A concept I want to return to again and again in this blog is that the liberal position on all issues is that the rights we have are so important, so immovable, that they mitigate the risk involved in maintaining those rights.
In American culture, Democrats are usually identified as “liberal” and Republicans “conservative,” but, (I’m sure I don’t need to state this for my audience) both parties cross the conservative/liberal divide, and usually on opposite issues. Democrats have liberal views on abortion rights, Republicans have liberal views on gun ownership. Beyond these smaller views on particular issues we are all supposed to share certain unalienable human rights – the right to “equal pay for equal work; the right to rest and leisure; the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being; the right to education; and the right to participate in the cultural life of the community” (UN).
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights website “Article 3, the first cornerstone of the Declaration, proclaims the right to life, liberty and security of person -a right essential to the enjoyment of all other rights.” If an individual has the right to life and liberty, and security of person, then wouldn’t an individual have the right to self-defense? Unfortunately not in so many words. These rights are conditional, limited by the rights of sovereign states to govern their citizens. These limitations “must be determined by law, solely for the purpose of securing due recognition of the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society” (UN).
So, if a government determines that public order is better served through illegalizing weapons, they have that right. Citizens then must find other ways of protecting their individual right to life (a la duck-and-cover). However, if the government then begins to unjustly take away the rights of a particular group within its borders, the international community has a right to step in.
The point is, to argue the right to own firearms, we must return to the small view – the rights and responsibilities outlined within our country – the complex debate between liberal/conservative Democrats and conservative/liberal Republicans.
Recently I was reading a discussion of England’s 1997 handgun ban, the strongest firearms legislation in the international community. Two cases in particular stand out to me:
“In 1973 a young man running on a road at night was stopped by the police and found to be carrying a length of steel, a cycle chain, and a metal clock weight. He explained that a gang of youths had been after him. At his hearing it was found he had been threatened and had previously notified the police. The justices agreed he had a valid reason to carry the weapons. Indeed, 16 days later he was attacked and beaten so badly he was hospitalized. But the prosecutor appealed the ruling, and the appellate judges insisted that carrying a weapon must be related to an imminent and immediate threat. They sent the case back to the lower court with directions to convict” (Malcom, 2002).
“In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal” (Malcom, 2002).
Sometimes we look to the failures of the English system to argue against firearms legislation in the United States, but in some ways it doesn’t make sense to do this. The British system is an evolutionary system of common law that can be reversed and altered over time. The American system has been derived from a fixed constitution enacted after breaking from the British system through the Revolutionary War. It is the second amendment of that fixed constitution over which we argue.
To conclude this meandering post: an international right to self-defense doesn’t make sense because of the right to state sovereignty. States have the right to create laws and responsibility to protect their citizens through law as they see fit. In some countries limitation of individual rights seems like the way to go. They may be wrong, and we can point to circumstances we see as ludicrous, but those governments have the right to legislate as they will. In the United States we have the second amendment protecting our right to own firearms, but what we have to be even more careful of is the maintenance of reasonable individual self-defense laws in each state. It doesn’t get us anywhere to own tools of defense that are illegal to use in situations of imminent threat. This gets back to what I was saying in previous posts: we must look to behavior – is the intent of a particular act to harm, or is the intent to defend, and should we maintain the right to self-protection? Let's work with both Democrats and Republicans to maintain a liberal position on self-defense just as we work to maintain our second-amendment rights.
Comments (4)
I'm concerned about the beginning of your conclusion: "an international right to self-defense doesn’t make sense because of the right to state sovereignty."
This naturally follows if your premise is that all rights come from the state, to allow or disallow to the people as the state desires. I choose to believe that all rights are inherent in the people, that the people in the process of forming and authorizing a government cede some necessary rights to the government sufficient for the government to carry out it's appointed tasks. In short, that it is the people that are sovereign, not the government.
At the time of the founding of the United States, the very concept that people had natural rights was quite liberal and foreign. Prior to the Declaration of Independence all rights derived from the sovereign, who dispensed any desired rights by their whim.
In respect to most rights loudly defended by the liberal establishment, among issues such as privacy, health, and well being, the standard appears to derive from the natural rights theory of origin. A person can not logically maintain that one person does not have a right to harm other persons without requiring that a person has the right to resist deliberate harm from another.
I like what you are saying, I'm just wondering if you've stumbled upon one of the fundamental divides between the "liberal" and "conservative" mindsets: the origin of personal rights and freedoms. Maybe we are saying the same things, but not quite recognizing them as familiar.
In the American system, the "fixed" constitution is the compact between the people and the government, dictating what abilities and privileges the government may enjoy, at the discretion of the people. The English system seems quite the opposite.
Just my thoughts, thank you for sharing yours.
Posted by Chris Pugrud![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.grapplingwithguns.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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May 1, 2007 9:11 PM
Posted on May 1, 2007 21:11
Chris,
Thanks for your post. I do agree with you that rights emerge from the self. Have you read "Rising Up Rising Down: Some thoughts on violence, freedom and urgent means" by William T. Vollmann? He creates a moral calculus addressing violence and power through examining many of the wars he has covered as a journalist. He breaks down the maxims that murderers and tyrants have used throughout history and explores the legitimate justifications that move an act of violence away from murder into the justified defense category. The ultimate justification is in the face of imminent threat. He raises the question, "What constitutes an imminent threat," which I think is an interesting question.
I completely agree that under an imminent threat you or I or anyone has the right to protect our lives: there is no way we have a right to life if we don't have recourse to protect that life when others try to take it. The UN makes a complicated argument though, and one with which I don't agree. They state that everyone has a right to life, but they say we don't have a right to self-defense, because in many instance my right to self-defense might take the life of the attacker (a life that the attacker has the right to keep). They say that governments have the right to refrain from prosecution in the instance that self-defense is proven.
I don't feel very comfortable about that statement. If one of us is cornered and cannot flee and is under threat of death, I believe we have the ultimate right in the heat of that conflict to do whatever we need to in order to get out of it. Does the attacker give up the right to life during that attack? Does my right to life become the right to self-defense and overshadow the attacker's right to life during the heat of that attack? These are questions I have thought about, but for which I do not have an answer.
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May 2, 2007 3:01 PM
Posted on May 2, 2007 15:01
You really got me thinking after my comment and I really need to grow my thoughts about the origins of freedom, rights, and sovereignty. (or my lack of spelling at 1 am).
To answer the question of your final paragraph, an attacker surrenders all rights the moment they intend to violate yours, particularly your right to life, in my opinion.
When I was quite young I paraphrased the Declaration of Independence as "You have the right to live your life in whatever manner you please, so long as you do not inhibit the right of another to do the same." It's a bit too easy to read whatever you desire into that oversimplification, but I find it difficult to find a more distinct way of explaining my own philosophy.
How much potential harm deserves how much defense is a question I don't think I can find an easy answer for. Murder is easy, what about rape? Rape is not murder, but I've not noticed anyone regretting a rapist killed by their intended victim. Mere property is never defensible in the US, every state I've studied requires that you feel an imminent threat of life or limb for you or a loved one in order to kill your attacker in self defense. There is a huge amount of grey there.
Coming back to the question, when someone intends to do you direct physical harm, to threaten your well being and/or your very life, what rational argument allows them to retain an expectation that they maintain their right to life while attempting to violate yours?
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May 4, 2007 9:43 PM
Posted on May 4, 2007 21:43
Hey Chris,
I agree. Your perspective makes most sense to me, but there are a lot of people who philosophically see things a different way. I mentioned the UN perspective before, and the way I understand it, they see the government's responsibility as insuring safety. They say we have a "right to protection from violence," but in their perspective, this means governments should illegalize weapons.
My feeling is that it is people who cause harm, and people are inventive, so illegalizing weapons only results in inventive hand-made weapons or inventive smuggling schemes. I think our approach to crime should be reactive, responding to harms that are occurring or have occurred rather than trying to define physical objects as symbolic of harms their owners may cause.
If we make the responsibility of the government to "insure" safety, we require proactive policing, which is generally considered to infringe on human rights.
To me, this is a liberal position because it acknowledges people's rights, and it also acknowledges that there is no perfect society where all harm will be ended by a simple set of rules. This doesn't mean that we can't respond clearly and decisively to harms done, and it also allows for the fact that individuals may have to act to protect themselves.
I think that often democrats and groups like the UN leave the liberal perspective behind when they create utopian ideals, because utopian ideals require significant amounts of centralized power and control in order to maintain.
The UN position is something I need to learn a lot more about. David Kopel speaks convincingly on why liberal perspectives on gun ownership (as opposed to restrictive laws) support human rights and how UN activities often perpetuate harms by oppressive governments. I liked the "dust up" between Kopel and Economist editor Christopher Lockwood in the LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup25apr25,0,5160196.story?coll=la-opinion-center
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May 5, 2007 7:34 PM
Posted on May 5, 2007 19:34