Guns and the Natural Right to Self Defense

As philosopher John Locke explained, people have an inherent “natural” right to defend themselves.    That right to self-defense was described as the first natural right of humans.  Locke is fairly described as the single most important philosophical “Father” for the views of many of the founders of the United States.  His numerous works had a profound impact on the design and aims of the American political experiment even though today’s typical American is unlikely to have any awareness of who he was.  Locke’s analysis of the natural right of self-defense precedes even the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and also limits the power of the State in a nation in which certain fundamental rights are said to be reserved to the people.  The “natural right to self defense” justifies “trumping” laws against gun ownership when it can be shown there is a need and that the legal institutions charged with the duty to provide security fail to do so effectively as is so often the situation.

When it comes to many violent crimes the understaffed, undertrained and underfinanced police forces are reactive rather than preventative.  How many women and other vulnerable people have sought to obtain police protection only to hear the response “I’m sorry.  We can’t do anything until something actually happens”.  In such a situation, and urban dwellers and vulnerable visitors to cities often find themselves caught up in that unfortunate dilemma, people have the right to possess the tools needed to protect themselves and others.  When the violent predators are armed with guns, and the police are mostly an “after the fact” system that investigates once the irreversible harm has been be done, potential victims have the natural right to possess the means to counter that threat.

I once lived in a city where gun ownership was prohibited.  Ironically, it was also a city where killings and robberies were rampant.  The criminals all had guns even though it was against the law.  If you are willing to rob, rape and murder, laws against gun possession aren’t that much of a deterrent.   In this city I had one colleague who was killed in a home invasion and another who had been robbed at gunpoint on its streets and pistol-whipped.  The sister of another colleague had been raped.  The house where I was living had its door kicked in by an individual who decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to proceed with his plan when he heard my shotgun being “jacked”.  My children and I were caught up in the midst of an armed robbery in a grocery store with guns pointed at us and the other customers.  The manager was nearly killed.  I walked across a bridge with a man who came up to me and after a pleasant discussion he said, “I was going to rob you” and I replied, “I know.  I was going to throw you off the bridge if you tried.”  There were nights I went to sleep to the “music” of handguns being fired in close-by alleys.  So did I have an illegal firearm for defense in violation of the jurisdiction’s law?  In the immortal words of a former vice presidential candidate, “you betcha!”  Self-defense is not a hypothetical myth but a factual necessity.

A news story was published recently aimed at making the realities of gun homicides in America concrete.  It stated that more than 31,000 people die from gunshot wounds annually, an average of 87 per day out of a US national population of approximately 310,000,000 people.   Thirty of those 87 deaths are murders, while more than 50 are suicides.  The USAToday report, “1 deadly day provides overview of gun fatalities across country”, describes selected gun fatalities that occurred Jan 19, 2013.  It relates the following facts. At 1:45 AM two men were shot outside a bar in Hampton, Virginia.  At 2 AM, a man was shot and killed at an intersection in Allentown, PA.  At 2:30 AM, a man was killed in Washington, DC.  In Winnsboro, Texas, an estranged husband was shot and killed by wife’s male friend in an alleged “stand-your-ground” situation.  At 3:28 AM, a man was shot and killed in Greensboro, North Carolina with the shooting ruled justifiable homicide.  At 3:50 AM at a White Castle restaurant a robber armed with a gun was shot and killed by police.  At 12:20 PM in San Leandro, California a man was killed in cross fire from a gang fight.  In Humboldt County, California, a man killed himself.   During the day of January 19, 2013, a six-year-old shot herself with her father’s gun, one he was owned illegally due to a prior felony conviction.  Later that night in Memphis, Tennessee a man was shot and killed in a robbery attempt in a convenience store parking lot.

What do such killings tell us?  Not enough, although there are insights and patterns that can be extracted from the details.  These tragedies could, for example, lead to the argument that all guns should be banned, confiscated and destroyed.  It could also lead to arguments for banning knives and blunt instruments since roughly 20 percent of murders involve those weapons.  Barack Obama recently stated in support of new gun control laws that even one death due to firearms was not acceptable.  The unfortunate but obvious fact is that you can’t stop everything or protect everyone.   I mention the President’s aspiration because it really is a situation in which the “perfect is the enemy of the good”.  There is no way a perfect gun violence law can or should be enacted and if one ever was passed the intrusiveness of governmental control required for enforcement would truly be “mind blowing”.  It would create a police state of the kind we have never seen in America outside the pages of fiction.  The numbers of police, monitoring, reports, conflicts and the like would be astounding and extremely expensive in the toll of money, human rights and lost freedoms.  It is a recipe for civil strife and domestic terrorism.

But consider other less dire interpretations.  One lesson we might take away from the litany of killings set out above is that it is considerably more important to “control the context” than the weapon.  By “control the context” I mean understanding where, when and why most illegal shootings occur.  Besides being spread across a vast nation, a number of the killings happened in urban areas in “the wee hours of the morning”.  They were also in close proximity to bars or convenience stores.  One involved the shooting of an armed robber by police.  Two others were ruled justifiable homicides.  One was a suicide.  Another, with the six-year-old girl, was a terrible accident and the result of a father who was a convicted felon breaking the law by even having a gun.  Although not reflected in these data, in far too many instances gun murders involve otherwise law-abiding family members who “lose it” and kill people they love due to divorce, infidelity, paranoia or insanity.

This is not at all surprising.  People who have been drinking are easy victims for predators or, if armed, are potentially dangerous people.  Convenience stores tend to have cash and the customers who frequent them in late hours may not be fully alert.  Such stores and locations are convenient targets that seem to draw street criminals looking for a quick and easy “score” from their personal “ATMs”.  One option to prevent such attacks is to shut down bars much earlier, to impose curfews so “honest people” aren’t on the streets past ten PM or so, and require late night or 24/7 convenience stores to close up earlier.  Otherwise they will remain magnets for predators.  This would do far more to reduce the number of gun-involved murders than any number of ineffective laws against guns.  But of course we won’t take that kind of action.

I started out by mentioning that the hysteria over gun control is to some extent a media-instigated crisis.  This in no way seeks to devalue the horrors of the recent tragedies in schools and a theater.  But even with those terrible events we need to understand that there may be a problem with certain types of killings that must be addressed if we can figure out how to do so responsibly and strategically.  But, in the midst of the political and media-driven hype an intriguing fact in the current aggressive movement for expanded gun control is that there has been a dramatic decline in killings by guns in the US over the past several decades.

Consider what has happened in the US over the past twenty years.  The infoplease.com site reports that in 1993 there were a total of 23,180 murders in the US.   From that total, 16,136 were by gun, 2,967 by cutting or stabbing, and 1022 by blunt instrument.  The striking “counter-fact” in relation to the media-hyped effort to create a sense that we are faced with a rapidly growing crisis of violence and murder by gun is that in 2008, even though the US population grew dramatically since 1993, there were 14,299 total murders, 9,000 fewer than 1993.  Of those killings 9,484 were by gun.  The vast proportion of those deaths were by handguns rather than assault rifles.  1,897 of the 2008 killings were caused by cutting or stabbing and 614 deaths were inflicted by blunt instruments.

The irony is that gun laws were loosened rather than tightened during that period.  The FBI reports that in 2010 there were 12,996 murders with 8,775 by guns, 1704 by knife or cutting, and 540 by blunt instrument.  These figures are not offered to suggest that murders are not terrible tragedies.  But they show clearly that killings are on the decline and that the US is not experiencing an increase in murders by guns or any other weapon.  Between 1968 and 2011, for example, the rate of murder per 100,000 people declined from 10.2 to 4.7.  The data show steady improvement, something we would never be aware of if all we did was receive our information from the “circus” of US media intent on ratings and hype.