New School Politics

Of Hokies and Handguns

Ryan | 21 05 2007

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Too often public opinion reacts with more emotion than reason to events of magnitude such as the Virginia Tech shooting of a month ago. Rather than take perspective on a monumental tragedy much of the public, the media, and politicians will move to use the event as an expedient for pushing an authoritarian agenda, and all the while they will remain oblivious to the fact that individuals have rights whose legitimacy does not waver with the breeze of public opinion.

Rights, to the contrary, are inalienable and they include not just the right to property, but the corollary right to self-defense. The right to bear arms proceeds from those two concepts: (a) the right to own the gun as property itself; and (b) the right to use it against anyone who threatens or attacks your own safety or property. Anyone who wishes to take that right away from you in the name of peace and public harmony are hypocrites, for, it is guns and force that the government itself must employ to keep its private citizens from having guns.

Let us first remember that crimes and violence are not committed because guns exist–crimes and violence exist because there are evil people in the world who believe that it is morally permissible–or expedient–to initiate force upon individuals at their own whim. Whether or not guns existed there would be crime–crimes occurred even before guns existed, believe it or not. Moreover there are even crimes committed without guns. Who would have thought? It is the people motivated to do so who are the driving force behind murder, and thus laws to limit murder must be concentrated on de-incentivizing criminal action–namely effectively enforcing the law, and strictly punishing violations thereof.

Re-examine Virginia Tech for a moment and recall that the perpetrator of the shootings, Seung-Hui Cho, was himself declared “mentally ill and in need of hospitalization” in 2005 and certified as “[presenting] an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness” by a Virginia judge. The problem at Virginia Tech was one with an individual, not with a nationwide policy of lax gun control.

And in this case, more guns may have actually been the remedy–not the cause–of such a grotesque death toll. Virginia Tech was notably a “gun-free zone” and as such it was against the rules for anyone to carry even concealed firearms on campus for the purpose of self-defense. By doing so those populating Virginia Tech were rendered helpless by anyone who carried a gun into the school with malicious intentions.

As we can see in the case of VA Tech, banning guns does nothing other than make self-defense impossible. When even a well intentioned administration makes carrying a gun illegal it makes it so only criminals will be carrying guns–and those criminals will not have any immediate barriers to their malicious intents. Gun control does not prevent crime, it incentivizes it.

Some feel that permitting a gun in the school is unsafe. But sometimes there is a difference between feeling safe and being safe. The fact remains, when administrations ban guns they also ban self defense, and in no way will that make any of us safer from those with the intent of harming us.

The fact remains that the right to own guns is enumerated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Obviously it must have been significant to the framers if they made it the second of all rights enumerated in the constitution. During the zeitgeist of 1800 the notion of needing to seek approval from the government to own a gun would have been laughed at. As a matter of fact, gun registration was not issued in this country until after the War Between the States ended and the slaves were emancipated—why do you think that was?

Today, authoritarian intellectuals who couldn’t load and fire a rifle if their individual rights depended on it scoff at the idea that individuals need guns. “Collecting is childish–Hunting is cruel and primitive–Shooting at a range is pointless” are all conclusions we could expect gun controlists to make. Certainly collecting, hunting, and shooting on the range are all activities that must be protected by gun rights, but it wasn’t recreation for which the framers wrote the second amendment. The right to bear arms was perhaps the single most important check on government power written into the constitution. In light of a violent separation from an overbearing government the framers recognized that the last resort to protect the people from a monstrous dictatorship—whose power itself derived from its use of force–was to give the people the power to fight back against it. And to reserve that right it must give them the right to bear arms, because if the government were ever to effectively ban the ownership of guns there would be no power left to keep it from overrunning all individual freedom.