***Chapter Two--Conservative Debate Handbook***
The Right & Duty To Keep & Bear Arms
Synopsis
The right to keep & bear arms, inherent to the human condition--hence unalienable--founded on the same philosophic moral basis (individual responsibility) as free enterprise and freedom of conscience. While morally unassailable, it (like free enterprise and free market) is thoroughly practical and utilitarian, conferring numerous benefits. The ultimate benefit is as the linchpin of a free society--that which secures all other freedoms.
The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of the republic.--Mr. Justice Joseph Story.
Overview
For two centuries, political exponents of man as an individual have fallen into two ideological camps; those who premised their position on Natural Law and moral philosophy, and those who premised their position on Utilitarian considerations. American Conservatives since the Founding Fathers, seeing Government as merely the agency of a social compact between the governed and the State--or between the rulers and the ruled--have viewed the issue as primarily a moral question. Respect for individual Liberty was respect for God's Creation.
From Magna Carta, through Locke and Jefferson, it was the State's respect for this social compact which provided the basis for the individual to respect the authority of the State: for his voluntary submission to its laws, for the duty to serve its needs and defend its interests. Under this concept, the ideological basis for the American Republics, the individual retained his basic natural rights; rights deemed unalienable, coming not from Society (or the State as the political manifestation of Society); but bestowed by the Almighty as inherent to the very nature of man.
These rights included personal freedom in relation to economic endeavor, free access to the market and a right to retain the fruits of one's labor--rewards usually determined by the market, which became the property of one endeavoring, to be passed on to his family and heirs;--together with freedom of personal conscience, limited only by one's obligations to that social compact; and together (by obvious implication) with the right to defend what was one's own.
Jefferson put it thus in the Declaration Of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men....are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
That Jefferson changed the "life, liberty and property," of the older exponents of Natural Law, was in no respect a trivialization of the essential justice or moral foundation for private property. Jefferson was land rich--but often cash poor (not infrequently the landowner's problem)--and believed in a society of free holders. But the Declaration was an exposition of the moral, Creation derived, basis for human society; and it recognized that the unalienable rights of man included the right to pursue happiness not only via economic or utilitarian pursuits, but via art, philosophy, devotion, reflection and whimsy. The Fathers understood that for many there were things more important than the worldly or material.
While the document defines the moral rather than utilitarian basis for the early American adherence to maximum individual freedom, it clearly implies both the right of a free people to keep and bear arms--else how indeed could they alter or abolish an errant Government--and the utility of an armed population. (We will return to this in more detail.)
The principle that armed free men could and should legally rise against a Government that violated the social compact was at least 561 years old when Jefferson penned the Declaration. The Magna Carta (1215) provided in part (Chapters 60 & 61, Magna Carta Commission Translation, 1964):
60 All the customs and liberties aforesaid, which We have granted to be enjoyed, as far as in Us lies, by Our people throughout Our kingdom, let all Our subjects, whether clerks or laymen, observe, as far as in them lies, toward their dependents.
61 Whereas We, for the honor of God and the amendment of Our realm, and in order the better to allay the discord arisen between Us and Our barons, have granted all these things aforesaid, We, willing that they be forever enjoyed wholly..., do give and grant to Our subjects the following security, to wit, that the barons shall elect any twenty-five barons of the kingdom..., who shall ... keep, hold, and cause to be kept the peace and liberties which We have granted unto them... so that if We, Our Justiciary, bailiffs, or any of Our ministers offend in any respect against any man, or shall transgress any of these articles ..., and the offense be brought before four of the said twenty-five barons, those four barons shall come before Us, ...declaring the offense, and shall demand speedy amends for the same. If we ... fail to afford redress within the space of forty days from the time the case was brought before Us ..., the aforesaid four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who together with the commonalty of the whole country, shall distrain and distress Us to the utmost of their power, to wit, by capture of Our castles, lands, and possessions and by all other possible means, until compensation be made....etc..
The Utilitarian argument for individual liberty is quite different. It is premised not on compact or on what is right, but on what confers the greatest benefit to the greatest number. The motivation is the interest of the collective, the economy or society, rather than an acceptance of the Nature of God's Creation or a concern for establishing a moral basis for the individual's duty towards society. Jeremy Bentham, the definer of this approach, put it more simply: The sole object of government ought to be the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of the community.
While this collectivist perspective is offensive to most American Conservatives--your correspondent among them--because it reverses basic priorities; the realities of man's nature render the debate largely academic as it pertains to most purely economic decisions facing the modern State. (The distinctions are of course vital to many other questions.) America recognized and respected the individuality of man, because it was morally right. But having accepted the freedoms which flowed from that recognition, America demonstrated to the entire world, the utilitarian benefits of a free society.
For the first 150 years of Independence, we put the individual on his own mettle to determine his material position in life. And the resulting free, market driven economy, proved so much more utilitarian than any of the more regimented societies overseas, that those who came here--from infinitely varied backgrounds--all did better here than their ancestral cousins had ever done in their ancestral homelands: For all the vast range of ethnic types, the same experiment, the same result.
The dynamics were not hard to fathom; although they had escaped much of the old world throughout the ages. By making the motivater not the prescriptions of the theorist, but the self-directed, self-interest of the participant, we unlocked the energy (both mental and physical) of the whole people; each aspiring participant driven to find what he or she could do on which the free market put the greatest value. Communism collapsed because fear and coercion could not bring out the same effective level of individual involvement. It simply could not compete. Today, even the Socialist Governments of Western Europe are engaged in denationalizing industry, and pinning their future plans on market economics and private enterprise, precisely because of that utility; although in other respects many preserve their studied contempt for man as an individual.
It is clearly morally right--inherent to the human situation--that free men be allowed to obtain and possess the arms needed to protect themselves and their families--including the fruits of their and their forebears' labor. There is surely no point in the historic compact, where anyone gave up the right to self-protection on the promise of political protection. The right to exact punishment for crime is a different matter. There, there is reasonable consideration, a "trade off." The State assumed the function of punishment, subject to the rights of a fair trial, etc.. We gave up the right to take private vengeance on the promise of a fairly administered system of Justice. There, there is time for deliberation.
