Darwin writes:
The fact is as long as guns are all the hell over the place, any crazy person can get one, and as long as guns are legal they can carry it down the street to their target without fear of interference.
I take issue with your argument that as long as there is large quantity of guns crazy people will get a hold of them and fire away. If one were to ban all guns there would still be a black market for guns which would allow crazy people access to firearms. Crazy people using guns for mass shooting has very little to do with the availability of weapons and everything to do with the nature of guns. Guns enable someone to wreak massive harm in a short period of time. That’s their intended purpose.
Often times, crazy people will use this to their advantage by selecting targets in which gun bans are enforced. This enables them to do the most amount of harm without having to worry about someone else doing the same kind of harm back to them. It is worth noting that the recent attempt at a mass killing in Colorado was stopped by the lawful use of a firearm by a citizen, illustrating that the capacity to do harm with a gun is indirectly proportional to the amount of armed citizens in the collection of would be victims.
A plethora of guns is not even close to the controlling factor in mass killings. I would also argue that preventing people from going crazy is probably the controlling factor, but would be impossible to control. Would you suggest placing draconian laws to detect and control potential crazy people from executing mass shootings? You are already up in arms with the expanded powers of our intelligence gathering agencies.
This reminds me of the war drugs. Given your liberal disposition I suspect you would take issue with this kind of rhetoric. First you probably object to the state telling people what they can and can’t do with their bodies. But given your reasonableness, you probably realize that the state must have some laws on drug usage, but that the state, particularly the federal has no business vigorously prosecuting the illegal drug industry. You probably view the draconian drug laws as begin fundamentally illiberal and largely ineffective because people are going to drugs no matter what.
Assuming I have characterized your position on the war on drugs then l ask you how a ‘war on guns’ would fair any better? Crazy people are going to go on mass shootings no matter what laws there are in place restricting gun ownership.
That being the case, why in your view is it desirable to take the guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens knowing that this will leave them completely vulnerable to the whims of crazy people that, given crazy people’s desire to conduct mass killings, have already indicate a disinclination to follow the law?
The Sentiment Informing Libertarians and Liberals
I really think this issue highlights nicely the difference between liberals and libertarians. The problem of mass shooting can be handled in a variety of different ways. The liberal solution is to interfere with an explicit constitutional right in an attempt to completely eliminate access to guns. They argue that protection should not be handled by the citizen, but by the state in the form of the police. The libertarian solution is to embrace the constitutional right that citizens should have access to the firearms need to protect themselves. During a mass shooting protection should be handled by the citizen until it is clear the state has control of the scene.
Putting aside the feasibility of the two different solutions lets examine the sentiment that informs them. The libertarian sentiment is pretty simple. Citizens should be responsible for their own protection. While the state can assist, at the end of the day, the citizen should have the maximum amount of freedom to protect themselves. The liberal sentiment is that citizen can’t be trusted with the freedom of protecting themselves, and therefore to protect all citizens, the state should be responsible for citizen protection. While the citizen can assist in their own protection, at the end of the day, the citizen should only have a minimum amount of freedom to protect themselves since this freedom could be used irresponsibly to harm others.
We can see then that libertarians have a fundamental trust in the citizenry while the liberal position rests firmly on a distrust of the citizenry. The liberal distrust of his fellow man translates into policy that uses the state to remove certain freedoms to allay his concern that citizens may exercise that freedom in a disapproving fashion. This is no different then the conservative putting in place laws against sodomy because he doesn’t trust his fellow citizen to use his right to privacy in a proper fashion. Meanwhile the libertarian works hard to keep both the rights of self protection and privacy free of state interference motivated by a healthy distrust of the state.
After all, the state does have a monopoly on coercion. Something liberals and conservatives tend to forget anytime they want to force their values on the citizenry.
