"The Second Amendment is about revolution."

[darxus]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/4/881431/-Why-liberals-should-love-the-Second-Amendment

I am the choir. I do not understand liking anti-gun laws.

Comments

One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 2)

[beowabbit]

A nuclear missile (say, an ICBM with a MIRV warhead) is a tool. It presumably has some uses other than violence or the threat of violence against humans (the Soviets are alleged to have used a small nuclear bomb to close an oil leak at one point, and there’s the traditional SF scenario of deflecting an asteroid), but its overwhelming use is as a deterrent, to threaten unimaginable, vast devastation on potential enemies if they cross some sufficiently important line (like launching you at one first).

A nuclear missile multiplies the ability of the person using it to exert force millionsfold; perhaps billionsfold if you take into account long-term effects. And depending on the delivery mechanism, a nuclear warhead can exterminate a city before anybody but the person detonating it knows its there; even on an ICBM, it can exterminate most of a city before there can be any effective reaction.

A world in which a large fraction of the population had, or had control of, nuclear missiles, would be a very very strange world indeed. Actually, it wouldn’t last long enough to get strange, because given the ratio of nutjobs to sane people, just 0.1% penetration of nuclear weapons in the population — one person in a thousand having control of an ICBM with a MIRV on top — would pretty much guarantee the destruction of the world. But assuming such a situation could possibly be stable, it would have some really weird effects on life and politics. Nobody could admit to being pro-choice, for fear that a loony pro-lifer would nuke their entire city. Nobody could admit to being pro-life, for fear that a loony pro-choicer would nuke their entire city. On election night, the executives at the news agencies would have agonized meetings to discuss whether they could report any of the election results, for fear that somebody would shoot the messenger. Realistically, democracy or even public discourse would be utterly impossible.

Now, an ICBM is expensive, and in the real world if there were no legal constraints on the ownership of ICBMs, it wouldn’t be you or ItsJustJosh who had ICBMs, it would be Archer Daniels Midland and Citibank and Mitsubishi and Wal Mart. Do you really want to think about cutting agricultural subsidies when Archer Daniels Midland has the bomb? Sure, the WTO found against Mitsubishi in that dumping claim and you have the legal right to impose retaliatory sanctions, but is this issue worth losing San Francisco over? How is that company that would otherwise be happy to give you a better job than bagging at Wal Mart going to feel about taking an employee from a company that could take out their corporate headquarters and a three-county radius? And you think Citibank is “Too Big to Fail?” We’ll show you too big to fail!

Anyway my point here is that tools can be more or less dangerous, and more or less unpredictably dangerous. And I think most Libertarians would agree that part of the point of government (even just of a civil tort system, which I think most of you agree is worthwhile) is to decrease the unpredictable danger of life, especially to innocent bystanders.

I think only the looniest of fringe Libertarians would think that there should be no limits whatsoever on private ownership of nuclear missiles. If so, then the rest agree that there’s some point on the danger scale (and the unpredictability scale) where the risk to bystanders of an unregulated dangerous tool outweighs the good done by leaving that tool unregulated. Leaving aside constitututional issues and enforceability, if you think that it is good policy to prevent private individuals from having usable nuclear missiles, but you think that it is bad policy to prevent private individuals from having usable handguns, you’ve made a determination about where those risk and reward lines cross, and about how much risk is enough to justify impinging on people’s freedom. (For that matter, you’ve also made a similar judgement if you think it’s OK for a government to enforce basic traffic laws like which side of the road people drive on, or stoplights at busy intersections. I don’t know if you think that’s OK or not, but it’s the same sort of principle.)