The tragedy in Newtown, Conn., in which a mentally ill gunman went on a shooting spree in an elementary school, has escalated the gun-control debate and brought out some good legislative ideas. But it has also brought out the worst extremes on both sides of the debate — from Wayne LaPierre’s unworkable (and perhaps even cynical) proposal to place an armed guard in every single school in America, to Piers Morgan calling his interviewee, gun-rights advocate Larry Pratt, “unbelievably stupid” on the air.
What Morgan and the rest of the world do not seem to understand is that the American “gun culture” that is so derided by the global left was actually intended by our Founding Fathers from the beginning. Although the framers of the Constitution probably did not intend (or foresee) the decline in American morality that has led to so much violence in this country, it’s clear from the text of the Constitution itself that the framers intended the population to be well-armed. Hence the inclusion of the “right to bear arms” in the Bill of Rights.
So why should a gun culture still be considered desirable, even in the wake of a string of tragedies from Columbine to Newtown? Because a well-armed population is the last bastion against the imposition of tyranny.
Let us step back for a moment and contemplate the unthinkable: Suppose that a totalitarian party gains political power (could be Nazi, communist, or some other extreme ideology), by constitutional or extra-constitutional means. Let’s now imagine that they start dismantling all of our civil rights — freedoms of expression and religion, rights of the accused, right to due process, and everything else you can name. You might be thinking to yourself, “it couldn’t happen here.” The liberal Germans of the 1920s and the liberal Egyptians of the 1960s probably thought the same, and yet the Nazis were elected into power in 1933 and the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012.
A well-armed population can prevent the unthinkable from happening in America. Daniel Deudney of Johns Hopkins University envisioned this problem when he invented the concept of “negarchy.” A negarchy, in contrast to a hierarchy and anarchy, is a political system in which the government and the governed have about equal power. If both government and governed have power, then each remains accountable to the other and each must cooperate with the other for the political system to function. Although it remains true that the state would (and must) having overwhelming power over any individual, the collective population is strong enough to prevent the state from imposing the kind of tyranny that has characterized totalitarian governments in the past.
This may seem like an abstract rationale, and not very comforting to the victims of senseless violence, but armament of the general population is hardly senseless. The likelihood of an outcome such as what I’ve described is admittedly small, but I submit that the cost of maintaining a well-armed population (to prevent it from happening at all) is less than the risk of such an outcome to an unarmed population.
Let’s now imagine a world in which the American population is completely disarmed (other than military and police). Violent criminals will still be violent (they will fashion their own weapons or steal them); those who are mentally ill and also prone to violence will still find ways to hurt or kill people. And the general, law-abiding population will be largely at the mercy of these elements, for most of us would be unable to overwhelm our assailants with deadly force of our own.
Let us therefore not disparage the so-called “gun culture” of America too much. Although a few proposals such as banning high-volume clips seem reasonable to me, most of the gun-control proposals seem to be knee-jerk reactions to high-profile news stories (the “do-something” mentality). They are oversimplified solutions to a problem that is considerably more complex. There are larger reasons for maintaining a well-armed population, which democratic cultures tend to overlook when democracy is taken for granted.
Davis Brown is a professor of political science at Maryville University in Town and Country.
