On Gun Control

At a DNC convention this week, Hillary Clinton said, “We need to put an end to the gun violence that plagues our communities.”  This is true, but only if by ‘gun violence’ we also mean the attacks by law-enforcement agents against blacks and other minority people.  It’s strange that she waited to mention this need until there was a fatal incident involving white victims that didn’t require her to mention the recent murders of black citizens by racist police.  So her real position on this is clear, and it contrasts sharply with the “black lives matter” position that Bernie Sanders warmly supported at that same convention.

Then she said that “We must keep weapons out of the hands of the domestic abusers [and] the violently unstable. . . .”  This merely echoes the old calls by anti-gun conspirators for laws requiring “background checks,” which some rightist-liberal states have already legislated.  The greatest danger of such laws is that they are the first step in creating a national registry that will tell our centralized government the identity not only of those who were denied the right to buy a gun, but also of everyone who did buy one.  And when our rightists (or collectivists) win control of all three branches of our government, they will suspend all of our rights as individuals with new “Patriot Acts,” and then use that registry to seize everyone’s weapons.

But there’s another basic flaw in those background checks that goes unmentioned in the media; namely, that today no legislation can be correctly written and fairly enforced as regards mentally disturbed people.  This is so because, notwithstanding nearly two centuries of academic propaganda to the contrary, no philosopher or human scientist has ever explained human nature fully and truly.  Therefore, we cannot logically assume that our scientists’ current ignorance and ex post facto (or empirical) methods will allow them to judge people correctly, and to do so before the fact, which is when it really matters.

Moreover, if it is true, as researchers recently reported, that 70% of all murdered people in the US were family members or lovers of the murderer, background checks will require a vast expansion of our family and social counseling programs, and this will produce an even greater intrusion by our government into our minds and private lives.

As a philosopher, progressive, and humanist who tries to reason deeply and fairly on all issues, I can see no logical or moral validity to the old arguments by rightists—including establishment Democrats such as Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Biden—that we need more laws to restrict gun ownership.  As individualists, we leftists know better than to let our state have such total power over our natural, inalienable rights and hence our thoughts, beliefs, and life decisions.

I consider my core belief here to be a fundamental principle of any truly sane and just society that anyone could ever conceive.  As Jefferson put it, once again echoing the views of true leftists like Thomas Paine and George Mason, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

But we must go even further than that, for the right to own weapons is an inalienable right of every individual who is born anywhere, just because it is the right of self-defense.  That right is as natural and inalienable as eating, sleeping, loving, and breathing.  So why should we surrender it to the massive centralist government that rightist elitists created for us in 1787 and hope to rule us with forever?

The gun restrictions proposed by our collectivistic rightists, whether liberals or conservatives, are irrational because they put the cart before the horse.  Only after they have helped us establish a moral government that serves and protects every individual equally can they reasonably ask us to lay down our arms.