The Right to a Firearm

I've kind of been casting about for stuff to write about, and when I asked my wife about it, one of the things she suggested was gun control because everyone is writing about it.  This is because, at the time that I write this, an "assault weapons ban" is being debated, an idea which came to the fore as a result of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

I'm not interested in covering the same ground that others have ground into mud, so my immediate reaction was "I don't have anything to say about that" but I was watching a video yesterday that touched on an idea that I had some time ago, and so I thought maybe I should talk about that, and the result is these words that you're reading.

First, a word on rights.  When I first thought about what a "right" is, I was puzzled by the way people talked about rights.  On the one hand, they seemed to be granted by various legal documents, spoken of like "I have a Constitutional right to this."  And on the other hand,the way people talked about them as if they weren't granted by various legal documents, as exemplified by the phrase "endowed by our creator."  So, what gives?  Well, I have come to think of rights as a kind of a decision that's always considered right.  However, doing what's right in the abstract sense is sometimes not permitted under the law, which leads to the inclusion of a list of things that people must be allowed to do in the Constitution, which is supposed to prevent the creation of bad law.

By the way, I don't think of any right as absolute.  That is, there is no decision that is always right, there are only decisions that are right the vast majority of the time.  Only a moment's reflection is needed to come up with a reason why any right might be wrong, in some circumstances.  That's where the concept of "due process" comes from because someone has to judge whether or not the abrogation of one right is justified by the necessities of another.  I think the right that comes the closest to absolute is the right to secure your own person and property.

And that's important because the right to a firearm isn't the real right, the right to secure your person and your property is the real right.  A firearm is simply the most effective way to do that in many cases, and it's effective enough to be the method listed specifically in the Constitution of the United States of America.

The thing is, some governments have decided that firearms aren't appropriate in some places.  The elementary school in Newtown, CT is one such "gun free zone", and the North Harris campus of the Lone Star College is another.  I mention the latter one not only because I'll be spending much of the next few Saturdays there, but also because last weekend I spent quite a bit of time staring at the "this campus is a gun free zone" signs posted all over that campus.  (I vividly recall one that was on the inner door of the men's room stall that I occupied for a brief time.)  Those majority of those signs were put up, no doubt, because of the shootings that happened there a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, people are free to decide to not go armed, and a government might decide that the right thing to do is limit the ability of lawful citizens to go armed in a particular place.  Most citizens who choose not to go armed have put their trust in something other than brute force for his or her security.  However, if a place is declared a "gun free" zone, then the government has apparently decided that it can do the job of guarding the occupants' persons and property better than those citizens can.  In the case of a building full of preadolescent children, that might be justified.  In the case of a community college, it's considerably less likely to be so.

However, in both cases the state that forbade the legal carry of firearms by its citizens in a particular place fell woefully short of the job of protecting the occupants of that place.  That's not at all surprising because providing that sort of protection is both expensive and intrusive and even the best forms of protection fail sometimes.  The best person to resist a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, even though that protection might fail.  That, in my opinion, is the reason that "gun free zones" are ill-advised.