How To Argue For Gun Control

(More people requested this subject than any other, so here it is, finally!)

Gun control is another of those issues where people on each side just keep talking past each other. I think it's time someone actually tried to further the conversation. So let's look at the issue intellectually and with skepticism, and see what gun control proponents have to do to argue for their policy.

1. Read the Second Amendment.

Since a huge amount of the debate takes place in the United States, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is very important to this debate. But rest assured, international viewers, we'll get to more generalized arguments later, and even examples in other countries. For now, let's look at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

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.

Really, the important part here is after the comma; linguistically, the first part—known as the "prefatory clause"—doesn't actually impose any sort of condition or requirement on the rest, the operative clause. It's merely a justification.

But reading what the founders wrote about the right of the people to be armed, it's clear that if they'd had a clue how it would be interpreted, they would have ripped it right out and just kept the rest. In fact, the whole point of that clause is to prevent gun control.

What progressives keep saying is that this means that only the militia is allowed to have guns. There are two problems with this. First, it specifically and clearly says the right of the people to keep and bear arms—not the right of militia members. They viewed the militia as being the entire armed body of the people, and of course had seen first hand how an armed populace was very effective at resisting an invading army, even the largest army in the world at the time.

Most people know the most famous example: Paul Revere's ride, although unfortunately they mostly know it because of Longfellow's historically-inaccurate poem written about it in 1860. For example: Revere was the one who set up the lights in the tower, not saw them. He sent the message, not received it.

The biggest problem (and the reason why I bring this up) is that there were actually several riders going off in different directions to alert militia members—i.e., the people of several prominent cities—that the British were preparing to attack. One of those riders was Sybil Ludington, who rode twice as far as Revere did to warn the citizens of Danbury, Connecticut of the attack and mobilize the militia there. Oh, and she was only 16 at the time.

So, the first thing to take from this is that the militia was the people. Although there were people who had officially signed up to be militia members, when the militia was called out, anyone who grabbed a gun and showed up was a militia member, regardless of whether they'd previously enlisted.

The second is to counter the contention that the militia was just the male population. Ludington herself shows quite clearly that women had participated, and there are plenty of other examples of women signing up, including Deborah Samson, who was wounded at a Tory ambush at East Chester (and even removed one of the musketballs herself), Anna Marie Lane, who was wounded in the Battle of Georgetown, and Margaret Corbin, who lost her arm in the Battle of Ft. Washington.

Sadly, it is true that there was a lot of sexism through the ranks at the time, so a lot of women fought in disguise and some were even punished for it, but principally, and certainly at the time the Constitution was written, the militia was regarded as anyone who showed up with a gun. So there is no validity whatsoever to the contention that this clause is in any way meant to restrict who can own guns. It's precisely the opposite, in fact. It wasn't just an assertion that people could own guns to hunt or whatever, but that they could use their guns to secure their cities against even the state if need be, and their absolute opposition to a standing army.

And this was absolutely the sentiment of the time. On July 7th, 1775, the North Carolina Gazette wrote: "[I]t is the Right of every English subject to be prepared with Weapons for his Defence."

The Boston Independent Chronicle wrote on October 25, 1787: "[I]t was in the law of nature for every man to defend himself, and unlawful for any man to deprive him of those weapons of self defence."

In the Connecticut Courant on January 7th, 1788: "In countries under arbitrary government, the people oppressed and dispirited neither possess arms nor know how to use them. Tyrants never feel secure until they have disarmed the people. They can rely upon nothing but standing armies of mercenary troops for the support of their power. But the people of this country have arms in their hands...[this] enables them to defend their rights and privileges against every invader."

In the State Gazette of South Carolina, September 8th, 1788: "Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen."

The Pennsylvania Gazette wrote on November 7th, 1788: "While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of a noble spirit, the most corrupt congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny."

There are numerous more examples I could list, but really, all you need is the operative clause, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That is not in any way modified or limited by the prefatory clause, and no linguistic sophistry can make it so.

By the way, a lot of times you'll see this published with two extra commas. Some gun control advocates love doing all sorts of gymnastics with these, to say that it's the well-regulated militia, not the right to keep and bear arms, that shall not be infringed. On top of all of the other numerous problems with this, the main issue is that these commas aren't really there in the Constitution. They do not appear in the Second Amendment as entered into the Congressional Record. They were a transcription error that happened when the Bill of Rights was copied on to the famous parchment. NO meaning that anyone could attach to them is valid.

Another very desperate ploy is to say that, since the only arms available to the militia at the time were muskets, those are the only arms allowed by the Second Amendment. Well, first, we have to realize that they actually had much greater armaments than that, such as cannons, but we'll put that aside. Let's think about this: If the second amendment only applies to muskets, then freedom of speech only applies to soapboxes and freedom of the press only applies to movable type machines. So, just let us know when you're ready to give up radio, television, telephones, email, blogs, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and your iPad. Then we'll discuss gun control.

2. Don't pretend it's not an individual right.

Another argument gun control advocates like using is that the Second Amendment is a collective right, not an individual right. The fact is, the Constitution in no way recognizes any collective rights, only individual rights. And the Supreme Court has confirmed this many times.

Probably the most prominent example is DC vs Heller in 2008, in which the court found that DC's gun ban was unconstitutional:

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.

The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause...The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.

None of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation. Neither United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542 , nor Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, refutes the individual-rights interpretation. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes.

The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.

This was later clarified to also refer to the states, in McDonald v. Chicago:

[T]he Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers and ratifiers counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to the Nation’s system of ordered liberty.

The right to keep and bear arms must be regarded as a substantive guarantee, not a prohibition that could be ignored so long as the States legislated in an evenhanded manner.

We therefore hold that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment right recognized in Heller.

The notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only 'process' before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words. Moreover, this fiction is a particularly dangerous one.

[T]he Second Amendment is fully applicable to the States...[T]he right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment as a privilege of American citizenship.

Both the framers and the courts have confirmed that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right...which is really the only kind of right there is!

3. Don't claim it's unnecessary because we have police.

I've already covered how the principle of the right to bear arms is as much to defend people against a tyrannical police force as anything else. But putting that aside, it's also necessary to protect homes from criminals. As has often been remarked, "when seconds count, the police are just minutes away." Sorry, but the job of the police is just to sort out what happened afterwards, and they have no duty to protect you, which was confirmed in Warren vs. DC. This case involved Carolyn Warren, Joan Taliaferro, Miriam Douglas, and Douglas's 4-year-old daughter. Warren had called the police saying their home was being burglarized; the burglars proceeded to rape Douglas while Warren and Taliaferro hid. Repeated calls to the police elicited no response. Police did show up at the house, but didn't enter and render assistance.

The case was combined with that of Wilfred Nichol, who was stopped at a red light when he was rear-ended several times, then pulled from his car and beaten. Police arrived at the scene, but refused to do anything, even so much as take the assailant's information so Nichol could take legal action against them.

The court found:

A publicly maintained police force constitutes a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order. The extent and quality of police protection afforded to the community necessarily depends upon the availability of public resources and upon legislative or administrative determinations concerning allocation of those resources.

At any given time, publicly furnished police protection may accrue to the personal benefit of individual citizens, but at all times the needs and interests of the community at large predominate. Private resources and needs have little direct effect upon the nature of police services provided to the public. Accordingly, courts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.

Although the Supreme Court hasn't weighed in on this issue, this decision represents the status quo throughout the US, and it isn't much different in other countries.

4. Deal with the black market issue.

Over at the Bogosity Forum, there's a sticky thread called "The Black Market for Firearms." It's full of links and other information about the illegal firearms trade, and even production.

See, you're acting as if government controlling the production and sale of firearms will fix anything. When we point out that it hasn't exactly happened that way with heroin, you come back with how guns are actually difficult to manufacture, and that this makes all the difference. If this is your argument, then you need to read the links in this thread.

People in the third world are producing illegal firearms in nondescript huts with basic machinist tools, even high-quality fully-automatic assault rifles, including Kalashnikovs, H&Ks, M16s, and even RPGs and stinger missiles, which they sell to the Japanese Yakusa, the Chinese Triads, and other criminal organizations. There are several such operations in the Philippines, and there's evidence that these weapons are being used by criminals in the US as well.

Not only that, but even homemade single-shot pistols are regularly used in India for murders and assassinations. The weapon is easy to destroy afterwards, and they're so cheap that buying a new one each time is very cost-effective. They're great for assassination; not so good for defense.

Even if you manage to make the production and sale of firearms in the US illegal or at least highly restricted (dubious at best), and even if you can stop guns from coming in from out of the country (even more dubious), anyone can make these things in their basement with perfectly legal machinist tools. It's much easier than running a meth lab! How on Earth are you going to stop anyone but lawful citizens from having firearms?

5. Stop doing cross-cultural comparisons.

In virtually every debate on the matter, someone does a cross-cultural comparison, usually comparing the murder rate in the US, where a lot of people own guns, to the UK, where few people do. There are numerous problems with this.

The first is that it's blatant cherry-picking. Notice that they don't mention Switzerland, which has a much lower crime rate even though everyone there is armed to the teeth!

The second is that it's a correlation/causation fallacy. You need to show an absolute causation to defend gun control.

The third is that not all of these murders are committed with firearms, and of the ones that are, what evidence do you have that the murderer wouldn't simply have used an alternative weapon?

The fourth is that different countries count crimes in different ways. For example, the UK counts violent crimes as:

"Violent crime contains a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder. Around a half of violent incidents identified by both BCS and police statistics involve no injury to the victim." —The Home Office Statistical Bulletin, Crime in England and Wales, p.17

But the FBI defines it as:

"In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force." —FBI, Crime in the US: Violent Crime

Even in the case of murder there are differences. The UK reports homicides only after court findings, which means they may be missing a lot of unsolved murders. The US counts any homicide "cleared by arrest," which will end up counting cases where the defendant ends up being acquitted due to self defense or whatever. So even if the actual homicide rate were exactly the same in both countries, the statistics would still make it appear as if the US has more homicides.

Cross-cultural comparisons are pretty much worthless.

6. Stop using mass shootings as an excuse.

First of all, you have to be a particularly vile kind of scumbag to jump on the deaths of innocents in such a tragedy as an opportunity to push your agenda. Yet time after time after time, the bodies aren't even cold; in a matter of hours after a tragedy, while people are still bewildered and piecing together what happened, they're there psychotically using these dead bodies and grieving families to push for more gun control—even when there's no indication it would help. Really, can you people not just wait a day or two, to let passions cool down and police report more details of what actually happened? If not, that tells us that you want to make your case based solely on emotions, and on shaming the people who disagree with you as heartless. In reality, you're the heartless ones.

Not only that, but we see time and time again that these attacks are committed where people are less likely to be armed. The Paris attacks happened in a country with some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. The San Bernardino attack and Elliot Rodger's attack were committed in the state that the Brady Campaign gives the highest score for best gun control laws. When James Holmes shot up a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, he deliberately went past several theatres that were closer, including some that were more crowded, to go to the one that expressly restricts people from bringing in firearms. When will you people get the trend?

And to make matters worse, you keep pushing the same agenda even when it wouldn't have prevented the shooting at all. When Vester Lee Flanagan II shot reporter Alison Parker and photojournalist Adam Ward, gun control advocates called for background checks, even though such a check would have completely failed to stop Flanagan, who had no criminal record. Just like it didn't stop Dylann Roof from shooting a church meeting in Charleston, South Carolina; he passed his background check and obtained his firearm legally that way.

And by the way: this is why we don't believe for one second your protestations that you don't want to ban guns, only pass common-sense gun regulation. Because you know that these propositions won't work, don't you? Come on, you can't be that stupid! So you advocate "common sense" legislation that you know will fail, so that when it does, you can argue for more restrictions, and more restrictions, and more restrictions, and, by the law of mathematical induction, it all culminates in the banning of all private ownership of firearms.

Not only would none of your proposed laws have stopped any of these perpetrators from getting guns, we can see clearly with the statistics that it's better to have armed citizens present to stop attackers. None of the wild scenarios of shoot-outs the gun control advocates warn about have ever been observed, but we have seen instances of armed citizens stopping attackers cold—not that the news media reports on them much.

A school shooting in Pearl, Mississippi was foiled when Vice Principal Joel Myrick retrieved his colt .45 from his car and stopped Luke Woodham. Myrick didn't even fire his gun. James Strand, who lived next door to a school, heard shots and ran over with his 12-gague shotgun, stopping Andrew Wurst's killing spree without even firing. Mark Wilson stopped an armed and armored shooter at a courthouse in Tyler, Texas. Wilson was fatally wounded in the altercation, but his was the only death. And more recently, an armed Uber driver in Chicago stopped an assailant who'd pulled out a gun and started firing into the crowd. Fortunately, that was now legal due to the McDonald case mentioned earlier, and the Uber driver will not be charged with any crime. But amazingly, this resulted in an outcry from gun-haters and now Uber has actually prohibited both drivers and passengers from being armed during Uber rides. It's completely insane.

Davi Barker has done an audit of 100 mass shootings, and found out that when a mass shooter is stopped by police, the average number of people killed is 14.29. When they're stopped by an armed citizen, that number drops to 1.8. Using a mass shooting as an excuse to push for more gun control is not only morally reprehensible, its downright dangerous!

By the way, the biggest school massacre in US history wasn't even committed with a firearm. It happened in 1927 at the Bath Consolidated School in Bath Township, Michigan, and was committed with explosives, killing 38 elementary school children and 6 adults. At least 58 others were injured. Stopping guns will NOT stop this kind of violence; it will only impede the ability of citizens to stop it themselves.

7. Stop including suicides in your statistical evaluations.

Every time some gun control nutbar comes up with an Over 9000 fallacy to scare you into how many people are killed with firearms each year, they always include suicides. Why? As if there aren't about 100 other ways to effectively kill yourself. There's just never been any good data showing that the availability of guns has any effect on the suicide rate. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 41,000 Americans commit suicide every year, so it really inflates the numbers.

One of the favorite scaremongering statistics of the gun control nuts is the accidental shooting of children. The problem is—you guessed it—they include suicides. Oh, and many of them also include "children" as old as 23!

The fact is, according to the CDC, only about 500 people all total—adults and children—are killed by accidental firearm discharge every year. You have about the same chance of dying from tuberculosis or meningitis, which are all but unheard of now. You're 60 times as likely to die from an accidental fall, 70 times as likely to die in a car accident, and 77 times as likely to die of accidental poisoning.

For children under 15, the number of deaths from accidental firearm discharge is 69. They're 3 times as likely to die from asthma, 6 times as likely to die from the flu, 9 times as likely to die from accidental drowning, 13 times as likely to die from cardiovascular disease, and 20 times as likely to die in a car accident. They're also 10 times as likely to die from a non-firearm homicide. Oh, and since we're mentioning homicides, children under 15 are 4 times as likely to be murdered without a firearm than with.

People—and especially children—are very unlikely to be killed by an accidental discharge of a firearm. That's why the gun control people have to keep including suicides. Again, morally reprehensible.

8. Stop using Australia as an example.

Another point that gun control advocates love pointing to is Australia, which instituted tougher gun laws and a gun buyback after a 1996 mass shooting.

They love pointing to the reduction in the rate of firearm homicides since 1996. But remember: you can't just look at after; you have to compare it to before. And before, the rate of gun deaths was dropping at about the same rate. Also, neighboring New Zealand, which had no such change in gun laws (and has much more permissive gun laws than Australia), saw a similar drop. There's just no way that the drop in firearm homicides in Australia can be attributed to the 1996 gun control program.

Suicides in Australia don't help you, either. Apart from the points in #7, during the same period since the gun buyback non-firearm suicides actually dropped at a higher rate than firearm suicides! Also, firearm suicides had already been dropping at much the same rate before the buyback, whereas non-firearm suicides had previously been rising.

Correlation doesn't mean causation, and you don't even have a correlation here!

9. Actually learn something about the so-called "Wild West."

Another favorite talking point of gun control advocates is how we don't want to go back to the Wild West, where everyone had a gun and there were shootouts in every street. These people need to learn history from something other than movies.

Yes, there were instances such as the shootout at the OK Corral. But those were talked about so much because they were exceptions, aberrations that you can find in any society.

In a 1979 study published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Terry Anderson and PJ Hill showed:

"The West during this time is often perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected, and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved." —Journal of Libertarian Studies 3:9–29.

The homicide rates back them up. According to W. Eugene Hollon’s book Frontier Violence: Another Look, in what are generally considered the worst towns for this sort of violence: Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, between 1870 to 1885, had 45 total homicides, which equates to a murder rate of just 1 in 100,000. And although gun control nuts love cherry-picking cities and areas with murder rates of 30 or more per 100,000, you can do that anywhere: in America today, St. Louis has a murder rate of 50 per 100,000. And it's easier to cherry-pick examples where you have places like the frontier West, which was mostly small towns where even a single murder could send the rate into double digits. Abilene, for example, had a population of around 500, so if we look at that in isolation, a single murder in that town would increase its homicide rate to 200 in 100,000!

Really, most of the violence of the Wild West can be attributed to government. In fact, the gunfight at the OK Corral was the ultimate result of gun control gone awry! Most of the violence sprang from retaliation from Native Americans after the US Army started waging war with them everywhere they went.

And, of course, the gun control nutbars love to do their monkeying with statistics. One way they get the homicide rate so high is by looking at statistics that count self defense as homicides. Come on, guys, cut that out!

10. At least do a utilitarian calculation.

If you're not going to act on moral principles (and it's clear that gun control proponents are never going to act on moral principles, since that would require consistency) then you at least need to make your arguments utilitarian in nature. And this is exactly what gun control nuts try to do: show that gun control will mean lives saved. But the problem is, they're counting lives they think gun control will save (which it won't for reasons we've already mentioned, like the black market), and don't even try to account for the lives their policy will cost.

The fact is, the more things you push, such as wait times, the more difficult you make it for the most vulnerable people to defend themselves.

Let's say a 110-lb woman is being stalked and threatened by a 220-lb ex-boyfriend who doesn't know the meaning of the word "restraining order." In fear for her life, she goes to try to get a gun. What does your policy do?

What happens if there's a 3-day waiting list, but he rapes or murders her that night? Will you accept responsibility for that senseless and avoidable tragedy?

What happens if she can't get a gun at all because she failed a background check, even if her only crime was not in any way violent, but merely to be in possession of a plant? A single marijuana joint in college that results in her being busted will stop her from getting a gun in perpetuity, if you guys have your way. Is her death not on your conscience then?

You must know that you'll fail the utilitarian calculation, otherwise you wouldn't need to do bogus statistics like including suicides in your figures on gun fatalities.

It really is like the saying goes: gun control advocates believe that it's better for a woman to be lying dead, raped and strangled with her own pantyhose, than for her to be explaining to the police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.

11. Yet again, there IS a gun in the room.

The fact is, all forms of gun control are blatant hypocrisy: special pleading where moral rules are set inconsistently based on the almost-religious beliefs of the advocates.

Remember, there IS a gun in the room here: government. In order to stop people from getting guns, you need government to point guns at people who try to get guns. So despite what you claim, you don't want a society without guns, you want a society where only your Blessed Government has guns, its High Priests having Divine Rights that aren't bestowed on the rest of us.

Also, you claim over and over again that you want to reduce gun violence. But we're not the ones advocating pointing guns at people who disagree with us!

In fact, it's just the opposite. We won't do anything to force you to carry guns. Many of us don't carry guns ourselves. We believe it's a personal choice. But thankfully, you don't have to arm everyone to make people safe. You only need a small percentage of the population armed—as long as the criminals and other would-be wrongdoers have no idea who is armed and who isn't. This has been proven over and over again to be a deterrent to both criminal acts and foreign invaders. It's why the Nazis never invaded Switzerland. It's why the Japanese never invaded the US mainland. When you're only protected by government, all an invader has to do is get past the government forces—which he can do with superior firepower and/or numbers. But with an armed populace, that isn't enough. After getting through the military, their problems are just beginning, and they have no idea as they go from building to building, home to home, business to business, which of those doors have an armed citizen on the other side of it.

In every statist argument, you always have to acknowledge the gun in the room, and no more so than in the gun control debate. The fact is, this isn't a question of whether or not we can reduce violence by banning guns, because we can't. It's a question of, are we going to have rule by brute force, where only the strong and the politically powerful survive, or are we going to have true equality, where that 220-lb thug is no threat to a 110-lb woman who has half a pound of iron to even the score?

I think you've seen all sorts of reasons why we just don't believe you're sincere when you talk about this. But if you want to prove us wrong, if you want to show you really, honestly believe what you say, and it's not just posturing or excuse-making or hypocrisy or belief-in-belief, there's a simple way to do it:

Put this yard sign in your front lawn. And leave it there.

And then go on vacation.

How many of you will do it?