Pink Pistols as Deontic Constraints
In my home state of Virginia, people have been up in arms about the right to bear arms. Legislation is being proposed that would ban “assault weapons,” require background checks for all firearms purchased, and prohibiting the subjects of protective orders from having guns (among other things). I will not dismiss such proposals as unreasonable offhand. Mass shootings happen in this country at what seems to be an alarming rate, and it is not unreasonable for people to want to come up with ways to minimize the chances of them happening. When we examine how the banning of “assault weapons,” in particular, bear on our understanding of individual rights, such a measure cannot be ideologically sustained. Furthermore, I suggest that the collective interests of certain minority groups strengthen the case against an “assault weapon” prohibition.
First and foremost, you may be wondering why I have placed the phrase “assault weapons” in quotes every time I have used it. This is because the term is now used to describe guns that are not in fact assault weapons. “Assault weapon” is a term that is traditionally used to describe firearms that have the capacity to switch between semi-automation and full automation. Such weapons have been made largely inaccessible to civilians because of the National Firearm Act, which was passed in 1934. When people refer to “assault weapons” nowadays, they mean to describe AR-15s or other semi-automatic firearms with certain cosmetic features that merely look frightening. To place a ban on “assault weapons,” in other words, is to deprive civilians of access to a specie of firearm completely arbitrarily.
Michael Huemer argues that we, as individuals, have a right to own guns. He provides us with a thought experiment to prime our intuitions about why this is the case. Consider a scenario involving Killer, Victim, and Accomplice. Victim is asleep in his home. Killer and Accomplice break in. Killer stabs Victim to death. Accomplice does nothing to Victim but hold him down and prevent Victim from struggling. Despite the fact that Accomplice did not kill Victim, he precipitated Victim’s death by depriving him of the resources to defend himself against attack. In so doing, Accomplice does something egregiously wrong. Now imagine that Killer and Accomplice break in but instead of holding Victim down, Accomplice steals Victim’s firearm resting on his bedside table and runs away with it. Victim, if he had his gun, would have been able to incapacitate Killer before being killed. Accomplice does something comparably wrong in this scenario as he does in the last (Huemer 2018, 3).
Were the state to ever ban all firearms, it would play the role of Accomplice in every circumstance where somebody fell victim to violence that they would have otherwise been able to put a stop to with a firearm. In Virginia, however, there is thankfully no proposal to ban all firearms. So it may still be permissible for “assault weapons” to be banned consistent with the right to own a gun. But I find this highly implausible for two reasons.
If we, in fact, have a right to own a gun (which I am strongly inclined to believe we do), then there must be strong justifications for restricting access to guns. Since “assault weapons” are a specie of firearm that are singled out arbitrarily on the basis of their cosmetic features and because such guns have been used in mass shootings, there seem not to be strong justifications for restricting access to them.
There might not even be good reason for restricting civilian access to fully automatic firearms, so there cannot be good reason for restricting civilian access to semi-automatic firearms.
When I use the term “good reason,” I am suggesting that the costs associated with respecting a right must be so high that they require its suspension. Some argue that the costs associated with gun violence are the very type of good reason that would warrant the suspension of peoples’ right to own a gun. This assertion, however, is deeply mistaken. Huemer spells out why in his most recent piece on the issue entitled “Gun Rights as Deontic Constraints”:
[Some] contend that the right of self-defense is entirely subservient to a broader goal (perhaps a broader right) of physical security. For this reason, the right of self-defense cannot serve as an obstacle to policies that render everyone physically safer. An action that interferes with some people’s self-defense efforts while simultaneously making those very people overall safer is either no violation of self-defense rights at all, or a violation that does not matter morally. Since, [gun control advocates] believe, gun prohibition would lower each citizen’s overall risk of suffering violence, prohibition would not violate anyone’s right of self-defense in any way that matters.
To succeed, this argument must not merely claim that some citizens are rendered safer by gun prohibition while a smaller number are rendered less safe. To argue that prohibition does not violate anyone’s rights, [gun control advocates] must hold that every individual is rendered safer by gun prohibition; no individual’s risk of suffering violent crime goes up.
But that is certainly false. Consider the case of the woman who wants to buy a gun to protect herself from her mentally unstable, estranged ex-husband. The ex-husband outweighs her by 70 pounds. He has abused her before. The police cannot or will not protect her; they will not station a car outside her house all night, nor send an officer to follow her all day. She has no hope of defending herself without a weapon. She is not safer if both she and the ex-husband are legally prohibited from buying guns; she will, rather, be at his mercy.
This last paragraph brings me to my final point about restricting civilian access to firearms. It appears that the people who will be most adversely effected by such policies are women and racial or sexual minorities. In 1998, Matthew Shepard was tortured, pistol-whipped, tied to a fence, and left for dead by two hate-filled homophobes in Laramie, Wyoming. Were Matthew armed and versed in how to defend himself against those men, he may perhaps be with us today. Unfortunately, he was not armed. And restricting access to firearms entails the restriction of access to firearms to members of groups already vulnerable to hate crimes and sexual violence. Though making members of these groups would merely be an unhappy consequence of such prohibitive legislation, there was a time when firearm regulations were used specifically to disempower marginalized people. In fact, the modern-day gun control movement has its origins in disarming the Black Panthers so as to prevent them from holding racist police officers accountable in majority-black neighborhoods in Oakland, CA.
Gun advocacy and educational groups like the Pink Pistols have taken it upon themselves to educate members of the LGBTQ+ community about legal, safe, and responsible firearm ownership. They also provide members of the organization with opportunities to practice shooting guns and teach them about de-escalation tactics so that the employment of a firearm in a high-stakes scenario is a last resort. Ensuring that such groups are not prohibited from access to firearms has the happy consequence of empowering these individuals to more effectively protect themselves. That these groups are not prohibited from access to firearms is most important, though, because such a prohibition would be an inexcusable violation of their rights. (Beyond this, we may have reason to believe that prohibitions on both “assault weapons” and firearms more generally would be largely ineffective because of the problem of noncompliance).
Philosophy, a sincere and avowed reverence for the safety of women and minorities, common sense, and the Constitution all militate against the prohibition of “assault weapons.” Why keep at it, Virginia?