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Choose
to Live: The Moral Decision to Bear Arms by Larry Rybka "I would rather be killed by a handgun than own
one." This seemingly absurd
statement was made by the substitute host of a nationally-syndicated radio talk
show, during a discussion on violence and gun control.
As a value judgment, it betrays a deliberate refusal to envision the
continuance of life, and morbidly prefers death over the rational possession of
an object. Why
would an American birthright be painted over as a suspect assumption and a grave
threat to public order? The answer is found in a proper understanding of the
ideological campaign against gun ownership, which is no less than an active
front in a total war on reason. THE
IRRATIONAL REPUBLIC In
the first nation founded on the strength of ideals, the idea of rational
self-government lies dormant in our subconscious. Two centuries of hostility to
the supremacy of reason has produced contempt for the moral exercise of free
will. The rugged individualist of early America was transported into a mystical
flux, where gurus of anti-logic conducted a feint to liberate his mind, while
government lackeys fixed shackles to his body. The expanded role of the state in
our daily lives stems from a growing distrust in the wisdom of each person to be
the just beneficiary of his own decisions. Individual liberty has been redefined
in the ethics of utilitarian collectivism. Natural rights have been supplanted
by political franchise. Once derived from the nature of man's existence, rights
have given way to entitlements keyed to the fluctuating preferences of groups.
In
order to destroy the concept of absolute rights, it was first necessary to make
men believe in a world where absolutes did not exist. Thus, if a desired
political end was out of touch with reality, reality was redefined. After all,
celebrated intellectuals had already proclaimed that reality was
incomprehensible, and the world of appearances, strictly a creation of the mind,
is all that one could ever hope to know. In this plastic realm of uncertainty,
reason is merely a tool for molding desire into substance. Furthermore, being
conditioned by the ideas of other men, if our minds are part of the organic body
of society, then a "right" becomes whatever society wants it to be;
the right way to secure it is whatever works. Traveling
the highways of American culture, the few exits leading to freedom and
well-being are poorly marked. In the all-inclusive domain of the general
welfare, a wrong turn can take us to an unwanted destination. Unfortunately,
directions found in the road map, the catalog of contemporary values, provide
little guidance. Throughout this political landscape, any demand that a vocal
group wants addressed is generally deemed to be in the "public
interest." And if it’s widely accepted, it’s automatically
"rational." Here, moral correctness is equated with popular appeal,
while the "soundness" of a policy is only contingent on its desired
results. Finally, "goodness" is determined by the net benefit for the
group rather than on the negative effects for individuals. In the outcome-based
quest of the greatest good for the greatest number, traditional standards are
discarded as impediments to progress. THINK
FOR YOURSELF A
person dedicated to preserving his freedom will not surrender his mental
integrity to a bankrupt philosophy that demands that one blindly follow the
opinions of others. From elementary ideas to ultimate actions, the process of
integrating his natural observations will remain well guarded. This is the
method of rational concept formation. It dismisses opposites, reflects the world
as it is, and relies on a process of reasoning. On the other hand, an aversion
to the discipline of logic will produce irrational concepts. Driven by feelings,
they are incomplete, reflect a world created by the mind, and are formed by
emotional reaction. A moral decision is one made by choice, in accordance with
reason, by applying principles in a given context. In contrast, immorality stems
from a willing embrace of senseless contradiction, and manifests itself in a
passionate denial of choice. An irrational person lacks self-control but is
resigned to impose control on other people, who, refusing to think for
themselves, eagerly accept it.
The
ability to transform concepts into a personal value system is part of what
defines a human being, but when skepticism takes hold, value systems themselves
are placed in question. If society is also obsessed with tolerance, it will
grant equal weight to any contrary argument. Therefore, one's choice of values
becomes unimportant, reflected in comments such as "that may be true for
you, but not for me," or "I can't prove it's true, but you can't prove
it's untrue." In a culture that enshrines irrationalism, words are
relative, truth becomes an abstraction, and right is unknowable. When the
consequence of an act can not be defined beyond doubt, results lose significance
and good intentions take on virtue. The offhand remark "you never
know," commonly used to describe uncertainty, is an ever-present
expression, but "never" is a long, long time. If people accept the
notion that the mind is incapable of certainty, rules of behavior will replace
their own moral choices, as they effectively relinquish their mantle of
sovereignty.
FORCE:
IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD Being
his own moral agent by nature, each individual is both the cause of action and
the beneficiary of its results within his personal space, the area and property
under his control. It is therefore a contradiction for individuals to live under
voluntary association by means of plunder, or by appointing agents to invade the
moral space of one another. However, this stubborn fact is incongruous with the
dynamic of expediency that has dominated politics for the last century. As a
result, the notion of collective or "group" rights has evolved to
justify a social architecture proceeding from the assumption that human nature
should not determine human rights. At the outset, it should be noted that a
group does not exist as an entity. It is incapable of forming abstract concepts,
and has no life apart from that of its individual members; therefore it
possesses no rights. The fallacy of "group rights" was perpetrated to
encourage loyalty to men rather than to principles, and to preface each
individual act with a sense of obligation to others. Bizarre
interpretations of the concept of justice have also taken shape, imparting
legitimacy to government paternalism. Involuntary servitude administered under
coercive threat (of surveillance, entrapment, asset seizure, fine, arrest, or
incarceration) is now seen as not only acceptable but desirable in the attempt
to procure balanced shares of freedom and well-being for all citizens. The door
has been opened to social policy in which proactive force becomes the lifeline
to the "common good."
Yet
in the arena of liberty, force can only be of moral value if used to defend an
individual's rights. Toward his peaceful neighbors, each individual delegates to
government no greater authority than he possesses as an individual, that force
be used only in a defensive manner. Toward criminal aggressors, government is
allowed to apply sufficient retaliatory force to preserve its citizens' rights
and freedom. However, sanctioning the government's initiation of force toward
the innocent, even as a coercive threat, is a method of human behavioral control
which violates the dignity of man: the exercise of reason expressed in his free
will. You
can not change a person's mind without his permission. He must voluntarily
consent, then make the choice himself. Obedience extracted under threat has no
moral value. Value requires volition. Force, in attempting to detach and
transfer value without choice, destroys it. Good can not result from such an
attempted transfer, because the element of force deprives the intended
beneficiary of the rewards of sound judgment. If one can force good, it must be
separable from human consciousness. Just as a contract signed under duress is
unenforceable, so obedience to law that is contrary to your conviction is
unenforceable on your conscience. Performance is forced, since you have not
consented in your mind. You obey, but the act itself has no moral value.
Traditionally,
natural law has recognized man's identity as a rational being capable of
self-government. But critics of natural law have argued that human dignity is
not rooted in freedom of choice, but in a sense of belonging. In the reigning
philosophy of the previous century, reason was not understood as the pursuit of
truth, but as the pursuit of agreement. When rational objectivity is redefined
as consensus, morality is not located in human nature, but in the overlap of
emotions floating in the group. The new purpose of government is not to protect
man's natural rights, but to create policy (entitled rights) that satisfies the
perceived needs of the group, and then to constrain personal behavior in
accordance with public policy enforcement. RIPE
FOR DISARMAMENT Judging
from the preceding survey of the state of our collective psyche, it seems more
likely than not, when hoplophobia (fear of weapons) reaches a threshold level
the stage will be set to craft a national "right" to be free from the
fear of firearm violence. A recent article regarding firearms and fear in Epidemiology,
the journal of public health professionals, uses the issue of community fear
to promote the idea that fewer guns in society will make people feel more
secure. Not a new concept, "freedom from fear" was designated by
President Franklin Roosevelt as the fourth essential human freedom. Federal
Gun Free School Zones are the direct result of this kind of mass delusion,
sprung from the minds of fear-mongering psycho-terrorists, and based on the
belief that violent behavior is an essential byproduct of firearm possession.
Even though the Supreme court rejected the illogical basis of this
unconstitutional fabrication, Congress circumvented the court and stealthily
reenacted the same basic law. The "assault weapons" ban in the 1994
Federal Crime Bill was another back door opportunity for pragmatism (end
justifies means) to infect the national consciousness. Senator Feinstein
justified her gun ban because "it's the rights of many to feel safe"
which were being violated by firearm owners. However,
there is a world of difference between a natural right to secure oneself against
potential harm, and the legal fiction of a right to feel secure. But in
establishing the fictitious right to feel secure, pragmatic (subjective)
collectivists would be endorsing the logic of a natural right by modeling its
method of advocacy. Since a natural right is contingent on inherent possession,
they would have to demonstrate that crime victims would have naturally felt, and
would have actually remained secure, if only their assailants had not used a
firearm in the assault. Thus criminals were merely acting as an agent of the
firearm itself in violating their victim's sense of, and therefore their actual
security.
Demonization
of firearms and encouragement of nonresistance shifts focus to the weapon, while
benignly accepting the aggressor as a given ingredient. To pass outcome-based
scrutiny, a policy of forced disarmament would only have to propose better
conditions for those affected by its outcome than would exist in the absence of
such a policy. Sufficient research
posing this theorem already exists, while an ostensive display of the victims of
violence would imply its proof. Next, the assertion that disarming would make
far more people better off before it made a significant number worse off is easy
to argue, since relatively few people are armed in any given area, despite
concealed carry reform. Unintended consequences befalling any individual would
be irrelevant in satisfying the public demand to feel secure. While
natural rights theory states that human nature is understandable, pragmatism
counters that human nature is not a valid concern. A pragmatist does not care
that disarmed people are defenseless. The natural rights advocate invokes
fundamental truth, while the pragmatist responds that truth is unknowable in
advance, and can only be ascertained after existence conforms to a desired point
on his sliding scale of arbitrary standards.
This
is why the act of disarming takes on such political significance. First,
disarming provides the symbolic renunciation of our right of self-preservation.
By tearing down our personal boundary, we grant leave to be used by anyone, for
any purpose, and we exist solely by the permission of others. Next, disarming
produces the psychological effect known as "sanction of the victim."
We're expected to embrace our exploiters, and pay their ransom with our lives.
Government can then fill the void by substituting a right to seek compensation
after our right to personal security is nullified. Finally, through personal
disarmament we emerge "civilized," as human solidarity replaces the
unity of objective truth in the ongoing pursuit of servitude for its own sake.
Antigun
extremists should be seen for what they represent: worship of the state.
For them, the state is god. The religion of statism holds personal
disarmament to be a sacramental rite. Thus, armed citizens are infidels, and gun
ownership is idolatry. It supports the heresies of self-reliance and
independence; the opposite of altruism, which is the "state of grace"
in which enlightened citizens worship their deity, the state. They would rather
die at the hands of an armed criminal than defend themselves with a gun, first,
because it would be unholy to put one in their hands, and ultimately, because
their deaths would be martyrdom, the highest form of sacrifice to their god. The
reason that only police or military should touch weapons is, they believe, as
fascism teaches, that no personal act can possibly have meaning or value if
performed outside the reach of the state. In the face of facts showing that guns
save lives, they will still demand disarmament because it would be a transgression
against the almighty state if individuals continue to own guns. If something is
thought to be wrong in itself, then personal utility is no defense. Utility is
morally correct only when it can benefit the state.
The
anti-self defense movement, in the guise of the antigun lobby, is in its second
generation. Its leaders are well versed in the ways of the irrational republic.
The aforementioned fictitious right to be free from one's fears already exists
in the irrational minds of tens of millions. With countless more unwilling to
bite the hand that feeds them, many will not openly disagree with a policy which
forces disarmament, even if indirectly achieved through the coercive threat of
litigation and burdensome legislation. The average person has been conditioned
to accept irrationalism as a way of life. The man in the street, unable to deal
with his own self-doubt, is not equipped to withstand verbal intimidation such
as "you can't possibly approve of settling your differences with
guns," or "handguns are only meant for killing people," or
"we can't allow people to roam the streets armed to the teeth."
Statements such as these are designed to trigger emotions, while diverting from
the specific and well-defined context of defense of life. Since fundamental
contempt for the absolute right to life is left unchallenged, the intimidator
remains on the offense.
Along
the same lines, arguments in support of right-to-carry, which rely on body count
statistics, cite lack of police protection, or correlate decreased crime with
the presence of armed citizens, all place the moral foundation of the right to
bear arms on the turbulent, outcome-based grounds of expediency. Any change in
the variables, whether actual or perceived, and the "need" to carry
will be questioned. The only logically consistent defense of the right to bear
arms, which is firmly anchored in reality, is based on the right to life, and
nothing more.
THE
ESSENCE OF SELF-DEFENSE The
most fundamental of rights is the right to life. It is a
"self-evident" truth, the evidence being contained within the truth of
life itself: awareness of existence as a self-sustaining process. The only
"duty" which can not be shirked is that of self-preservation, which
entails the acceptance of existence. Our founding fathers believed that all
man's rights were branches of this basic truth. A precondition to the exercise
of other rights, life is the ultimate value. As the only "end in
itself," it must be self-perpetuating. Thus, life encompasses both the
process that supports it (the means), and the value sought strictly for its own
sake (as an end). To separate the means from the end is to deny existence. The
right to life is unalienable; it can not be forcibly denied, infringed upon,
transferred, or renounced. Since
man is morally compelled to seek life, rejecting an action that would sustain it
can not be considered good behavior. For example, arming oneself in the face of
unprovoked homicidal assault, as a means of resisting life-threatening
aggressive force, would be a virtuous act, while disarming oneself in the same
situation would be a contradiction: seeking life (an end) while simultaneously
not seeking it (rejecting the means). Also,
since the practical consequence of personal disarmament is a denial of
individual choice in accessing an indispensable means of self-preservation at
the precise moment it is most needed, it becomes an immoral policy. It is most
appropriate to viewing life not as an end in itself, but as the means to some
other end. In this case, one's martyrdom, expropriated under the guise of heroic
altruism, infuses strength into the embodiment of evil, and empowers it to
achieve another victory. When
civilized man delegates a general right of public defense to government, he
still retains his unalienable right to life. In his moral space each man remains
sovereign, in complete control of his own destiny. There is no liability on the
part of government for not defending any individual's life. It has no obligation
to do so. An innocent person has a lawful right to stop any unprovoked attack on
himself, by using a force equal to what he perceives is brought to bear against
him. Laws that disarm effectively redefine the common law doctrine of equal
force, to require that the innocent party use an inferior level. They also place
the individual under a form of prior restraint by preventing his moral exercise
of free will: that of choosing whether or not he will allow himself to be
senselessly slaughtered. Disarmament forces him to live out his life in default
of his nature, subject to the mindlessness of barbarians and the capricious whim
of bureaucrats. Reasonable men will disagree, but one ought not hide behind
reasonableness in order to evade reason, by which one is aware of the difference
between self-esteem and self-sacrifice.
CHOOSE
TO LIVE I
can not disavow my right to effective self-defense, without forswearing my right
to life. To do so is to consciously deny my nature. It would mean that somehow,
I have reversed my scale of values from one that holds "good" to be
the pursuit of individual excellence, to one that believes that being good is
acting in a way that facilitates my own destruction. By refusing to answer
life's ultimate demand, I deny my existence as a rational being. To
those who counter that it can never be "good" to take a life, your
decision is not to take life, but to face reality. Your own life is held in such
esteem, that when there is no escape from a savage assault, the attack must be
stopped at all costs. To live is the only concern. You must use whatever force
is needed to stop the attack, even if it results in the death of the aggressor.
Repudiation of the use of weapons in the defense of life is not a sign of human
dignity, but of human frailty. Not only is it an illogical rejection of man's
technology designed to protect life, it is a manifestation of one's inability to
reconcile facts with feelings, and by retreating into a world where
self-reliance becomes self-delusion, evading the possibility that some day one
may have to choose to live.
To
pronounce that an absolute right to life exists only in a "state of
nature," a time before men established governments to protect their rights,
is to agree that reality will likely place some of us in the "modern state
of nature," where brute force still rules, the weak and defenseless
succumb, and government is nowhere to be found. To reply that it is absurd to
suggest that everyone go armed at all times is to distort the real issue. The
only absurdity is an outright refusal to ever allow the choice of arming, in any
given situation. The real crime is not in carrying a weapon to defend your life
if the need arises, but in forcing the guiltless between the rock of government
and the hard place of merciless depredation. Surrendering the last outpost of
individual defense is an act of homage by which lowly vassals declare fealty to
the lord of "reasonableness," and eagerly take on the yoke of societal
tyranny. The ultimate result of this misguided attempt to shield every citizen
from folly is to fill the nation with fools. A
QUESTION OF CONSCIENCE If
one recognizes that possessing an object may help sustain his life, he will not
separate the potential for life sustenance from the actual possession of the
object, which will then acquire value. This is quite rational. Now, consider
anti-firearm legislation. It
presumes an evil personality in an object, rooted in its supposedly dichotomous
nature, in which case society can not be put at risk of it's evil side emerging
uncontrollably to wreak havoc on civilized order. This is mindless nonsense. It
is a mockery of civilized order to compel the innocent to fall prey to predators
and parasites, and, by the very sweat of the brow of those devoured, allow a
disinterested oligarchy to sustain the evildoers in further laying waste to law
and order.
A
citizen's firearm is a tool of personal defense, but if it appears sinister,
menacing, or has military features of a cosmetic nature, it's personality
somehow changes to that of an "assault weapon." Attempting to remove a
man's free will and mysteriously transplant it onto an object is irrational, and
forcing the man to obey irrational edicts at the cost of his personal safety is
immoral. As well as a
self-determined refusal to be enslaved at the hands of rapists and murderers, human dignity equally demands resistance to the forcible deprivation of
liberty at the hands of one's political exploiters. Those who resort to
predatory violence must be resisted and overcome, but not at a cost which
involves government becoming partners with the lawless in a two step
"shakedown" of peaceful citizens.
Arguments
to disarm often equate self-defense with vigilantism, by cleverly mixing the
specific context of personal defensive force with the larger public context of
retaliatory force, the exclusive domain of the police. But as criminal
aggressors have no claim to self-defense, citizen defenders abstain from the
retaliatory use of force. An armed citizen is not waiting for someone to make
his day. However, a police officer as an agent of the public has no greater
right, nor greater need, to effectively defend his own life than does a citizen
under attack. As an pursuing agent, he may choose to retreat. But once under
criminal invasion he has no choice, and is fighting for his life. The life of a
citizen in defense is as valuable to himself as that of the agent's is
respectively, and, as a corollary of the right to life, the moral soundness of
the right of self-defense can not be contingent on the frequency of its need.
Allowing weapons of individual defense to be removed from the hands of citizens,
and placed exclusively into the hands of a select group, certifies that citizens
are expendable commodities, intended to become the fodder of a police state. Firearms
have been in use for the major part of the last millennium, and will continue
indefinitely, despite the ill will of the antigun crowd. As personal property,
their rightful ownership is grounded in the value of individual labor. The
zealots of disarmament wish to ignore this economic reality. Scarcity-inducing
legislation, designed to raise the cost of firearms in an attempt to deter their
possession, overlooks the fact that those who value firearms have an inelastic
demand for them. The feel-good policy of seizing and melting down firearms to be
cast into art, as if to appease the gods of vengeance with a sacrificial
offering, is merely a remnant of a primitive mentality which attempts to punish
objects for their wrongdoing. The notion that feelings create facts is also
responsible for the proclamation that firearms are a pathogen infecting the
organic body of society. Since this line of thought considers all resources to
be part of a common societal pool, it is as normal for diseased cells (disarmed
people) to be sacrificed for the health of the body, as it is normal for
government to confiscate your earnings and use the funds to propagandize the
idea that defending your life is somehow contributing to the
"epidemic" of violence.
CONCLUDING
THOUGHTS Our
Constitution was not intended to become a replacement for natural law. The
founders believed that charters only declared rights that already existed. They
could not write a constitution, and declare it fundamental law, unless they had
appealed to a higher form of unwritten law to justify their action. Positive law
can never become a substitute for moral truth. Defining liberty through law, as
a means to virtue, will redefine virtue as an end in itself. Then man will exist
in servility for the sake of others. If obedience becomes warranted, then it
will be proper to compel it. The higher the level of force required to bend a
recalcitrant will, the greater the imperative for its application.
Totalitarianism waits at the end of this road, paved with good
intentions, and the bodies of its victims. There is no right to bear arms in
such a society, only a duty to sacrifice yourself for the "common
good." That
is not the American way. Here, the road to freedom is paved out of personal
integrity. A conscious loyalty to principle requires knowing the difference
between right and wrong, and deciding that right must always supersede
expediency. Virtue remains a choice, for a man can not know good unless he can
freely choose it. In America, virtue is not an end in itself, but only a means
to liberty. In our system, the individual does not exist to serve society. On
the contrary, society exists as the forum where an individual can be the best he
can possibly be, fully capable of serving himself, and only then truly able to
help others.
The
war on reason has not led to utopia, but is leading to a state of ideological
anarchy, where the right to life is relative, conditional, and only valid if
desired. Under a guise of "common sense," the distortion of mutually
agreeable prejudice (political correctness) has entered the arena of public
debate. Appeals to "reasonableness" are frequently made to support
further restrictions on effective self-defense. Appeasement can no longer be
allowed. Altruistic collectivism cloaked in a facade of popular freedom has
permeated our culture, and is totally incompatible with the concepts of
individual rights and private property. Embracing the moral cowardliness of
personal disarmament proclaims that our life, and also our way of life, is not
worth keeping. There
is one fundamental right: the right to life. It is solely the pursuit of life's
requirements that make the entire concept of "rights" possible.
Refusal to accept the absolute nature of this reality is a consequence of
turning away from reason as the primary path to knowledge, and replacing ordered
consciousness with a mystic transcendence. However, facts and events are
logically connected. One mind can not manipulate reality to cause changes in
existence any less than a million minds can do so. One can not compromise moral
principles, concede rights, ignore the demands of existence, and still expect to
exist. But this is what the disciples of disarmament want you to believe, as
they implore you to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
Also by Larry Rybka |
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