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.