Gun control - Misplaced Pages

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Template:Gun politics by country The phrase gun control refers to efforts to restrict or limit the possession, production, importation, shipment, sale, and/or use of guns by private citizens. In this context, the guns in question are generally personal firearms: handguns and long guns. The gun control issue in the United States is a highly contentious one (see gun politics). The right to own a firearm is enshrined in the United States Constitution, in the Second Amendment.

History

Self-defense

Scholars such as John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, have discovered a positive correlation between gun control legislation and crimes in which criminals victimize law-abiding citizens. The findings reveal that criminals ignore gun control laws, and are effectively deterred by armed intended victims.

Advocates of rights to gun ownership (gun rights) counter that since law abiding gun owners vastly outnumber the criminals who steal guns, the only way to eliminate this avenue of criminal gun ownership is to fully disarm all law abiding gun owners. Even then, just as with illegal drugs and illegal full-autos, the criminals would continue to smuggle guns into the USA from other nations. The Scotland Yard report on the illegal importation of firearms into the United Kingdom, following the near total gun ban in that nation, is cited as an example of what happens when firearms are banned for law abiding citizens. The US experience with Alcohol Prohibition and the current "War on Drugs" being other prime examples cited by gun rights advocates.

Non-defensive uses of guns, such as hunting, varmint control and the sport of target shooting, are often lost in the debate despite being the most common reasons for private gun ownership. However it should be noted that most countries where a gun control is enforced allow these kinds of uses.

Human rights

Many opponents of gun control believe that the right to own a firearm is a fundamental human right. Many in the United States believe that the right to own guns is not actually based on the second amendment and that if there were no second amendment in the U.S. Constitution, one would still possess a right to own a weapon of self-defense, which in today's context, means guns.

The right to own a firearm, they contend, is based on the right to self-defense, i.e., the right to those means to defend oneself against those who wish to destroy one's life. That the right to self-defense is itself a corollary of the right to life.

Libertarians and other advocates of human rights say that it would be absurd to say one has the right to life, but does not have the right to the means necessary to protect that life. They say it would be like saying one has the right to life, but not the right to purchase food. This is what they claim opponents to the right to own a gun are really against: the right to life.

Under libertarianism and other philosophies based on individual liberty, it is the government's job to use force to defend its citizen's rights; however, government is not omnipotent, and it is not omnipresent: it cannot be everywhere. In many cases the protective forces of government cannot arrive to a criminal situation in time to prevent an irreversible situation, i.e., such as a murder. As such, every peaceful citizen has the right to those means necessary to protect themselves in emergency situations, until the police can arrive to 'takeover', i.e., an intrusion by a would be rapist when a woman is alone in ones apartment.

Security against tyranny and invasion

A position taken by gun rights advocates is that an armed citizenry is the population's last line of defense against tyranny by their own government. They point out that many soldiers in the American Revolution were ordinary citizens using their privately owned firearms. In addition, the people's power to replace elected officials by voting is sufficient to keep the government in check.

Indeed, there is a historical regularity in that totalitarian regimes pass gun control legislation as a first before restricting civil liberties. The sequence is supposed to be gun registration, followed some time later by confiscation. Nazi legislation is the most famous example of this sequence, but it also occurred in Marxist regimes. However, some gun control advocates claim that many democratic governments also have restrictive gun control laws with no loss of civil liberties. That claim is highly disputed.

Invasion by hostile outside forces is another reason gun rights advocates oppose registration. If captured, the associated records would provide invaders with a means of locating and eliminating law-abiding resistance fighters. Location and capture of such records is a standard doctrine taught to military intelligence officers. Registration aside, gun rights advocates point out that an armed citizenry is a strong deterrent against a foreign invasion.

Many gun control supporters, however, argue that this leads to untrained civilians taking the role of police and military. This claim is also disputed.

Gun control in the United States

Main article: Gun politics in the United States

Before the American Civil War ended, state slave codes prohibited slaves from owning guns. After slavery in the U.S. was abolished, states persisted in prohibiting African Americans, from owning guns under laws renamed Slave Codes.

The United States Congress overrode most portions of the Black Codes by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The legislative histories of both the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as The Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867, are replete with denunciations of those particular statutes that denied blacks equal access to firearms.

After the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1878, most states turned to "facially neutral" business or transaction taxes on handgun purchases. However, the intention of these laws was not neutral. An article in Virginia's official university law review called for a "prohibitive tax...on the privilege" of selling handguns as a way of disarming "the son of Ham," whose "cowardly practice of 'toting' guns has been one of the most fruitful sources of crime.... Let a negro board a railroad train with a quart of mean whiskey and a pistol in his grip and the chances are that there will be a murder, or at least a row, before he alights." Thus, many Southern States imposed high taxes or banned inexpensive guns so as price destitute individuals out of the gun market.

In the 1990s, "gun control" laws continued to be enacted:

Police-issued license and permit laws, unless drafted to require issuance to those not prohibited by law from owning guns, are routinely used to prevent lawful gun ownership among "unpopular" populations.
Public housing residents, approximately three million Americans, are singled out for gun bans.
"Gun sweeps" by police in "high crime neighborhoods" whereby vehicles and "pedestrians who meet a specific profile that might indicate they are carrying a weapon" are searched are becoming popular, and are being studied by the United States Department of Justice as "Operation Ceasefire."

References

Kates, "Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment," 82 Mich. L. Rev. 204, 256 1983
Carrying Concealed Weapons, 15 Va L. Reg. 391, 391-92, 1909 George Mason University Civil Rights Law Journal (GMU CR LJ), Vol. 2, No. 1, "Gun Control and Racism," Stefan Tahmassebi, 1991, p. 75

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