Sunday, November 7, 1999 | Print this story

The Last Line of Defense
The right to bear arms is a matter of individual safety and, ultimately,
freedom. The issue goes far beyond gun nuts.

By ROBERT J. COTTROL

The central premise of the gun control movement is that society
becomes more civilized when the citizen surrenders the means of
self-defense, leaving the state a monopoly of force.
That this premise goes largely unchallenged is the most remarkable
feature of our gun control debate. We are ending a century that has
repeatedly witnessed the consequences of unchecked state monopolies of
force. University of Hawaii political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel, one
of the leading students of democide (mass murder of civilian populations
by governments), has estimated that nearly 170 million people have been
murdered by their own governments in our century. The familiar list of
mass murderers–Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot–only scratches the
surface. The mass slaughter of helpless, unarmed civilian populations
continues in Sudan, Rwanda, parts of the former Yugoslavia and East
Timor.
The reluctance of outside forces to intervene is well documented.
And yet the obvious question is strangely absent: Would arms in the
hands of average citizens have made a difference? Could the
overstretched Nazi war machine have murdered 11 million armed and
resisting Europeans while also taking on the Soviet and Anglo-American
armies? Could 50,000 to 70,000 Khmer Rouge have butchered 2 million to 3
million armed Cambodians? The answers are by no means clear, but it is
unconscionable that they are not being asked.
Need Americans have such concerns? We have been spared rule by
dictators, but state tyranny can come in other forms. It can come when
government refuses to protect unpopular groups–people who are
disfavored because of their political or religious beliefs, their
ancestry or the color of their skin. Our past has certainly not been
free of this brand of state tyranny. In the Jim Crow South, for example,
government failed to protect blacks from extra-legal violence. Given our
history, it’s stunning that we fail to question those who would force us
to rely totally on the state for defense.
Nor should our discussion be limited to foreign or historical
examples. The lives and freedoms of decent, law-abiding citizens
throughout our nation, especially in our dangerous inner cities, are
constantly threatened by criminal predators. This has devastated
minority communities. And yet the effort to limit the right to armed
self-defense has been most intense in such communities. Bans on firearm
ownership in public housing, the constant effort to ban pistols poor
people can afford–scornfully labeled “Saturday night specials” and
“junk guns”–are denying the means of self-defense to entire communities
in a failed attempt to disarm criminal predators. In many
under-protected minority communities, citizens have been disarmed and
left to the mercy of well-armed criminals.
This has led to further curtailment of freedom. Consider
initiatives in recent years to require tenants in public housing to
allow their apartments to be searched. First, police failed for decades
to protect citizens in many of our most dangerous public housing
projects. Next, as the situation became sufficiently desperate, tenants
were prohibited from owning firearms for their own defense. Finally the
demand came, “Surrender your right to privacy in your home.” The message
could not be clearer: A people incapable of protecting themselves will
lose their rights as a free people, becoming either servile dependents
of the state or of the criminal predators who are their de facto
masters.
All of this should force us to reconsider our debate over arms and
rights. For too long, it has been framed as a question of the rights of
sportsmen. It is far more serious: The 2nd Amendment has something
critical to say about the relationship between the citizen and the
state. For most of human history, in most of the nations in the world,
the individual has all too often been a helpless dependent of the state,
beholden to the state’s benevolence and indeed competence for his
physical survival.
The notion of a right to arms bespeaks a very different
relationship. It says the individual is not simply a helpless bystander
in the difficult and dangerous task of ensuring his or her safety.
Instead, the citizen is an active participant, an equal partner with the
state in ensuring not only his own safety but also that of his
community.
This is a serious right that takes the individual from servile
dependency on the state to the status of participating citizen, capable
of making intelligent choices in defense of life and ultimately of
freedom. This conception of citizenship recognizes that the ultimate
civil right is the right to defend one’s own life, that without that
right all other rights are meaningless and that without the means, the
right to self-defense is but an empty promise.
Our serious thinkers have been absent from this debate for too
long. The 2nd Amendment is too important to leave to the gun nuts.
* * *
Robert J. Cottrol is a professor of law and history at George
Washington University. His most recent book is “From African to Yankee:
Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England” (M.E.
Sharpe, 1998).