The Right to Bear Arms Responsibly

Guns kill people more efficiently than any other personal weapon, better than knifes or swords or crossbows or clubs. That's why soldiers carry rifles and pistols and not katanas and longbows.

Guns are dangerous. People go berserk on a fairly regular basis; the ones we tend to hear about are the ones who go berserk with guns, because they're the ones that inflict the most damage when they go berserk. Guns are fight escalators. When you brawl, you feel the pain in your knuckles. You have time to see the damage you've inflicted on the other guy. You can disengage. A gunfight is over in a shot or two. You never have a chance to change your mind.

Most of us want society to be safer. In order to ensure domestic tranquility, one of the goals of government, a lot of folks want to restrict the availability of guns if not prohibit them outright. Regardless of where you stand on the matter, you have to concede that this is a sensible opinion.

I'm going to leave aside historical arguments about founders' intents and careful parsing of each word in the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment and focus instead on a general principle that you can see throughout the Bill of Rights and elsewhere. It's a civil libertarian perspective. It says the government can't go poking around in your private life unless it's got a good reason and it does so the right way.

Generally speaking, that principle, especially amplified by the Second Amendment, says to me that government can't make a blanket prohibition against gun ownership. The government can't prohibit you owning a lawn mower, it can't prohibit you owning creepy paintings of big-eyed kids on black velvet, it can't prohibit you owning guns. So that part of the sensible opinion is out.

But the Second makes reference to a "well-regulated" militia. I don't think there's any reason at all why we can't have a whole sheaf of rules and regulations pertaining to gun ownership designed to promote safety. License guns; require safety training in order to get that license; keep track of who owns which guns; collect taxes on guns.

Guns are automobiles.

Cars are insanely dangerous, especially when misused. No politician who proposed limiting or prohibiting car ownership would get re-elected. What we do instead is identify the car, track the ownership, require the owner to pay a license to own the car, and require the user to obtain a license showing that she knows how to drive the car.

Do the same for guns.

Hell, I'd be in favor of stiffening the licensing requirements for cars while we're doing it for guns. There are too many incompetent and careless drivers out there; why we countenance a fool at the wheel of a 2,000 kg chunk of metal traveling at 90 kph when we quail at a gun is a damn fine question.

Should a felon be allowed to have a gun? Well, I'll tell you: I'm deeply disturbed at the concept that a person who has served his jail term is not a full citizen, as in Florida, where he can't vote. If he can otherwise meet the license requirements, give him the license, just like he'd never gone to jail. And just like anybody else who subsequently misuses that gun, throw the book at him.

Wouldn't you drive safer if the law required that you went to jail if somebody died in an accident you caused, even if it was by inadvertence? If somebody gets shot with the gun you hold the license for, and you could have prevented it if you were more careful, you should go to jail.

That's my theory, at least. Regulate beforehand, and punish afterwards, and otherwise let'em have the guns.

Posted by Greg at September 16, 2002 11:47 AM