Comments Elsewhere

Alex: “If people like Cheney have access to firearms either way, how does giving them to everyone else at the same time really help anyone?”

I don’t think that Roderick intended his remarks as an argument against gun control legislation (although of course he opposes that). He intended them as a reply to an argument for it that opportunistic advocates might make in light of the recent events. The point being that Cheney, as one of the most powerful members of the political class, would have access to guns with or without stricter gun control legislation, so his recent misadventures don’t prove anything one way or the other about gun control.

That said, it does point the way toward one of the arguments against gun control legislation: advocates often act as if it just abolished guns from society. But it doesn’t: what it does is to mandate that the men of the political classes, or their deputized enforcers, have guns, and that nobody else does, as far as the State can reliably enforce its will. That is to say, that military or paramilitary forces under the command of the State will be armed, and resourceful outlaw gangs may be armed, and the rest of us will be almost entirely depend on the former (thus on the good graces of both the enforcers and the political class) for our own bodily safety. I can’t see how that’s a humane or reliable plan for greater autonomy and freedom.

I should note that I’m not actually concerned with (as you’ve worried here and worried elsewhere) the prospects of using widespread gun ownership to mount a successful insurrection against tyrannical governments. I don’t think that prospect is as easy to discount as you seem to think it is (lots of ad hoc guerrilla forces armed mostly with Kalashnikovs and rudimentary explosives have seriously contested, or even defeated, the armed force of world powers in recent history). But that’s not my primary point here; my primary point is about the way in which the situation created by gun control requires ordinary people to be dependent on a professional class of military and paramilitary “enforcers” and “defenders,” and the way in which that dependence is corrosive of freedom and conducive to rampant abuses by the contemptuous pigs. Cf. GT 2004-11-30: Condoleeza’s Right and especially my clarificatory comment to Fred Vincy for more on the theme. The basic idea is that gun control contributes to the conditions that sustain the perceived need for large standing armies, large regimented professional police forces, etc., and that those are corrosive to freedom and dangerous to us “civilians.”

I don’t think this quite comes under the heading of either 1 or 2. I do endorse 1 (as I’ve mentioned) and I don’t really care much about 2 one way or the other. But this seems to me to be a different argument from either.