In response to my expressed concern that placing “placing the safety and freedom of society in the hands of individuals harms us normatively by making collective action more difficult,” my new friend Bob referred me to “Why the Gun is Civilization” by Marko Kloos. While somewhat interesting, I think Mr. Kloos greatly oversimplifies both the effect of introducing firearms into human interaction, and the nature of human interaction itself. Read the rest of this entry »
One Percent Doctrine
Jan 30
Bob S., over at 3BoxesofBS, offers a good illustration of the “one percent doctrine” applied to the carrying by private citizens of personal firearms in public places. In his book, Suskind argued that the Bush Administration treated threats with even a one percent likelihood as certainties. Similarly, Bob argues here that his anecdote about a robber beating a woman and stealing her ring shows that he must carry everywhere he goes–because it happened in a nice neighborhood.
This destroys control advocates’ memes, he says, because it shows that one might need a firearm even if they avoid “bad” places. No one is ever a hundred percent safe–anywhere–so people should arm themselves.
Technically, I suppose, Bob is right: no one is every one hundred percent completely safe, wherever they go and whatever they do (just ask these guys up in Lorton). But the “gun control memes” “If you live in a good neighborhood, you aren’t likely to need a firearm” and “If you don’t go to bad places, you won’t likely need a firearm” are demonstrably true. Saying they’re not is a bit like saying that everyone must always be prepared to win the lottery–since someone won it just last week.
I’ve spent time in very dangerous places, where we had to keep pretty much constant vigilance when out and about. I wonder about the mind set of someone who does this all the time, even in his own neighborhood.
If Deterrence is a Goal…
Jan 30
…then why not make concealed carry permit applications public?
Delegate Lee Ware, a Republican from Virginia’s 65th District (Powhatan and Chesterfield Counties), has proposed legislation that would amend Paragraph 18.2-308 of the Virginia Code to require that clerks taking concealed carry permit applications withhold information about applicants from public disclosure.
One of the interesting things about gun owners and Second Amendment supporters is their apparent reluctance to let their fellow citizens know that they own weapons and carry them on their person in public. Given that a key argument supporting widespread gun ownership and public carrying of concealed firearms relies on the assertion that this would have some measurable deterrent effect on criminals, it would seem that owners would want others to know that they at least might be carrying.
I haven’t heard Delegate Ware’s argument in support of the bill–it presumably provides some protection against government confiscation, for example–but I can think of at least one argument against it: that fellow citizens, especially neighbors, should have access to some knowledge about which people around them own and carry firearms.
I would like to know, for example, which of my neighbors own weapons, and which of my coworkers have a pistol in a shoulder holster. Whether or not the gentleman next to me in the pew, working in my kid’s school, or the guy eating wings next to me at the sports bar is armed would be nice to know in the event something takes place that makes the carrier want to use it. I especially want to know if wings guy is packing when he orders a beer. This is true whether or not I am armed.
An example which hits close to home, the Virginia Tech shootings back in April 2007, illustrates this well: those who argue that armed students could have limited the tragedy of that day should understand fellow students’ desire to know who else besides the shooter might be armed. The justice claim of people who wish to arm themselves as they interact with others in public places conflicts with the that of fellow citizens to know which of the people around them might be armed.
Which should precede is another matter. I am sympathetic with the argument that owners need some protection from government confiscation (though I think that shared understandings about the right, not secrecy, provide protection from this). But given the relatively low chance of a general federal effort to seize privately owned firearms, I wonder if the people around armed citizens should get more sympathy for their claim: that people who walk around with firearms should have to warn others that a weapon is near.
Since someone in comments challenged my assertion that neither the Soviet nor Maoist Chinese states were communist, I thought I would clarify my view on this.
By definition, communism refers to a stateless society in which the citizenry own the components of production, including land, resources, money, and labor in common. The USSR and “Communist” China could therefore by definition not be communist, since they included a state apparatus.
Though these governments justified themselves as an intermediary step between capitalist and a communist society, I argue that they really existed only as a way to institutionalize the consolidation of wealth in the hands of elites. This makes them authoritarian and tyrannical, perhaps, but it does not make them communist.
In a sense, the commenter has offered an example in support of my argument that social discourse matters. Since he grew up on a social environment that classified these governments as communist, he refers to them so, whatever Engels, Marx, or anyone else says. They were communist only in the sense that he believes they were.
Though fairly well-read in constitutional law, history, and political science, I am no expert on the gun rights v. gun control debate. But since I do have a policy preference with respect to guns, and I intend to involve myself in discussions with people on both sides of this discussion as a way to promote my preferred policy, perhaps I should lay out my thinking on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »
Be Careful What you Ask For…
Jan 22
I was disappointed to hear on the radio yesterday that the Supreme Court had ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that Congress cannot limit “electioneering communications” by corporations and unions. On its face, this seems logical on free speech grounds: “no law abridging the freedom of speech” seems pretty clear, and the campaign finance laws struck down by the Court did limit speech.
Still, this ruling troubles me on a couple of grounds. First, I more or less agree with the sentiment that “If money is speech, then speech is not free,” so the equation of speech with money makes me uncomfortable. Treating the spending of money on purchasing message ads as free speech which cannot be regulated gives an amplified voice to the wealthy. Large, very profitable corporations will now have a much louder voice than individual citizens, and that’s bad enough.
But some conservatives may have reached a “be careful what you ask for” moment, since they will also have the resources to drown out others in the commercial sector, and this ruling will probably have quite a large distorting effect on markets. Wal Mart, for example, will now have much more freedom to work for the defeat of local politicians wishing to protect local business culture and flavor against the homogenization of retail in a region. This new freedom for corporations will probably mean the end of small businesses who share this new freedom, but not the resources to exercise it.
Of course, since the assertion of rights depends on access to court systems, and we manage this access itself as a market, all of our rights claims have always been subject to possession of the necessary financial wherewithal. Wealthy people, whether acting in groups or individually, have far more power to make justice claims than the poor. This fact, by the way, helps to show that we hold our “rights” only with respect to social relations–they have no intrinsic value separate from our interactions with others, including financial ones. If they did, we would not organize our adjudication of justice claims around market transactions.
Perhaps more problematic is the deeper placement of corporations in social relationships as the equivalent of citizens. We treat these collectives in law and rights discussions as individuals, and this begs the question: How long until discourse creates an understanding of corporations as possessing rights besides free speech? Should corporations have the right to vote? If the First Amendment protects their speech, does the Second protect their right to keep and bear arms?
The ruling leaves other questions equally unclear. How, for example, do we define the citizenship of a multinational corporation? Since our current understanding of “inalienable rights” makes them in fact quite “alienable”–that is, our Constitution does not protect the “natural” rights of non-citizens–this question will come up, and soon.
This may shake out in the “free market of ideas” way libertarians and other conservatives expect. But many may find that giving corporations the same free speech rights as individual citizens will have unintended consequences they regret, even if it gets more conservative politicians elected. Be careful what you ask for–you might get it.
Last week, I posted an essay making a case that rights do not arise from nature, but depend on socially constructed understandings developed through human interaction and discourse. Briefly stated, I argued that social concepts like rights do not distinguish various natural kinds from one another, and cannot be studied without regard to social relations among humans, among other points. Since they depend on social relations for definition, rights must be a social construct. To support this view, I pointed out that our concept of rights do not remain static, and vary across societies. In this post I’d like to discuss how this applies to gun rights.
The social construction of rights depends on prevailing understandings about appropriate behavior in human interaction, as well as shared understandings about right and wrong, the value of human life, social ordering of political and economic behavior, competing concepts of justice, and an almost infinite variety of other components of social relations. All of these things combine to make up prevailing norms and inter-subjective understandings that make up social reality, and if these understandings include a specific “right,” challenges to such a right would by definition come from marginal actors, and probably have little effect. For example, few challenge rights to speech or religion in the US today, but most shrug off claims of a right to food or health care as illegitimate.
All of this matters to gun rights advocates because given that prevailing norms change, and they rightly worry that a shift in normative paradigms about the social order (e.g, about the appropriateness of violence in society, or killing to protect property) could threaten the existence of a “right to keep and bear arms” as a shared understanding. The claim that society abridges a rights claim–that is, creates an injustice–by disarming those who wish to own and carry weapons has little meaning in a social framework where the right is not broadly recognized. Some citizens might nevertheless claim such a right, and use violence to oppose its infringement, but since this in turn infringes on the strongly held beliefs of prevailing society, it would organize against the rights claim and quash the effort, as it would a person or group that went around kidnapping people today, claiming a right to own slaves. This is true even if I am wrong, and rights are natural kinds.
Therefore, the justice of rights claims matters only to the extent that it empowers a minority to resist a majority without violence. It has no bearing on the ability or power to resist disarmament, and actually only protects the “right” if society shares the moral principle. This is one of the senses in which I claim that rights don’t exist unless humans manufacture them, and it means that puffing out the chest and rhetorically defending a right to gun ownership helps only to the extent that it perpetuates the social norms that support such a right.
Advocates, that is, might claim a moral principle, but this only has value as a rhetorical device in support of perpetuating the norm–discourse privileging some moral claims as “rights” over others helps to constitute the normative structure in a way that elicits support from large segments of society, even some who disagree with the behavior. Firearm (speech, religion) rights survive, not because nature endows them, but because infringing them is something you just don’t do. Others (e.g., right to food, shelter) have less normative power as justice claims because fewer people share the understanding of them as “rights,” whether or not they accrue naturally to humans.
This suggests that gun rights advocates who wish to preserve this norm should concentrate on rights discourse, and limit discussion intended to make fellow citizens afraid, such as quoting crime statistics, listing home invasion incidents, and carrying on the pretense that an armed citizenry can preserve liberty with a constant threat of rebellion. Over time, changes in society which made these reasons obsolete could make firearms less useful, ownership less widespread (firearm ownership already trends down), and this argument less valuable. And as technology advances and makes representative government much more inclusive (if only by growing a more educated population), the perceived need for the ability to rebel against it could wane.
Advocates of protecting Second Amendment rights won’t protect these rights with guns. Discourse might work if used to frame gun ownership as a moral and civic good. Focus on crime only increases incentives to solve the problem, and threatening rebellion only marginalizes advocates. Thinking of gun rights in terms of social relations rather than as a natural individual right is the best hope of preserving gun rights for posterity.
Pat Robertson said, during a 700 Club report on the earthquake in Haiti, that
“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”
This of course sent all kinds of people into high dudgeon over the insensitivity of the remark. Pat Robertson of course gives not a whit for the opinions of others, unless they speak to him from on high.
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher.
The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?
If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.
You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS
Man, I wish I’d thought to send a letter to the editor like this. Good work, Lily.
Americans talk a lot about rights (defined as a just claim or title, whether legal, prescriptive, or moral). Some we have written down as specific limits on the power of government, such as prohibitions against infringement on a “right to keep and bear arms.” Others remain less clearly defined yet just as vigorously claimed, like the right to freedom of movement or the “pursuit of happiness.” We talk about “active rights” to assert our agency in certain realms (e.g., speech, assembly), and “passive rights,” which create duties for others to give or permit something. We also distinguish between positive rights (to a good or service) and negative rights (to non-interference). However we lay our claims to them, rights help define proper action and just institutions.
For some, the force of our rights claims and the definitions of justice we use them to reach depend in no small part on their sources. If a creator endowed humans with specific rights, or if the nature of humanity confers them, individuals have more powerful claims against others, and the rights framework creates an a priori assumption of justice. Rights that depend on human concepts of right and wrong developed through discourse, on the other hand, provide more limited protection for individuals and a definition of justice more subject to change.
In this post I will argue that rights are a social construct of inter-subjective understandings shared by humans, and do not arise from nature, whether or not metaphysical. I will do this by first making a case that rights are social, not natural kinds, and then outlining their changing nature. In a later post I plan to discuss gun rights in this context, since proponents link them to a foundational right to life. Read the rest of this entry »
Military Quote of the Day
Jan 15
The three most dangerous things in the Army are a Lieutenant with an idea, a Captain making a decision, and a Warrant Officer saying, “Watch this!”