Resolved: In the United States, private ownership of handguns ought to be banned
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- 2 nd amendment isn’t absolute-it gets overridden for general welfare.
- Ausomeawestin
Martelle 14Try or die for the aff-handguns reverse the culture of death away from violence and save lives.Martelle 14 Scott (writer for LA times) “You say gun control doesn't work? Fine. Let's ban guns altogether.” Los Angeles Times May 28th 2014 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-gun-control-ban-homicides-suicides-20140528-story.html JW As for handguns, assault-style weapons, etc., let’s have a flat-out ban. Beyond the histrionics of the gun lobby, there is no defensible reason for such weapons to be a part of our culture. They exist for one purpose: to kill. Yes, hobbyists also like to use guns for target shooting and other nonlethal purposes, but it’s hard to say that desire for sport outweighs the atrocious level of gun-related deaths in this country. Self-defense? Impossible to measure because of a lack of trustworthy data. Similarly, the scope of gun victims is unknown, in part because of gun-lobby interference in efforts to try to establish baseline reports (we know how many die but not how many are wounded). This national debate would be helped immensely if the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were funded by Congress to collect the data. But we do know that guns are often used by angry men to kill their wives and kids; the mentally ill to act out whatever pain they are suffering; violent criminals; the suicidal (who may kill themselves anyway by other means, but ready access to a gun makes it easier); or children who find guns kept by “properly trained” owners and accidentally shoot themselves or others. In fact, two-thirds of homicides in the U.S. involve guns, according to the CDC. And yes, we need to have stronger, better programs and laws to help the mentally ill, but in the end, it’s their access to weapons that have caused so much mayhem at such a big scale. Mental illness is a factor in some of the violence, but guns are part of most of the killings. As for the argument that the 2nd Amendment was written with an eye toward protecting America from the tyranny of King George, the Revolutionary War ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. The Bill of Rights was adopted six years later in an atmosphere in which there was no standing federal army; the government relied on state militias, which were composed of soldiers who brought their own weapons with them. We haven’t had an army like that in a long, long time. And the idea that a few well-armed patriots would be able to defeat the U.S. Army should the government turn despotic is, at best, a romantic infatuation. Yes, the Supreme Court has upheld private gun ownership under the 2nd Amendment, but the Supreme Court has been wrong before (Fugitive Slave Law, the Dred Scott case, decisions allowing deed restrictions to bar home sales to African Americans, etc.). One can hope that the court will someday go further than its recognition that the 2nd Amendment is not an absolute right and determine that rampant gun ownership is a public safety threat. And that Congress will push legislation that recognizes that the heavy societal costs of gun ownership outweigh any 2nd Amendment pretense to the right to own guns. (By comparison, the 1st Amendment, near and dear to my heart, is not absolute: We have libel laws, which inherently limit free speech for the sake of the broader good, yet even journalists recognize them as a reasonable compromise.) So my personal view: Ban the guns, and slowly but inexorably bring our culture back from this violent, communal madness. It won’t be fast, it won’t be easy, it probably won’t even be possible given the political realities. But the status quo is unacceptable and, at one level, suicidal. We have to try to fix this. 2nd amendment isn’t absolute-it gets overridden for general welfare.Martelle 14 Scott (writer for LA times) “You say gun control doesn't work? Fine. Let's ban guns altogether.” Los Angeles Times May 28th 2014 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-gun-control-ban-homicides-suicides-20140528-story.html JW Yes, the Supreme Court has upheld private gun ownership under the 2nd Amendment, but the Supreme Court has been wrong before (Fugitive Slave Law, the Dred Scott case, decisions allowing deed restrictions to bar home sales to African Americans, etc.). One can hope that the court will someday go further than its recognition that the 2nd Amendment is not an absolute right and determine that rampant gun ownership is a public safety threat. And that Congress will push legislation that recognizes that the heavy societal costs of gun ownership outweigh any 2nd Amendment pretense to the right to own guns. (By comparison, the 1st Amendment, near and dear to my heart, is not absolute: We have libel laws, which inherently limit free speech for the sake of the broader good, yet even journalists recognize them as a reasonable compromise.) Outweighs: A. the preamble of the constitution is to promote the general welfare—that comes first since it frames the duties prescribed by all the amendments, B. specificity—right to bear arms is too vague to obligate government action--bear arms could mean hold guns or the limbs of the big scary animal.AusomeawestinOwning a gun for self-defense reasons is non-universalizable.https://ausomeawestin.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/law-and-morality-columbia-md-gun-rights-consequentialism-kantianism-and-client-counseling/ JW Now, issues in medical and public health ethics are certainly fascinating, but I want to turn our attention to an issue I have only broached recently on this blog — gun rights — due to yesterday’s tragic events that occurred in Columbia mall, a mall my girlfriend recently shopped out, and an area where my father goes to church. Using the tiers of normative ethics I have proposed, perhaps it is morally permissible to own a gun, in the consequentialist sense of it not being morally bad, while it is morally wrong, in the deontological sense of justice. To uncover whether this is so, we must look at the maxim for action that would best justify the possession of firearms. We do not want to attack a straw-man, that would not carry it’s force to stronger ways of phrasing the maxim, so we must look for the most plausible way of stating the maxim of gun ownership, so that if it is unjust on this account all weaker reasons for gun ownership are nullified. As highlighted in yesterday’s entry, the strongest reason for firearm possession is a right to self-defense, so the most plausible way of stating a maxim for gun ownership will be based in a right to self-defense. So we might state the maxim accordingly: Out of a right to self defense, I will kill people in order to not be killed. I argued yesterday that a right to gun ownership could only be a derivative right from the fundamental right of a right to life. While I do think it is possible to derive a right to self-defense from the fundamental right to life, it seems patently false that a right to self defense, an abstract concept, entails a right to a man-made artifice — a gun. There are many ways to honor a right to self-defense, so it doesn’t follow that there is a derivative right to own a firearm. If the only way to defend oneself was categorically to use a firearm then yes, there would be a derivative right to a firearm from the derivative right of a right to self-defense. Since a firearm is not the only way to perform self-defense there is not a natural right to own a firearm. But if the right to self defense does not entail a right to own a firearm then we must remove “out of a right to self defense” from the stated maxim above because a right to self-defense, I have argued, is not relevant to gun ownership. What this leaves us with is this maxim: I will kill people in order to not be killed. This maxim is not universaliziable because if all persons in society killed people in order to not be killed then people who killed people in order to not be killed would be killed, such that they wouldn’t be able to kill people in order to not be killed. As this maxim cannot be universalized without society ceasing to function and entering a state of lawlessness (Kant also argued that laws that lead to lawlessness are not legitimate laws, see here for his argument) it cannot be the case that this maxim for reasons for gun ownership can be universalized. Thus, owning a gun is morally wrong, in the deontological sense of justice, though it might not be morally bad. 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