best example — and one that I think we’re not talking about nearly enough right now — is that of George Zimmerman and Travyon Martin.

Vigilantes

Since when do people think they have an inalienable human right to be vigilantes?

I understand that people want to feel safe and believe that having a gun in the home will enable them to defend themselves. And I understand that acting in one’s self-defense is a legitimate legal defense. But using the language of self-defense to defend oneself in the (rare) case of shooting an assailant is not the same thing as asserting a human right to defend oneself.

To be sure, if we read a foundational text like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, we find a natural right to punish anyone who would harm us in our life, liberty, health, or possessions. In the state of nature, Locke tells us, each person is effectively judge, jury, and executioner unto herself. And, of course, it’s precisely the problem of a lack of independent judgment in the state of nature that leads people to join together to form a political community.

But for people to establish a political community, Locke asserts that people must give up to the government their natural right to punish criminal behavior and agree to have the government settle grievances. This is why we have standing laws that are meant to be applied equally by independent officers of the law and by the courts.

So, again, where is all of this talk of self-defense and vigilantism coming from?

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Human Rights and Guns Rights

The ridiculous and offensive meme that’s been making its way around Facebook and Twitter for the past few days, linking the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and gun ownership today, is being grounded in the language of human rights.

One blogger immediately responded to my most recent post to reiterate the right-wing talking points about how racial equality and gun rights are the same:

Insofar as they are both expressions of fundamental human rights, yes, they are the same thing. 

The civil rights leaders of the Jim-Crow-era South knew that having a gun was the only thing that would protect you from the KKK, because the local police wouldn’t. Even MLK himself had guns; one of his advisors described his home as “an arsenal”. 

Gun Rights Are Civil Rights.

The amazing thing about a response like this — and there are lots of these sorts of posts all over the internet right now — is just how amazingly wrong it is, both in terms of the way we think about rights and in terms of historical accuracy.

Let’s start with human rights:

First of all, there is no human right to gun ownership. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Leaving aside the intentions of the Founders, as I’ve already written about this extensively, we can clearly see that there is a right to keep and bear arms afforded by the American Bill of Rights. But this right, like all of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, has never been understood to mean that citizens have the right to own any weapons they want or that there should be no barriers at all to gun ownership. We regulate a citizen’s ability to procure weapons today without any constitutional problem and we restrict the types of weapons that are available for sale to the public today; it would be difficult to make an argument that further regulation or restriction would somehow be ruled unconstitutional.

Further, no such right to gun ownership appears in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The closest we get is Article 12:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

This language seems to refer both to governmental and private interference: The government cannot arbitrarily interfere with a citizen in these ways and, further, the UDHR notes quite clearly that the government and its laws exist to protect citizens equally against private attacks. Nowhere does the UDHR suggest that citizens have the right to arm themselves to protect themselves against criminals or that armed insurrection is the way to deal with the threat of a government that might become repressive.

If we go all the way back to John Locke’s argument about natural rights and resisting tyranny in his Second Treatise of Government, we find that in Chapters 18 and 19 he recommends a system in which the people can change their leaders with relative ease, thus allowing them to withdraw their support from a potentially repressive government and to replace it with a better one rather than resorting to rebellion and armed insurrection (which would bring with it a whole host of evils).

Now, a few words about American history:

Did Martin Luther King, Jr. own guns? You bet he did.

William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal.”

This was in the mid-1950s in Alabama, when King and his family were the targets of constant, credible, specific death threats; after his home was bombed, King even applied for a concealed carry permit (and was rejected).

There’s not a lot of discussion of the reason that King owned guns. Gun advocates would like us to believe that King owned them solely because he had the right to do so or because he liked having them around, not because he lived under the sort of constant threat that exists today only in the minds of wingnuts who think our tyrannical government is out to get us. What’s more, here’s the most important part of the MLK story that gun advocates aren’t quite so interested in discussing:

Eventually, King gave up any hope of armed self-defense and embraced nonviolence more completely.

So, gun advocates, if you want to emulate Dr. King, then you’d better start working to highlight for us the constant, credible, and specific threats against you that require you to own guns for your personal protection. And then, of course, I’ll remind you that you’re not really emulating Dr. King, since he later gave up on the gun and embraced non-violence. Are you ready to do that? Why not? Worried that someone is going to bomb your house or assassinate you?

Of course, I’m not actually in favor of taking all of the wingnuts’ guns away from them. As I noted above, I think the Second Amendment pretty clearly affords Americans the right to keep and bears arms and I don’t think we’ll be doing away with the Second Amendment any time soon. I am, though, in favor of further regulations and of further limiting the kinds of weapons that citizens can own. And that’s why the civil rights meme going around is so foolish: It attempts to establish some sort of right to an assault rifle based on either a human or civil right to own every possible kind of gun (which is obviously false) or to defend oneself. But even if citizens had a human right to self-defense, which they don’t, such a right wouldn’t establish the right to own an assault rifle since those are terrible weapons with which to defend oneself.

Twitter Assassins

Just in case you were concerned that racists, wingnuts, and regular old run-of-the-mill morons were going to take the day off, the folks at Public Shaming let you know that inauguration day is also a day when lots and lots of people turn to Twitter to contemplate the assassination of the president:

It’s the day of Obama’s second Presidential Inauguration! As Obama took the oath of office for his second term, the country came together as one and…

Oh wait, lmao, silly me. That didn’t happen. Instead here’s a collection of people who either fantasized or outright threatened President Barack Obama’s assassination (and note: I only picked tweets that fell right before, during, or immediately after the Inauguration itself!) …