JESSE WILLIAMS: A couple days ago, my friend told me she couldn’t get to her car on Crown Street because there’d been a shooting and the area where it was parked was now a crime scene. By now you’ve all probably seen the story. It’s lucky no one was killed. And it occurred to me: hey, these were just three guys shooting each other outside of a nightclub — this wasn’t a planned hit. Surely if they hadn’t had guns, it would have been a brawl at worst: no guns, no issue, no crime scene, and my friend gets to drive home.
Here’s a painful truth: restricting gun ownership — restricting what KIND of guns you can own, or how many, or what sort of ammunition you can use — is obviously unconstitutional. Or at least, it seems very difficult to read any kind of restriction into the text of the 2nd amendment. To my mind, any debate over gun rights that doesn’t boil down to a debate over the 2nd Amendment is wasted time. But I think we need to ask the really hard question: is the 2nd Amendment still good policy?
The best reason for letting people own guns – and the indisputable intention behind the 2nd Amendment – is to secure the public against a government that tries to enact tyranny through force of arms, that is, to permit the public to resist governmental coercion. Read the rest of this entry »
Recklessly Curious 