Phil Elmore
Master of Arts
A thread on gun control at another forum touched on the usual arguments ("Guns have only one purpose..." "If those parents had been more responsible, that little girl who shot herself would be alive today," etc.), plus the concept that the USA's interference with other nations' development of nuclear weapons constituted the failure to recognize their rights to arm themselves for self-defense. I wrote the following as a reply and thought I'd share it here:
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Guns have one purpose, and one purpose only: to launch projectiles at high speed in a direction away from the firearm.
All tools -- firearms, hammers, kitchen knives, jacks, battery-operated "massagers," tire pressure gauges, toothpicks, fireplace pokers, electron microscopes, egg beaters, toasters, wrenches, "Salad Shooters," and Garden Weasels included -- can be misused. Inanimate objects possess neither volition nor intent; their presence or absence no more causes crime than the presence of my toaster forces me to make toast. Certainly my toaster facilitates the cooking of bread -- but in its absence, if I wished to make my bread warm, there are numerous ways to make this happen regardless of laws forbidding the consumption of toast.
The government of a free society can and should make a good faith effort to protect its citizens before the fact -- but when those efforts infringe on individual natural rights, we no longer live in a free society. Residents must constantly ask themselves: what level of prior restraint are we willing to accept? At what point does treating all individuals as criminals who have not yet committed crime constitute a violation of individual rights in the name of such prior restraint?
Advocates of firearms prohibition seek to create a world in which people who wish to do harm cannot do harm because they lack the physical means -- but this is impossible, and reality has quite clearly taught us that disarming the law-abiding merely empowers those who retain ill intent and do not care what laws they break. Even in a world where all firearms could be magically erased, human beings would be at the mercy of the most aggressive, the strongest, the most numerous -- and thus society's predators would have license to do as they wished, in the absence of the equalizers that make average citizens less attractive prey.
Beware, in seeking to find meaning in the "gun control" debate, the fallacious thinking of inappropriate analogies. Nations are not individuals, and nuclear weapons are not tools of individual self-defense. If I choose to use my handgun against a mugger while others are within twenty feet but not in my direct line of fire, I am exercising my right to self-defense. If, however, I choose to to use my hand grenade to accomplish the same feat, I am both dangerously suicidal and a threat to all others in the vicinity -- and thus my action is not an issue of individual self-defense, but a political problem affecting all in the room.
A single nuclear weapon is a not a knife clipped to the nation's metaphorical front pocket, nor a Glock in a shoulder holster; it is a lighted stick of dynamite thrown in the general direction of the enemy.
A nuclear arsenal is not wood-grain glass-fronted case full of shotguns in metaphor; it is a butane lighter in a room whose occupants stand ankle-deep in kerosene.
"Mutually Assured Destruction" -- the doctrine on which nuclear proliferation as "self-defense" on the national scale is based -- is not applicable to individual arms, which is what handheld weapons like firearms and knives happen to be. We do not buy handguns and then hold them to our neighbor's heads twenty-four hours a day while they hold their guns to our heads, each of us hoping no one will pull a trigger. It is not an applicable analogy.
For those interested in more information on natural rights and from where our innate rights are derived, please see "Manifesto of the Mind: Natural Law, Rights, Property, and Government" here:
http://www.philelmore.com/objectivism/rights.htm
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Guns have one purpose, and one purpose only: to launch projectiles at high speed in a direction away from the firearm.
All tools -- firearms, hammers, kitchen knives, jacks, battery-operated "massagers," tire pressure gauges, toothpicks, fireplace pokers, electron microscopes, egg beaters, toasters, wrenches, "Salad Shooters," and Garden Weasels included -- can be misused. Inanimate objects possess neither volition nor intent; their presence or absence no more causes crime than the presence of my toaster forces me to make toast. Certainly my toaster facilitates the cooking of bread -- but in its absence, if I wished to make my bread warm, there are numerous ways to make this happen regardless of laws forbidding the consumption of toast.
The government of a free society can and should make a good faith effort to protect its citizens before the fact -- but when those efforts infringe on individual natural rights, we no longer live in a free society. Residents must constantly ask themselves: what level of prior restraint are we willing to accept? At what point does treating all individuals as criminals who have not yet committed crime constitute a violation of individual rights in the name of such prior restraint?
Advocates of firearms prohibition seek to create a world in which people who wish to do harm cannot do harm because they lack the physical means -- but this is impossible, and reality has quite clearly taught us that disarming the law-abiding merely empowers those who retain ill intent and do not care what laws they break. Even in a world where all firearms could be magically erased, human beings would be at the mercy of the most aggressive, the strongest, the most numerous -- and thus society's predators would have license to do as they wished, in the absence of the equalizers that make average citizens less attractive prey.
Beware, in seeking to find meaning in the "gun control" debate, the fallacious thinking of inappropriate analogies. Nations are not individuals, and nuclear weapons are not tools of individual self-defense. If I choose to use my handgun against a mugger while others are within twenty feet but not in my direct line of fire, I am exercising my right to self-defense. If, however, I choose to to use my hand grenade to accomplish the same feat, I am both dangerously suicidal and a threat to all others in the vicinity -- and thus my action is not an issue of individual self-defense, but a political problem affecting all in the room.
A single nuclear weapon is a not a knife clipped to the nation's metaphorical front pocket, nor a Glock in a shoulder holster; it is a lighted stick of dynamite thrown in the general direction of the enemy.
A nuclear arsenal is not wood-grain glass-fronted case full of shotguns in metaphor; it is a butane lighter in a room whose occupants stand ankle-deep in kerosene.
"Mutually Assured Destruction" -- the doctrine on which nuclear proliferation as "self-defense" on the national scale is based -- is not applicable to individual arms, which is what handheld weapons like firearms and knives happen to be. We do not buy handguns and then hold them to our neighbor's heads twenty-four hours a day while they hold their guns to our heads, each of us hoping no one will pull a trigger. It is not an applicable analogy.
For those interested in more information on natural rights and from where our innate rights are derived, please see "Manifesto of the Mind: Natural Law, Rights, Property, and Government" here:
http://www.philelmore.com/objectivism/rights.htm
