Notes from the reluctant gun advocate


By request
Someone asked me what I meant by "reluctant gun advocate." Here are selections from some of the things I have said on the web over the years.


I am at best a reluctant gun advocate.

I own no guns. I belong to no gun groups. I haven't shot one since I was a teenager. Up until a few years ago, I firmly believed that the 2nd Amendment applied only to government organized militias.

But then I noticed that the gun control debate was a little one-sided. There is no problem finding information about handgun injuries and deaths, the news is full of them. But try finding the news stories of people defending themselves with guns.

The fact is, guns introduce an unknown. When a someone is thinking about a violent crime, the one thing that has been proven to stop it is the uncertainty that the victim is armed. The potential robbery victim may be in their sixties, but with a gun and the knowledge to use it, they could face down one or two attackers with no problem. That pretty 14 year old may weigh less than 100 pounds, but with a handgun she could deal with a 250 pound potential rapist.

There are four things that gun control advocates will not tell you, yet can be verified with any good library.

First, the Constitution's meaning of the word "militia" is considerably different than the popular use today. In that time, it meant a self-organizing group along military lines. The men got together without government sanction, organized themselves, and carried out their duties.

Second, the Supreme Court case that determined that Congress could legally control gun sales under the Constitution was decided on a lie, namely that a sawed-off shotgun had no military value. This was just after World War I when sawed-off shotguns were essential in trench warfare.

Third, gun control laws in the United States originated as a way to keep guns out of the hands of blacks in the South.

Fourth, in states where guns can be legally concealed, the violent crime rate per capita is lower.

As I said, these are facts. They can be confirmed. They can be disputed, but not changed.


Now if we were talking about something like bug spray or gasoline or fertilizer, there would be no question. Even though these items are dangerous and potientially lethal, we assume that most people are adult enough to make their own decisions on how to use them.

But guns and other weapons are different. There we have government morality stepping in.

Please think about those two words for a moment. Government. Morality.

Gun control laws are aimed at keeping cheap guns off the market, or in the case of the UK and Australia,all guns off the market.

But the people who would follow the law aren't the ones who everyone else is worried about.

Gun control laws don't prevent guns from being available, they just drive guns into a black market. A black market that doesn't pay taxes, I might add.

Gun control laws don't stop the rich from owning and using guns, they can afford lawyers and lobbyists to find or create exemptions from the law.

Gun control laws don't stop crimminals from owning and using guns.

Gun control laws don't stop overly enthusiastic police agencies from owning and using guns.

The ones caught on the short end of gun control are those honorable people without means to manipulate the law. And that usually ends up being the poor. And they are told in no uncertain terms that it is for their own good.

There is a lot more I could go into here, this is one of the "hot button" issues for libertarians. But instead I will just say follow the guns.

Who do gun control laws disarm?


I did say I was a reluctant gun advocate. Accepting what the 2nd Amendment says was the last "libertarian" position I faced, and in many ways it was the hardest. I had to give up a lot of my preconceptions about history.

I still maintain that it is conditional. Just as one example, if there is space enough and the armed person only had a knife and I had a gun, I'd probably try to blast their knee out. I'd also probably try to warn them off first. If push came to shove would I feel differently? I might, I have not had to face that yet.


I get almost as much flak from libertarians over this position as I do from Pagans over my views on global warming.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - December 9, 2008 at 03:24 PM  Tag


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Random selections from NeoWayland's library


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