By John Mark Reynolds
Philosophical Fragments
If government were good, only God would have guns. Yet humans abuse
God’s gift of human freedom, and so guns abound. What can we do about
it?
Christians want peace, but perfect peace is not possible in
our present condition without tyranny. We must tolerate law — a thing
that does violence to our liberty — while remembering no law is good in itself. Liberty
is good in itself, while law is the compromise we make with our
inability to be good and free, and the law is only good when it
maximizes liberty and minimizes vice.
Nothing is so good that
humans cannot mess it up, and nothing is so bad that God cannot redeem
it. If we do not start with this simple truth when it comes to guns,
then our discussion will go no place. Guns can easily kill, though they
need not be used to kill. Killing can be murder and murder is immoral.
Guns, therefore, like cars, require thoughtful regulation in a fallen
world. This is why both guns and cars are already regulated.
No
gun control the President can suggest will deserve moral condemnation
or praise, because there is no fundamental human right to own a gun as
there is a fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Before guns existed, men were free and if all guns vanished
men would still be free.
If men were angels, then every man could
own a gun. If men were devils, no man should own a gun. Since no person
is either an angel or a demon, and since guns are so easy to abuse, we
must measure what to do about them.
Of course, gun regulations,
which Americans already have, limit our liberty, but a limit on liberty
need not make me a slave. As a conservative, I recognize that this is
a pragmatic decision between liberty and law. Regulation
reduces what it regulates, but it also infringes on my liberty. There is
also the pragmatic question of whether more gun control will prevent any of the events such as the Newtown horror.
Sociology
and science can help us answer those questions, but science cannot tell
us what society Americans want. Turning to another easily abused good,
media, makes this obvious. The scientific consensus is that consuming
violent media increases the tendency to violence, but that agreement
doesn’t tell us anything about we should do. Christianity warns that Utopia isn’t coming with direct divine rule, so no solution will be perfect. The awesome liberty to play Halo means that unstable people can easily play Halo. Most
Americans think the censorship of such media will not lead to a
sufficiently significant decrease in violence to be worth our loss of
liberty. Christians know that giving the government power is necessary,
but also understand that all such power will be abused.
Increasing
government power over anything is always dangerous, though increasing
my liberty is also dangerous! It is impossible to know when “tipping
points” are reached, when liberty devolves into licentiousness or the
law into legalism.
This means there an be no single Christian position on gun control. Christians
can live peacefully in societies where there is no right to bear arms
and in societies, such as ours, where there is such a civil right. We
believe in liberty, morality, and law, but don’t know how to balance those goods.
That is the downside of God’s gift of free will.
Pragmatically,
as a citizen, I believe that an armed citizenry is worth any increase
in violence that may result. I also believe that we have sufficient
regulations in place and no new regulations, given the number of guns in
the society already, are likely to prevent another Newtown. There has
been no increase in such violence, and it seems unwise to pass laws only
so that we can have the satisfaction of having done something.
If the Federal government decides further to
limit magazine sizes in an act of therapeutic regulation, however, I
think the Republic will no more be in imminent peril, than if it decided
to ban certain kinds of violent video games. We were free before Grand Theft Auto and could be free without it.
I hope we do neither, but only because I believe too much liberty and privacy has been lost already.
