The Case for the Second Amendment

The Trump Administration’s recent attempt to ban trans people from owning guns has reignited the conversation around gun rights as a whole in this country, at least in my circles. I figured I’d take the opportunity to clarify my position on gun rights, especially as famous right-wing masterdebator and professional retard Charlie Kirk was gunned down at a Utah University (ironically while talking about gun rights).

The conversation around gun rights is really between three crowds. Two very large, one very small. The largest crowds are the pushers for “common sense” gun regulations (who we will call Regulationists), and the pushers for the deregulation of the exchange of guns (who we will call Protectionists, as they want to protect gun rights.). The former are usually liberals, the latter usually conservatives and libertarians. The fringe group are the ones pushing for a total ban of guns— the type to say “what if nobody had guns?”. This type are also usually liberals, and we will refer to them as “Banners".

Let’s begin with the Banners. Alright. We’ll tell the police to go door to door and confiscate everyone’s guns. That way, there will be no more gun crime, because there will be no more guns! Problem solved!

Just one problem. The type of person to have a gun is almost always the type that wants to keep it. Organizations like the NRA have been fearmongering about the end of the second amendment for years¹— constantly raving on about how when they come for your guns, it’s over. The democrats want to confiscate your guns so they can start their tyranny, and then you’ll be powerless to stop them. While this is very untrue, it’s still very believed. The day the 2nd amendment is repealed is the day hundreds, even thousands of insurrections will begin across the country. These lunatics will organize and kill federal officers that they believe are trying to take their freedom. You’ll see tens, even hundreds of thousands dead in the first week. Rule of law would be obliterated. The federal and state governments would become completely unstable, as the millions of gun owners in this country defend their second amendment rights. America would be turned into Somalia in a matter of hours.

Gun owners will never accept a gun ban. They would die defending it. Their motto is literally “come and take it.” They mean it.

Not to mention the insanity of repealing a part of the bill of rights, something that has never been attempted before. It’s completely unprecedented, and something that would never pass in a million years. But I’m not interested in using the probability of implementation of a specific policy as a point against it. I’m just saying that we probably shouldn’t repeal a part of the bill of rights. A Banner may counterargue that they merely wish to reinterpret the second amendment into something that doesn’t protect the right of an individual citizen to own a gun, but this is how it’s been interpreted for decades, so you’re still moving upstream against historical precedent.

To add onto this point, I’d like to speak about the logistics of a complete gun ban. Imagine if the federal government wanted to ban computers (let’s ignore the other implications of this). That’s 121 million computers across the nation². The logistics of transporting and presumably destroying all the computers would be insane. That’s tens of thousands of tons of computers, all that need to be confiscated, shipped, and destroyed in some area. The pollution created by destroying that many computers would be an ecological disaster. Not to mention the ability for humans to lie. If a police officer came up to everyone’s house and told them to fork over their computers, a ton of people would say that they sold it, or that they gave it away, or that it broke and they threw it out, etc. etc.. Now replace computers with guns. Now you’re not dealing with 121 million things, you’re dealing with 300 million things³. And guns, unlike computers, get traded around a lot. There’s a lot more gun shows than computer shows, and therefore, it’s a lot more believable as an excuse that your gun was traded to here or there. It’d be pretty easy to keep your gun, especially considering that in order to check your house to see if you’re lying, the government needs this pesky thing called a warrant, and asking for tens of millions of warrants for people who may or may not have guns is ridiculous, and only adds to the logistical problem.

To sum up the Banners, we can put down the consequences of their policy as massive instability across the nation, hundreds of thousands of dead from gun-rights militiamen, and, at best, spotty implementation of this ban. Probably not the best decision.

So we can’t ban guns, but should we regulate them?

The Regulationist camp is made up mostly of liberal types. (The type that’s far less likely to own a gun than a Republican⁴) They say, “We want common sense gun legislation! We want waiting periods and background checks and requiring permits! All this has decreased gun violence in other nations!”

These types are the ones easily swayed with emotional appeal, so they usually will go on about how tragic mass shootings are in America (they’ll usually talk about school shootings exclusively, because kids dying makes them sadder than adults dying). In fact, this seems to be the major source of radicalization and outrage against America’s gun problem. When you look at the data, however, this is perplexing. Despite being the #1 talking point when it comes to regulating guns in America, mass shootings don’t make up 50% of gun deaths, they don’t make up 30%, they don’t make up 10%. They make up 1% of gun deaths⁵. That’s it. Just one. 60% of gun deaths in America are suicides, and 36% are homicide, excluding mass shootings. The remaining 3% come from America’s least violent institution: the police. All this fuss over 1% of gun deaths. Seems Regulationists really have their priorities in order.

Mass shootings aren’t what we’re talking about when it comes to gun violence. They’re irrelevant and serve only to keep the liberals angry at guns. Given that most gun deaths are suicides, if we want to prevent gun deaths, our money is probably best spent in mental health awareness (or better, actually making our society a tolerable place to live in, but I digress). Which to their credit, most liberals do. What they don’t advocate for is mental health awareness as a solution to gun violence. What Regulationists want is their common sense gun regulations, and for the sake of argument, I’ll assume that I support the existence of a state that can put these regulations into place.

We can start by looking at the numbers. Obviously, as America has more guns than people, we will always have significantly more gun deaths than anyone else, and by a wide margin. And as described in the section describing the Banners, this will never not be the case. Guns last a long time, in fact, they’re one of the few products in America still made to last, and halting production of guns will lead to the exact same problems I already described.

Perhaps what would be more useful than analyzing gun deaths is analyzing deaths as a whole. Because, for example, what would be the point of regulating guns if every person who would have otherwise committed murder with a gun before the regulations, then went and killed someone else with another weapon. No less murders would be committed, but “gun deaths” would go down, which are no worse than regular deaths (unless, for some reason, you consider instant death from a bullet to the head a worse way to go than bleeding out from sharp penetration of the stomach by a knife). It’s no wonder that countries with less guns have less gun deaths, that should be obvious to everyone.

One country that has implemented strict gun laws is the UK, which requires its citizens to obtain a permit before they can own a firearm⁶. In order to obtain said permit, you have to pass a background check to make sure you’re competent to own a gun, and you have to wait (as is bureaucracy). That’s background checks and waiting periods. Great.

Now, if the Regulationist hypothesis is correct, then the UK’s firearm regulation would have reduced murder as a whole compared to the US, which has not placed such strict restrictions in place. If regulating guns reduces murder, the US would have significantly more murder than the UK. Just one problem: this doesn’t track with reality. According to the UN, they have comparable rates of murder⁷. It seems that the amount of firearms per capita and amount of gun regulation doesn’t track onto murder rates, meaning that gun regulation doesn’t prevent death, just gun death.

But there are even more problems with the Regulationists. Regulationists, being mostly liberals, tend to be unable to see many problems in society, but when they do see problems (like crime), they tend to not understand why they happen, and at best treat the symptoms instead of the cause, and at worst implement completely ineffective or even counterproductive “solutions”, but what matters here is not seeing the root cause of the problem. A leftist like myself looks at crime and sees the root cause. People don’t commit crimes because they’re evil, they commit crimes out of necessity⁸. People don’t commit crimes because they’re greedy, they commit crimes because they need to eat, because they need a roof over their heads.

In order to prevent crime, we need to solve poverty, the number one cause of crime. We can do this by creating a world where everyone is guaranteed work, and where everyone is granted the ability to provide a good life for themselves through this work (a feat already possible, that I will go into detail about at a later date). This can only be achieved through socialism, which liberals are against (liberals are capitalists). If we want to prevent crime, and therefore murder, and therefore gun death, we need to attack the root cause: poverty. If poverty goes down, murder rates will go down. Gun regulation ignores the real cause of the problem, and implements an undesirable solution that doesn’t even solve anything in the first place.


Finally, we have the Protectionists. Now, if you’ve read this article up to here, you’d probably guess that I consider myself one of these guys. Not exactly, in fact, my position is probably best summed up with the following quote: “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.” Now, this Karl Marx truth nuke is only really half the story. I do side with the Protectionists on most gun issues, but most Protectionists are not Post-Marxists, so at that we are probably distinct.

Protectionists say that the second amendment is in place so that if the government were to become tyrannical, we could overthrow it with our arms. This is a very Lockean Enlightenment principle, and it is taught in every school across the country. This refutes the Regulationist idea that because the second amendment was written when rifles were single-shot and took 30 seconds to reload, the writers of the bill of rights may have reconsidered it if they knew that there would be terrifying assault rifles 250 years down the line. In reality, the writers would still support the second amendment applying to assault rifles. Because as rifle technology improves, the government grows more powerful due to it, and the citizenry need the same technology to compete. After all, if the US Army is using an automatic M4A1, and you’re using a musket, the government won’t have to worry about civilian resistance to its law.

This is the most important part of the second amendment for me. As an anarchist, I have to support the unabridged right of the people to own weapons. The people must be able to arm themselves and protect themselves. The individual has a right to defend himself from aggressors and those who tread on his freedom. By giving the government even a little ground to regulate guns, we risk giving them the ability to make owning a gun a fantasy for most people. A gun should be a representation that you can defend yourself, that you can protect your community and your beliefs from oppression, and that right should not be abridged.


This last section I will devote to convincing my fellow leftists that they should arm themselves with something more than a handgun (maybe even the dreaded AR-15).

As described above, I believe in an unabridged right to bear arms. What this means is that the proletariat should never be disarmed so that they are left defenseless. Revolution can only be conducted if we are ready to defend ourselves from the state. If the state threatens you with violence, you are permitted to use violence to protect yourself. That’s all I advocate for.

On a slightly less revolutionary note, arms are also useful at protest. I do not advocate for firing into crowds, what I advocate for is the same thing that the right does— open-carry. If every leftist protest against big business or big state or against the oppression of minorities was protected by a left-wing gun club, simply standing by the curb or marching in solidarity with the crowd, we would probably be beaten by police less. All it takes is half a dozen dudes with rifles with basic training to instantly deter anyone from attacking the broader protest. Why would you fuck with a guy with a big scary gun?

And thus concludes my position on gun rights: unrestricted. One should have the right to arm themself and defend themselves from encroachment on their rights. I hope my arguments addressed nothing but steelmen, and were convincing to liberals and baby lefties, who are still learning, alike. The right generally does a bad job at defending gun rights, but I think that my defense of the concept would do better than your average MAGAtard or even your average libertarian, who I generally gauge to be of higher intelligence on average than a conservative. If you take away nothing else, just know that the right of the people to arm and protect themselves ought not to be abridged, and that this is the principle of all free societies.

Sources

1. A recent example of fearmongering, another recent example, and a bunch of liberals complaining about it
2. National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Digest of Education Statistics, 2019. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_702.60.asp
3. Krouse, W. J. (2012, November 14). Gun Control Legislation. Federation of American Scientists. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL32842.pdf
4. Parker, K. (2017, June 22). The Demographics of Gun Ownership. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/
5. Brady United. (n.d.). Statistics | Brady United. Brady United. https://www.bradyunited.org/resources/statistics
6. House of Commons Library. (n.d.). Firearms: Licensing and Safety - House of Commons Library. House of Commons Library. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8521/
7. Lu, J. (2021, August 10). What Country Has the Highest Murder Rate: Homicide Rates. UN Dispatch. https://undispatch.com/countries-with-the-highest-murder-rates-ranked-in-a-new-un-report/
8. Alliant International University. (2023, September 21). Why Do People Commit Crimes. https://www.alliant.edu/blog/why-do-people-commit-crimes