Legislating Potential Crime
The latest ARI op-ed (also unfortunately featured here) is an interesting congruency of interests for me. I appreciate the intent of the piece, which is supportive of an individuals right to own firearms for legal self-defense. However, I think the author’s strict sense of stipulation is debatable.
The victim must summon police, if possible. An emergency ends when the threat ends, or as soon as police arrive and take charge. During that narrow emergency interval, a victim may defend himself, but only with the least degree of force necessary under the circumstances to repel his attacker. A victim who explodes in vengeance, using excessive force, exposes himself to criminal liability along with his assailant. [bold added]
I would argue that the victim not only may defend himself, one who values life should defend himself, and to a further extent than simply “repelling” his attacker – he should defend himself to the extent that the author prescribes above - until the threat ends. Calculating anything under the typical stress of a violent crime is difficult. If an individual has chosen to forego reason and deal with you in terms of force, force is what he should be granted, and to the extent that he chooses to encroach your right to life. In the same manner by which a free country should defend itself from foreign aggressors, an individual should respond to another who initiates force. As Gus Van Horn articulates:
Fighting a war entails a whole host of otherwise barbaric acts performed with one objective in mind: The most rapid incapacitation of one’s enemy as possible. Again, whatever acts had to be done on the account of an aggressor are entirely that aggressor’s fault. Period. [bold added]
Unless Government, the entity to which a free people delegate the responsible for protection of its individuals right to life, is able to effectively do so, and with reasonable timeliness; any response to an attacker, an initiator of force, should be admitted under objective law.
Many objects commonly owned for peaceful purposes can be pressed into service for emergency self-defense. But unlike kitchen knives or baseball bats, handguns have no peaceful purpose –they are designed to kill people. [bold added]
Firearms are designed and engineered to effectively deliver a projectile. How they are used is to the discretion of their owner. Yes, maiming and killing not only people, but living objects in general is one of the primary uses of firearms. The market, however, also functions in other completely benevolent manners. Competition shooting is a very popular sport that takes years of finely honed mental and physical training. Also, collecting firearms is a completely peaceful function that also serves as a celebration of man’s mind by way of an appreciation of engineering and aesthetics.
The same lethal power that makes handguns the most practical means of self-defense against robbers, rapists, and murderers, also makes handguns an essential tool of government force. Handguns are deadly force and nothing but–a fact that gives rise to legitimate concerns over their private ownership in a civilized society.
As I mentioned above, they are more than simply a ‘deadly force’ in the same manner as a chainsaw is more than a ‘deadly force’. Yes, you can kill someone with a handgun, but the motivity of murder (or any initiated force) is the volition of the perpetrator, not the instrument by which he commits his crime.
These concerns can be resolved only by laws carefully drawn to confine private use of handguns to emergency self-defense, as defined by objective law. Such laws must also prohibit all conduct by which handguns might present an objective threat to others, whether by intent or negligence.
As an individual, I have to right to peacefully engage in any practice so long as it doesn’t encroach the rights of others. Using a handgun for any purpose other than initiating force against another should be completely legal, and without stipulations in a free nation. Prescribing law based on the potential negligence of any object is a very slippery and subjective slope.
-3/16/08 Edited to include link to Gus, parallel to national defense…
