“Who wants to go down the barrel of an AR-15, even with a glock?” asked the Parkland, Fla., student David Hogg, defending sheriff’s deputies who stood outside his school while a gunman murdered his classmates. “And I know that’s what these police officers are supposed to do, but they’re people too.”
Hogg was mostly correct in this argument, but it doesn’t prove what the gun controllers want to prove. The police do not have a duty to protect you or your children. Multiple Supreme Court rulings have found that the police have no constitutional duty to protect the vulnerable. States or cities may impose such a duty on their police forces, but it’s no guarantee.
This is the bedrock argument of many fierce defenders of the right to bear arms: Because the state has no duty to protect you or your family, the state in turn may not deny you to the right to protect yourself.
As the country takes up in earnest a debate over gun control and the Second Amendment, it’s important to remember that a fundamental natural right is at play here: The right of self-defense. This is a God-given right. John Locke posited it as the most basic right. The Supreme Court has recognized it as a natural right. Even Christ, at the Last Supper, told his apostles to arm themselves.
In other aspects of life, the American Left is very on guard for government intrusions into civil liberties. Unlawful arrests, invasions of privacy, restrictions on free speech — these are all cases of the state violating rights which precede the state. Overreach in gun control, likewise, is an intrusion into the fundamental right of self-defense.
Perhaps understanding how many Americans are protective of this right, gun controllers in the 1990s deployed the term “assault rifle” to describe guns like the AR-15. The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, in effect, outlawed scary-looking rifles and left legal guns equally or more lethal. The importance of the term “assault rifle” is that it tries to distinguish between defense weapons and assault weapons.
That’s an imaginary distinction, though. A vast majority of gun murders are committed with hand guns — the type a mother might keep in her bedroom to defend against intruders. The most popular single weapon in the U.S. is the AR-15, and an overwhelming majority of them are never used in a crime — meaning they serve primarily as a home-defense tool.
It’s possible to craft gun control laws that do not infringe on the right of self-defense. For instance, the federal law basically barring civilian ownership of machine guns passes this test, because an automatic weapon’s fire is too indiscriminate for any purpose besides slaughter. For the same reason, we’ve supported restrictions on bump stocks.
Background checks, along with the concomitant restrictions on ownership by the violent or the mentally disturbed, can be a proper case of balancing rights. But the idea behind many gun proposals — such as the popular idea these days of banning all semi-automatic rifles — is that defense of innocents is properly a state responsibility, not an individual one.
But the duty to protect yourself always falls primarily on you. And so does the duty to protect your family or anyone else in your care. Maybe a gun is best for that purpose. Maybe it’s not. But that decision is nobody else’s to make.
