Gun Rights and Noncompliance: Two Problems of Prohibition by Michael Huemer. Footnotes are [HERE]
Most of my fellow academics seem to harbor a visceral antipathy toward guns. Many, perhaps most, would like to see all private gun ownership outlawed. I think this position is not well grounded, either in empirical evidence or in moral principle. If we followed the lessons that we – or at least, the social scientists among us – try to teach our students, we would not be so confident of the benefits of gun restrictions. If we traced the implications of the moral principles we accept in other contexts, we would not be so quick to dismiss the rights of gun owners.
Like most controversial issues, the issue of gun control is highly complex, and it is commonly treated in a sadly oversimplified manner. I can’t fix that problem here (though I have discussed the issue at greater length elsewhere1). Here, I will address only what seem to me the two most important arguments concerning the simplest and most extreme form of gun control, which would be a complete ban on private gun ownership. The first argument is that gun prohibition would violate the right of individuals to protect themselves. The second argument is that gun prohibition will fail because criminals will disregard the law.
The Right to Self-Defense
The rights of the individual often seem lost in gun policy debate, as in most policy debates – we ask “what is good for society?”, but we rarely ask “what does the individual have a right to?” At the same time, we tend to ignore the factual situation of people different from ourselves, so that when asked what is best for society, we answer based on our personal circumstances, or even on the imagined circumstances of an ideal society.
I, for example, live in an incredibly safe place; I hardly need a gun. Perhaps you, reader, are in a similar situation. If so, you might be inclined to think, “No one needs a gun.”
But it isn’t true. I need never walk home on streets where I fear for my life. But many Americans live in places where they fear for their own safety, and are completely justified in that fear. Many more have abusive lovers, ex-husbands, or other people in their lives who have beaten them or threatened them with violence. And many believe – again, with complete justification – that the government cannot or will not protect them.
Consider the case of Ruth Bunnell, who in 1972 called the San Jose Police Department to report that her estranged husband had just told her that he was coming over to her house to murder her. She requested immediate police aid, but the police refused to help, instructing her instead to call back when her husband arrived. When he arrived forty-five minutes later, she was unable to call back because the husband immediately stabbed her to death.
My point in relating this case is not the usual one; my point is not simply that Bunnell could have defended herself with a gun. My point concerns what happened after the murder. John Hartzler, the administrator of Ruth Bunnell’s estate, brought a lawsuit against the city for failing to protect her.2 In tort law, there are four conditions for a valid civil claim: (i) the defendant must have had some duty to the plaintiff; (ii) the defendant must have breached that duty; (iii) the plaintiff must have suffered a harm; (iv) the breach of duty must have caused the harm. On this basis, you might assume that Hartzler had an open-and-shut case: surely the police were duty bound to respond to Bunnell’s plea for protection; surely their failure to do so caused her death.
You would be mistaken. The court dismissed the suit without a trial. Hartzler appealed, but the appellate court affirmed the dismissal. No one disputed that Bunnell had suffered a tragic harm caused by the police’s refusal to protect her. The city simply claimed that they never had any duty to protect Ruth Bunnell in the first place – and the court agreed. Nor was this an idiosyncratic decision; U.S. courts have consistently held to the theory that the government only has an obligation to “society” in general, to provide a general deterrent to crime – not an obligation to any individual.3
My point: individuals have a right to protect themselves. I would say this even if the government had promised to protect all of us, but I think the point especially clear given that they have not. Having refused to accept any obligation to protect you, the government cannot justly turn around and prohibit you from taking reasonable and effective measures for your own defense. For many Americans, that means a gun. Studies of defensive gun uses consistently find that gun use decreases one’s chance of being injured by a criminal, compared with other methods of self- protection.4
In earlier work, I have drawn the following analogy.5 Imagine that a killer has broken into a house where his intended victim lies in bed. The victim has a gun, which he would use to defend himself against the killer. Unfortunately, however, the killer has an accomplice in the house. As the victim reaches for his gun, the accomplice grabs it first and runs away with it. As a result, the killer is then able to stab the victim to death. In this scenario, the killer is guilty of murder. What about the accomplice?
The accomplice’s action was less bad than that of the killer; nevertheless, it was extremely wrong. By taking away the victim’s means of self-defense, he violated the victim’s rights in an extremely serious way and became responsible (in addition to the killer) for the victim’s death. Just so, when the state deprives individuals of weapons, it can predict that some individuals will suffer murder, rape, or other serious crimes that would have been prevented if the victims had the means to defend themselves. By coercively interfering in individuals’ self-defense efforts, the state becomes partly responsible (in addition to the criminals themselves) for their victimization – the state in effect becomes an accomplice to those crimes. Failing to protect people is one thing; actively intervening to stop them from protecting themselves is much worse.
Just as it would be wrong for the state to murder a certain number of innocent individuals, it is also wrong for the state to be an accomplice in their murders. This is true even if the state has reason to believe that a greater overall benefit to society would be attained. One may not, for example, murder an innocent person, even if your doing so somehow stops someone else from murdering two other innocent people. (May you murder an innocent person to prevent a thousand other murders? Perhaps – but that is not what is at issue here. By most accounts, the number of crimes prevented by guns is comparable to the number caused by guns.6)
Thus, consider a famous hypothetical from the ethics literature: suppose a defendant is on trial for a crime that has caused great public outrage.7 If no one is punished, there will be riots, during which several innocent people will most likely be unjustly injured or killed. The jury, however, realizes that the defendant is factually innocent. Should they convict anyway – thus sacrificing the one innocent defendant to save several other innocent people from being harmed by the riots? Almost everyone answers “no” to this question. The reason seems to be that to do so would violate the rights of the one individual, and one may not do this, even to prevent other people from committing several other rights-violations.
I gave this argument in 2003. Since then, I have seen one printed response to it. It was from (anti-gun) philosopher Jeff McMahan in a 2012 editorial:
Imposing a ban on guns, [gun rights advocates] argue, would be tantamount to taking a person’s gun from her just as someone is about to kill her. But this is a defective analogy. [. . .] Guns are only one means of self-defense and self-defense is only one means of achieving security against attack. It is the right to security against attack that is fundamental. A policy that unavoidably deprives a person of one means of self-defense but on balance substantially reduces her vulnerability to attack is therefore respectful of the more fundamental right from which the right of self-defense is derived.8
I see two ways of understanding McMahan’s argument: (1) Perhaps McMahan is arguing that, even if gun prohibition causes some people to be victimized who otherwise would have defended themselves, it still decreases the total number of victimizations that occur, and therefore it is not a violation of anyone’s right to security. But of course, this would just miss the central point. This would be analogous to claiming, in the example above, that punishing the innocent defendant is permissible because it will decrease the total number of rights-violations.
(2) More likely, what McMahan means is this: a ban on guns will not just increase the overall level of security for society, but will actually increase security for every individual. And since the right to security is the only relevant right at stake here, the gun ban will not violate anyone’s rights. If that is the argument, it is factually false. McMahan may believe that individuals only need guns because others have guns – but that just isn’t the case. Take the case of the woman whose estranged husband has threatened to kill her. He has beaten her in the past – not with a gun, with his fists. If he attempts to kill her, and neither of them has a gun, he will most likely kill her. She needs a gun to defend herself. She doesn’t need it because he has a gun; she needs it because he outweighs her by fifty pounds, because he might have a knife, because she doesn’t know how to fight.
Or take the case of the man who has to walk home through gang territory at night. If he is accosted by a gang, he will not successfully defend himself with a knife, or a can of mace, or a phone. He needs a gun. Again, he doesn’t need it because the gang has guns; if no one has a gun, the gang is going to be able to do whatever they want.
The reader will appreciate that these are hardly outlandish scenarios. These are precisely the sort of situations that make people want a gun for self-defense. Now, suppose the woman with the violent husband turns up at a gun store. And suppose they send her away, because a new law has just been passed that says only government agents are allowed to buy guns. How is she made safer by this? I am not asking how society might be made safer. I am asking about that individual, who went to buy a gun to protect herself – she was not worried about gun violence in society, she was worried about her abusive husband. So how is she more secure?
Now suppose she decides to buy a gun anyway. She gets it on the black market, as it would be in a gun prohibition regime. But the police catch her, and she is prosecuted for an illegal gun purchase. In court, she tries to explain her reasons for the purchase – she had no desire to hurt anyone, but she had to protect herself. The police could not protect her and didn’t even claim that they could. These explanations are rejected in court (as they surely would be), because “the desire to protect oneself” is not accepted under the anti-gun law as a valid excuse for buying a gun, and thus the woman is sent to jail. Is this a just outcome? Could we in good conscience claim that at no point in this story were anyone’s rights violated; at no point was an innocent person sacrificed for the sake of others?
If you say frankly that we should sacrifice innocent individuals whenever doing so is better for society, that is a position I can at least understand. And if you are also willing to say that the jury in the earlier example in fact should convict the innocent defendant to prevent the riots, then you have a consistent position. But even then, it is far from clear that gun prohibition will achieve its stated aim – which brings us to the other major problem with prohibition.
The Compliance Problem
Many confuse the question, “Would it be good for everyone to give up their guns?” with the question, “Would it be good to have a law that says everyone has to give up their guns?” These are two very different questions – for what the law prescribes is not the same as what actually happens.
Most people can appreciate this point for at least some issues. For example, the drug war. It is illegal to buy or sell marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or any of a variety of other recreational drugs. That does not mean that people do not buy and sell drugs. What it means is that they are bought and sold on the black market. It does not mean that you cannot get hold of cocaine if you want it; it means that you must buy it from criminals at high prices. It also means that the state will not enforce agreements between drug sellers and buyers, so if you feel cheated, you must enforce your rights yourself. This is why the drug trade is so prone to violence. Granted, society would be better if everyone gave up using drugs. That does not mean that society is better for having laws against using drugs.
