Gun violence and fundamental rights

Criminal Justice Ethics

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 19-24

  Wheeler, Samuel C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

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EID: 4143065941     PISSN: 0731129X     EISSN: 19375948     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0731129X.2001.9992095     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Wheeler, Self-Defense and Coerced Risk-Acceptance, 11 PUB. AFF.Q. 431 (1997).
2. Wheeler, Arms as Insurance, 13 PUB. AFF. Q. 111 (1999).
3. The data on genocides are largely derived from J. SIMKIN, A. ZELMAN, & A.M. RICE, LETHAL LAWS, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Inc., 2874 South Wentworth Avenue, sMilwaukee, WI 53207, 414 769 0760.
4. Harff &Gurr, Victims of the State, 7 (1) PIOOM NEWSLETTER 24 (1995)
5. Harff, Rescuing Endangered People: Missed Opportunities, Social Research, Volume 62, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 23-39. LETHAL LAWS estimates that the deaths from ten famous genocides in this century total 55.9 million people. The supplement on Rwanda, published after LETHAL LAWS, raises that figure. The most authoritative and comprehensive estimate of the number of deaths unjustly inflicted by governments on their own citizens in the past hundred years is 169 million human beings, by R.J. RUMMEL, DEATH BY GOVERNMENT (1994). Rummel includes mass murders by colonial powers and other slaughters that might not technically be termed genocides, since completeness may not have been the aim.
6. The figures are from the 1997 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
7. It is no longer fashionable to target the poor or minorities explicitly. As many authors have noted, the earliest American gun-control laws were explicitly or implicitly directed at slaves, freedmen, and native Americans.
8. Cottrell &Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 GEORGETOWN L.J. 309 (1990)
9. Tahmassebi, Gun Control and Racism, 2 GEORGE MASON CIV. RTS J. 67 (1991). More recently, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was, as some will remember, a response to the riots of 1968. Inexpensive guns (Saturday night specials) that the poor could afford were among the targets.
10. I will not be specific about exactly what I am against in being against more gun control. I am more interested in the presumptions behind discussions of regulations on firearms than in the details. Discussions of detail about which weapons andlaws are appropriate and which are inappropriate are analogous to discussions of the kinds of free speech that are allowable, and to whom. With free speech, issues about decibel levels of loud-speakers in sound trucks, whether sky-writing can be allowed to obscure sunsets, what age groups should have access to pornography, and so forth, are details. The key idea in the right of free speech is that important values are protected by freedom of speech, so that any restrictions require substantial reasons. So also in discussions about firearms restrictions the presumption should be that any restrictions must take very seriously the values of self-defense and insurance against tyranny. Reasonable gun laws would include reasonable restrictions on competent owners and somewhat stronger restrictions on the public carrying of firearms. Reasonable gun control must allow people to protect themselves and meaningfully resist their government if need be. Thus gun registration is an unreasonable restriction, since it helps to defeat the ability of people to resist their government. Laws whose primary effect is to make guns inaccessible to the poor are also unreasonable. Certainly laws such as those in effect in Great Britain, Massachusetts, and New York City are unreasonable.
11. LaFollette, Gun Control 110 ETHICS 269 (2000).
12. Other important but less directly relevant features of fundamental include the following: (a) Fundamental has a comparative, and so is an attributive. That is, generally speaking, rights and interests are fundamental relative to kinds, rather than being fundamental or not: fundamental stockholder rights might differ from fundamental human rights. (b) Fundamental can mean underived or axiomatic. But it can also mean practically prerequisite. A lift could be said to be the fundamental piece of garage equipment because only if one has a lift are the other tools usable. The enabling sense of fundamental rights, that some rights are required inorder that other rights be preserved, seems to be this sense. Charlton Heston's claim that the Second Amendment is the most fundamental right should be understood in this sense. Without the right to bear arms, other rights are practically undefended and thus endangered.
13. How many disjuncts must be true for a general interest like being satisfied enough by my lights to be true is pretty vague. Perhaps many of those elements in the disjunction of what I would like must be true.
14. LaFollette, Gun Control, at 266 (my italics).
15. Even if we suppose that the person's lack of self-respect would be total, and so catastrophic, and could (somehow) be avoided only by needlessly embarrassing others, the issue would remain whether this is perverse, that is, whether there is something immoral about that need. Maybe we should tolerate that weirdness and not confine the person to his home, if the embarrassment is mild enough. Sadists do not have a right to inflict pain, no matter how important it is to their pleasures. If human interests are essentially normative, so that anyone's fundamental interests in the morally relevant sense are interests it is permissible to have, then there cannot be a morally relevant interest in violating the rights of others.
16. Other devices for self-defense, such as magic spells and phasers, we can leave aside as impractical even though not logically impossible.
17. The same observation would apply to police. Although the majority of police are decent people, my experience with police officers has been that a higher proportion of police enjoy the kinds of domination that being a police officer entails than is found in the general population.
18. Humphrey, quoted in Know Your Lawmakers, GUNS, February 1960. I owe this quotation to Robert Cottroll, Professor of Law at Georgetown University.