Guns

The Second Amendment was designed to protect state militias while also guaranteeing the federal government would never lose complete control. Many people today believe it was enshrined explicitly to protect unlimited individual gun rights. It did not. Early militias were typically organized to destroy indigenous peoples and suppress slave rebellions. The legacy of the second amendment is not a good one, and gun violence is a terrible problem in the United States that must be addressed.

However, gun ownership is an important part of American culture and identity. The individual right to bear arms clearly exists in the Constitution, and deserves to be protected. The second amendment also clearly allows for federal regulation, which also deserves to be protected. A balance must be struck between practical regulation which addresses gun violence, and the core purposes for the individual right to bear arms.

The currently recognized core purpose of the individual right is self-defense in the home. An additional core purpose, which we agree with, is to ensure that the population is armed and able to defend against dictatorship.

There are some major problems with widespread gun ownership with anti-government resistance as the primary reason.

First, it creates an incredibly volatile atmosphere. Who’s to say what counts as government overreach bad enough to warrant shooting? There are many answers to that question, including any government that one disagrees with. It opens the door to reactionary and extremist agitators using a bad outcome for them in an election as a legitimate opening for violence.

Second, it is something of a fantasy to think that an armed populace is the best bulwark against tyranny. It isn’t. Participation in Democracy is the best bulwark. If tyranny does arrive, it will be gradually, boiling us like the proverbial frogs in water. This process has already begun, which we will discuss in further journal articles. The answer is not to throw all hope in some sort of mystical uprising by armed middle-aged men in suburbia with a random assortment of guns. The answer is to double-down on Democracy. By tending towards reliance on guns to save democracy, we tend to stop investing in Democracy.

All this is not to say that there is no place for guns in American life. Sportsmen, hobbyists, hunters, and groups organized for self-defense, along with individuals looking for an extra degree of safety, are all constitutionally protected and should remain so. There are common sense federal regulations in line with the text and the spirit of the second amendment which would dramatically improve the quality of American gun laws. We will provide more details on our proposals in future articles.