As my distinguished colleague Spencer Madison pointed out, sometimes guns hurt people. Because of this, Madison seems to think that guns are bad. He elaborates that the constitutionally enshrined right of this country’s people to own them is bad as well. He is confident that the recent events he discusses will not have significant influence, backing his point by deploying a brilliant non-sequitur: “because people are extremely forgiving of the liberties a bunch of entitled slave owners gave us.”
How this should be an argument against the constitutional right to own guns is beyond me.
Cars hurt people too; far more people are killed in automobile accidents then in accidents involving firearms. According to the National Highway Administration, 41,821 people were killed in automobile accidents in 2000, whereas, according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, part of the CDC, 776 people were killed in firearms accidents. I do not see Mr. Madison, or anyone else for that matter, arguing against automobile ownership, even despite the fact that there is no constitutional protection of car possession.
Why, then, are guns such a great societal evil? As the framers saw it, they (more accurately their ownership by the body politic) are the foundation of the Republic and our democratic and free governance thereof.
George Washington said “A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”
As Jefferson explained, citizens should have weapons to protect themselves not just from the government, but from each other. “The laws that forbid the carrying of arms … disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes … Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
Whatever reason you believe more important, there are very real, legitimate, and necessary reasons for civilian ownership of firearms.
As Madison sees it, that right should be severely curtailed or eliminated (I can’t see clearly which he is suggesting through the thick coating of snark that envelops his prose) because, sometimes, bad things happen. This is the worst form of nanny-state politics I can imagine. The idea that we as a population should not be allowed to maintain the means to defend ourselves and our liberties because we can’t be trusted with those means is completely contrary to the ideals of the free society. In a civilization where possible harm to others is reason enough to curtail civil liberties, there would be no civil liberties. I count myself fortunate to live in a country where this is not the guiding philosophy of governance.
Rockne Andrew Roll blogs at the Oregon Commentator and is a member of the Student Free Press Association.
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