My Kingdom For An Answer

Last week, I put forth this one quesiton to be asked of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino:

"Mr. Mayor, as you know, the City of Boston over the last year has seen a marked increase in the rate of homicides and armed robberies - violent crimes committed by violent individuals against the good people of Boston. My question for you is a simple YES or NO question. Do the hard-working, law-abiding citizens of Boston have the right to defend themselves from violent criminals?

Clayton Cramer asks the same question in this article from Shotgun News (emphasis mine).

Defending Self-Defense

Do you have a right to defend yourself? If you think that is a silly question, keep reading--because there is an increasingly willingness among those who run our society to deny that there is any such right.

An excellent question, indeed, to which he offers the following commentary.

A fair number of gun control advocates with whom I have corresponded over the years deny that there is a right to self-defense. It is not simply that they object to the use of a gun in self-defense; they object to all killing, regardless of the circumstances. I remember one conversation I had some years ago with a journalist at a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper who explained that it didn't matter if making concealed weapon permits more available reduced robbery rates, because it would mean that robbers would be killed by their victims--and that was just as bad as robbers killing their victims. I was so overwhelmed by how crazy this sounded that I was temporarily at a loss for words. (This doesn't happen very often.)

I've had several similar conversations over the years with other gun control activists who similarly argue that there is no moral justification for deadly force--ever. They see aggressor and victim as identical--equally having a right to life. The rapist has a right to live, and this takes precedence over the right of his victim to not be raped; the robber has a right to live, and this takes precedence over the right of his victim to not be threatened with death. I don't want to live in such a society, and if we could get these "no right to self-defense" sorts to more openly express these ideas, it would discredit the gun control movement quite effectively--which is perhaps why gun control advocates almost never express these sentiments in public forums.

Not every gun control advocate thinks that self-defense is a bad thing. I would guess that most Americans who support restrictive gun control are not this crazy; they have been persuaded that restrictive gun control laws will somehow reduce violence, but they do not fundamentally disapprove of self-defense--even when that involves the use of deadly force. Still, the large number of gun control advocates who have expressed to me this disapproval of self-defense makes me suspect that much of the fanaticism that drives the gun control movement stems from this bizarre moral equivalence of victim and victimizer.

Yep.

RTWT.