Double-Edged Sword, Forged In Damascus

Karl Muth argues that the Arab Springs hold lessons for the debates over gun ownership that have recently animated American politics.

As a consistent advocate and supporter of gun owners’ rights in America, I’ve often wondered why arguments in favour of gun ownership are either misguided (the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, thank you) or overly polite (reclamation of the right to violence, in a philosophical sense, is far too serious a matter to be resolved with dueling daft opinion editorials). After graduating from law school in America, I did what many young people with an interest in law and philosophy do: I committed my thoughts on a legal puzzle to writing and published it. That article had to do with – you guessed it – gun ownership.

The purpose of the Second Amendment, many American legal scholars would agree, is to protect the individual from the State (that’s the classical “State” with a capital “S”). And the monstrous, oppressive State envisioned by so many philosophers is not something that has been seen on American soil, so it is difficult for Second Amendment advocates to cite a recent historical rationale for Americans being equipped with weaponry.

This difficulty is compounded by the fact that many of the Second Amendment’s most visible (but least articulate) advocates have also invested time stoking the fire of Islamophobia, particularly among poor rural whites. This is unfortunate – not only because racism and xenophobia are unfortunate in all their forms, but because by pairing a pro-gun-rights position with Islamophobic rhetoric these people have lost the most important recent example to be used in favour of widespread weapons ownership: the Arab Spring.

There is no situation in the last fifty years where more civilians took up arms to protect themselves from an oppressive State than during the Arab Spring. The resistance offered by civilians-turned-militia in the mass uprisings across the Middle East is precisely the type of resistance envisioned by the Founding Fathers and contemplated in the text of the Second Amendment. Why, then, is the Arab Spring not held up by visible gun rights advocates as a wonderful example of why the citizenry must be aware, armed, and willing to use violence against an oppressive regime? Surely, if anything is proof that widespread gun ownership is needed to enforce citizens’ rights against the government in the modern world, it is this current event, no?

The only (very disappointing) reason I can find is that many in America’s pro-gun-rights community have spent so long demonising and xenoising the Arab world that they find it impossible to relate to people in the Middle East, even when these people are offering delicious evidence in support of what the pro-gun-rights community has advocated. This is sad on many levels: that Americans have such difficulty relating to people from other countries and cultures, that Americans find it so hard to identify tyranny and armed resistance to it, and that Americans have somehow lost hold of this magical longhand invitation within the Constitution to, someday, when things get really bad, reclaim the right to violence and destroy a tyrannical government.

Are the mouthpieces of the pro-gun-rights movement really so blind as to pass up this opportunity?

If so, this is truly a crowning achievement in political incompetence. What explains this massive oversight?

I spent a decade living on the South Side of Chicago, where guns are heavily (over-)regulated. During that time, I realised minority populations draw a disproportionate amount of abuse, unfounded inquiry, and violence from police. Perhaps this did not cross the line into the wholesale tyranny required for one to redeem a Hobbesian “right to violence” coupon, but it certainly came close. Where were the gun-rights advocates calling for blacks on the South Side of Chicago to be more heavily armed to pose a more credible violent counterpart to the oppressive State? Where were the NRA's K Street suits?  Where were Alan Gura and his lieutenants? Sadly, that argument never came, and those advocates stayed quietly in the shadows.

The problem was the same one we face today: The gun rights argument has been mischaracterised – and hence poorly-argued – by spokespeople who are almost all white males who are not particularly well-educated and have difficulty explaining an idea on the rare occasion they create (or, more often, borrow) one. I have yet to hear an NRA spokesperson articulately discuss Hobbes (or any important philosophical position that might support the NRA’s position) or the importance of reclaiming the right to violence or the fact that the Second Amendment is about something far more important than venison.

The movement to restore gun rights and have the Second Amendment be as unfettered as the First Amendment must be led by people who are not afraid to engage in a cross-race, cross-class, and international discussion about the history, philosophy, and importance of armed resistance. Without that conversation, which is one many current, highly-visible gun rights advocates are intellectually and socially incapable of having, the Second Amendment will limp along, crippled by a century of bad advocacy and bad policy.

The Arab Spring is stunning evidence that consent of the governed and consenting to be disarmed are two very different things, and need not be philosophically or practically coterminus. It’s really too bad gun-rights advocates were too busy talking about magazine limits and school shootings to see the big picture and the most advantageous starting place for the next round of this debate.