Debating Gun Control
Last week, I did a debate about gun control with David deGrazia at the University of Delaware. The event all went well, except for the fact that it was pouring rain, and as a result less than half the seats were filled. (Usually, a hot button topic like gun control would fill all the seats.) We didn’t record the event either, so our insights are lost to the rest of the world …
Until now. Here is a summary of my observations about gun control.
The Right to Own a Gun
Three hypotheticals:
Case 1
A killer breaks into someone’s house to kill a Victim. Someone else in the house, “the Accomplice”, holds Victim down while Killer stabs Victim to death.
Intuitive verdict: Accomplice’s action is extremely wrong, comparable to murder.
Explanation: Accomplice makes himself an accomplice to murder. Preventing someone from preventing a wrong is morally comparable to committing that wrong.
Case 2
As above, except that this time, Victim has a gun which he is about to use to successfully defend himself against Killer. But before he can do so, Accomplice grabs the gun and runs away with it, with the predictable result that Killer succeeds in stabbing Victim to death.
Verdict: Accomplice’s action is about equally wrong as in the first case.
Explanation: Same as in case 1. This shows the importance of the right of self-defense.
Case 3
Similar to Case 2, except that the Accomplice is the government: The government takes guns away from citizens, some of whom would otherwise have used the guns to defend themselves from criminals.
Verdict: Government’s action is wrong.
Explanation: Same as above. Strict gun control laws (such as a ban on handguns) would violate the right of self-defense & make the state an accomplice to multiple murders, robberies, and assaults.
Objection
As far as I understood it, DeGrazia’s response to the above argument was basically this (my paraphrase):
People also have a right to be free from gun violence. The widespread availability of guns increases the rate of criminal (and wrongful) gun violence in the country. Since the right to be free from gun violence is equally important as the alleged right to defend yourself with a gun, there is no overall rights-based argument to be made against gun control.
A similar objection can be found also in this paper by Nicholas Dixon: https://www.pdcnet.org/ijap/content/ijap_2011_0025_0002_0151_0170.
Reply
Rights do not work that way.
Case 4
You’re the sheriff in a town where there has recently been a crime causing a lot of public outrage. If no one is punished for the crime, there will be riots, during which multiple innocent people will be harmed. You cannot find the actual criminal, but you can frame an innocent person for the crime. This will forestall the riots while causing the innocent person to be unjustly punished. The harm to the one innocent person will be less than the total harm that the riots would cause.
Verdict: Framing the innocent is impermissible.
Explanation: People have a right not to be unjustly punished. Rights are agent-centered constraints. I.e., it’s not permissible to violate one person’s rights, even if doing so would prevent several other people from violating some rights.
Notice how weak it would be for the sheriff to reply: “But citizens also have a right to not be harmed by rioters!” That’s true, they do. But the notion of rights is not a consequentialist notion. An agent’s responsibility is to not violate other people’s rights; the agent’s responsibility is not to minimize the total rights violations that will occur in the world. Thus, violating rights to prevent someone else from violating other rights is not permissible.
Similarly, it’s not permissible for the government to violate innocent gun owners’ rights, even if doing so would prevent some other people (criminals) from violating some other people’s rights.
I elaborate this point in this paper: https://www.pdcnet.org/soctheorpract/content/soctheorpract_2019_0045_0004_0601_0612.
Counter-reply
This was basically DeGrazia’s reply, as far as I understood it (my paraphrase):
Oh no, I’m not saying that we can trade off rights against each other, violating some rights to prevent other people from violating other rights. I’m saying that when delineating the boundaries of the right of self-defense, you have to take into account other rights. So you never had a right to own guns in the first place, because that would conflict with other people’s right to be free from gun violence. You only ever had a right to own a gun provided that allowing people to own guns wouldn’t create risks of gun crimes in society.
Counter-counter-reply
This would be my reply, which somehow I didn’t get a chance to give:
This is just a way of disguising consequentialism as a rights theory. You’re endorsing rights theory in words while endorsing consequentialism in substance.
Sure, you can have exceptions and limitations on rights. But the exceptions and limitations can’t be so designed as to produce exactly the same result as consequentialism (not if you want to count as a genuine rights theorist). So there can’t be an exception built into our rights that says, “… unless violating this is necessary to prevent something worse from happening.”
Examples:
There is a right not to be killed. But there is an exception for defense of innocent people: You have a right not to be killed unless you are threatening the life of an innocent person and killing you is the only way to stop you.
But there can’t be an exception for general utility; the principle can’t be: “You have a right not to be killed unless killing you produces greater overall utility.” Why not? Because if we recognize things like that, then it erases the distinction between utilitarianism and rights theories. There would be no point at all in talking about rights anymore.
Similarly for the proposal that “you have a right to self-defense unless interfering with your self-defense is necessary to prevent other crimes.” That is too close to the utilitarian exception.
Look again at Case 4 above, and imagine the sheriff saying:
Oh no, I’m not saying we can trade off rights against each other. I’m saying that in delineating the right not to be unjustly punished, we have to take into account other people’s rights. So the innocent person never had a blanket right not to be unjustly punished. He only ever had a right not to be unjustly punished provided that unjustly punishing him wasn’t necessary to prevent other people from committing crimes.
That’s surely wrong. There is no such exception built into the right not to be unjustly punished. Nor is there any parallel exception built into any other right.
Q&A
Here are a few other issues that arose in the Q&A.
Q: Hey, do people have a right to own machine guns & mortars, since we might conceivably need them for self-defense?
A: I don’t have any objections to citizens owning machine guns & mortars. Not because you need them to defend against criminals, but because we might need them to defend against the state. The function of the right to bear arms is partly to prevent tyrannical government. On this, see this paper by Jasmine Straight: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11406-020-00212-7
Q: Are background checks okay?
A: Yes, I don’t think that violates any rights.
Q: If the state allows people to own guns, why wouldn’t the state then become an accomplice to gun crimes?
A: There is a doing/allowing distinction. “Allowing” people to do something is not a (positive) action; it is just a failure to do anything. By contrast, for the state to not allow some activity is a positive action: it means that the state hires armed guards to round up people who do that thing and lock them in cages (or take their money, or do something else unpleasant to them).
When you coercively interfere with other people’s activities, you then become responsible for the negative consequences of that, in a way that you aren’t responsible for negative consequences that other people bring about that you merely did not prevent them from bringing about.
In other words:
Harming someone is generally worse than merely failing to prevent harm (see Case 4 above).
Coercively preventing a person from defending themselves against a harm counts as harming them, so taking guns away from people who would use them for self-defense counts as harming them.
But failing to take guns away from people who would use them to commit crimes counts as merely failing to prevent harm.