WICHITA, Kan. - A new ruling by the Supreme Court states the right to bear arms is a fundamental right. Really? Why just a gun? Should we then have the right to bear a sword? An Uzi? A taser? Why not?
According to various philosophers and political leaders we have certain natural rights. Thomas Jefferson famously referred to these rights as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." When it comes to liberty we especially value freedom of speech and conscience since we are born with the capacity to develop reasoning skills and communicate.
Thus we consider it our right to have the freedom to say, think, and write what we believe as long as it does not pose an immediate threat to public safety. To deny or suppress the innate right to reason and communicate would violate our very nature as humans. Right?
But do we really have "natural rights" or are those rights just ideas we have determined in our minds as something we desire?
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed "Mind is the law-giver to nature". I would like to suggest that the entire gun debate intertwined with the 2nd Amendment is not about natural rights, quoting dead founders, or something we have instinctively within us. Instead, there is something entirely different we should consider.
Consider the possibility that we make up, yes, we make up things we THINK we must have or that we desire, and by God we are going to do anything and everything possible to convince others our THINKING is a natural right that no one dare touch or some universal law of the gods will be broken and it's the end of the world without guns.
The remainder of this piece is going to focus on why the "right" to pack a gun in public is not a natural right, but is a right created in the minds of men and women who want their guns pried from their cold dead hands. That's right. A vocal minority of citizens have been able to take a sensible but dated amendment to our constitution and reinterpret that amendment to get what they desire; an armed society of American citizens without any government restrictions on owning, operating, collecting and shooting their guns.
We obviously have the right to defend ourselves and property but does this mean we have a natural right to arm ourselves in public when the very act of arming oneself can be threatening to others and infringe upon another person's right to happiness? Surely we can agree that not everyone who owns a gun is a rational person. In fact when I think about all the people who should not be packing a gun I'm positive we are working in reverse when it comes to posturing how we have the natural right to load up on weaponry as we stumble out the door in the morning.
Guns are not a natural extension of our existence. Guns are man-made. Guns are tools, instruments to make defending ourselves easier. Again, do we have a "right" to carry a gun in public just in case we might be threatened by a robber, drug dealer, or rapists?
In theory it sounds sensible. The police can't be everywhere and guns can be the citizens first line of defense against crime. It seems to me we experienced this reality in the old West. Men walked around just hoping to draw their guns and shoot it out with other varmints but this kind of unbridled freedom of gun rights only escalated the violence instead of protecting the townspeople and jailing the lowlifes who preyed on innocent folk. Western towns took to making men remove their guns and led to women running for local city councils to clean up the violence and lawlessness of their fair hamlets. Sounds like Americans in the 19th century already determined that more guns did not make a community safer nor did it create a wonderful living environment for children and families.
Instead of moving away from the old West, the Court has moved away from original intent of the 2nd Amendment which is the right to bear arms to form a militia to protect your community from invasion, to embracing the modern day NRA dribble that you have a personal right to take your little gun out into the streets to protect your individual person.
Americans are so convinced they live in a lawless world that they have created even more violence by supporting the proliferation of guns in society to keep themselves safer. But with more guns there is just more violence, and safety is only an allusion. Yes, gun owners can keep their guns in case of an invasion to their home or their nation, but allowing citizens in modern day society to walk around with guns is just insanity.
Of course, the Justices understand this insanity. Visitors to the Supreme Court may not enter within the gleaming marble sanctuary of legal wisdom with a weapon. The Supreme Court is not alone in its hypocrisy. Congress, banks, churches all get special dispensations to be gun-free zones. The rest of you slobs get to be caught between the crosshairs of gun slinging gangs, thugs, former marines and grandmas who now all have the right to pack some heat in public and if they get mad or feel threatened, well God Bless America and may the best gun slinger win.
What this ruling really reflects is the inability of our society to let go of guns and feel confident that our officials can keep public order. Instead of working to remove guns from society, including guns out of the hands of criminals, the Court just reaffirmed what is already obvious about our culture. America is a patriarchal society, built upon a foundation of horrific wars stretching across the centuries to the present day war in Afghanistan.
Clearly, we are a nation that has lived by the gun and it is the almighty gun we worship. Many have romanticized the gun's role in our democracy but ironically,it also defines us around the world as a nation of violence.
In truth, we are a republic that prides itself on the rule of law but we are a barbaric nation of uncivilized men and women who actually live by the sword.
You make an unsubstantiated jump from describing a Supreme Court case that decided the Second Amendment preserves an individual right to bear arms to your argument saying people wrongly perceive that they have "natural rights" to carry guns in public.
As Scalia said in Heller: "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose."
I understand most claims for a natural right to "concealed carry" as extending logically from the right of self-defense, which extends from the general principle of self-ownership. You may claim that guns are merely a tool, but that does not settle the issue. If they are a tool used to secure to self-ownership, then their restriction may violate natural rights.
For example, prohibiting the public use of markers, paper, crayon, pencils, etc. would have the effect of impeding free speech rights. But, using your logic, since these items are merely "tools" of expression, their prohibition would not constitute a violation of free speech.
You may argue that comparing markers and guns is absurd, but than we're no longer talking about principles per se, but rather the consequences of recognizing those principles. That's another discussion which relies upon empirical foundations, not philosophical dispute.
I don't really understand your column. At one point, it seems to be going in the direction of decrying concealed or open carry laws. And it then goes in the direction of decrying the individual ownership of guns, in general.