This essay originally appeared on the author’s blog on August 24, 2012 and was later included in his collection The Benevolent Nature of Capitalism and Other Essays. In the interval, it was reproduced on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and elsewhere under the title “Gun Control—On the Government’s Guns.” What follows is a slightly revised and updated version.
Mass shootings in recent years in Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, and, most recently, Charleston, South Carolina, have each led to renewed demands for “gun control” aimed ultimately at depriving the individual citizen of his Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. And just within the last few days, the shooting on live TV of a reporter and her cameraman in Roanoke, Virginia has been followed by the same demand. It is believed that if the individual were deprived of this right, such shootings would not take place, because of the sheer lack of available weaponry.
Let me say immediately that I too believe in gun control. However, I do so in the light of the knowledge that by far the largest number and the most powerful guns and other weapons are in the possession of the government. First and foremost, of course, the federal government, which has atomic and hydrogen bombs, as well as ballistic missiles with which to deliver them, fleets of warships, and thousands upon thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, machine guns, and lesser weapons. State and local governments also possess considerable weaponry, though less than the federal government. But just the revolvers, rifles, shot guns, clubs, tear gas, and tasers in their possession are capable of causing serious injury and death, and frequently do so.
Moreover, the threat of deadly force is implicitly present in every law, regulation, ruling, or decree that emanates from any government office, at any level. The threat of such force is what compels obedience on the part of the citizens. Even such an innocuous offense as a parking violation is capable of resulting in death if a person persists in not paying the fine imposed and, when ultimately confronted with arrest, resists by physically defending himself.
Literally everything the government does is ultimately a threat to point a gun at someone and use it if necessary. If this were not the case, the law, regulation, ruling, or whatever, would be without force or effect. People would be free to ignore it if they wished. Because of the government’s implicit threat to use deadly force to uphold its decisions, any meaningful program of gun control must above all focus on strictly controlling and regulating the activities of the government.
The government possesses overwhelming power to respond to the use of force by common criminals. That is its basic domestic function. The very existence of laws against such crimes as murder, robbery, and rape serves as a control on the use of force, including the use of guns, by the potential perpetrators of such acts, because it constitutes a deterrent to them. The more efficient the government is in apprehending the perpetrators of such acts and the more certain is their appropriate punishment, the greater is the deterrent, and thus the more effective is the implicit gun control.
Our entire Constitution and Bill of Rights are essential measures of gun control—this time, gun control directed against the government. For example, the First Amendment prohibits the government from using its guns to abridge the freedoms of speech or press. The Second Amendment prohibits the government from using its guns to abridge the freedom of the citizen to keep and bear arms. Indirectly, the Second Amendment also operates to limit the government’s use of its guns to abridge freedom in general. This is because, in our system of checks and balances, an armed citizenry constitutes a check on the possibility of the government becoming tyrannical and attempting to use its power to threaten the citizens’ lives and property. It should be understood as protecting a balance between the power remaining in the hands of the people and the power they have delegated to their government. Indeed, the language of the Second Amendment—“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”—should be understood in this way.
The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forebears that instead of regarding government with apprehension, he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent, concerned only with protecting and helping him. Evil, he believes, can come only from uncontrolled private individuals, notably greedy businessmen and capitalists and, now and then, psychopaths such as the murderers in Aurora, Newtown, and Charleston. And in these cases, of course, the solution is believed to be still more government power—power to tax, regulate, and control the businessmen and capitalists to the point of extinction and power ultimately to deprive private individuals of the right to own guns.
It simply doesn’t occur to many people nowadays that government could be the source not only of massive economic ills but of human deaths on a scale dwarfing the deaths caused by the worst individual psychopaths. The number of murders attributable to governments around the world in the 20th Century, including those resulting from government-caused famines in places such as the and Communist China, is estimated to exceed 260 million. Of this total, Communist China is responsible for more than 76 million, the for almost 62 million, and Nazi Germany for almost 21 million. (R. J. Rummel, Death By Government [New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1994], n. 1.) Of particular note, approximately 2 million of the murders committed by Nazi Germany were in the form of mass shootings, similar in nature to those in Aurora Newtown, and Charleston, but performed on a scale commensurate with the size of military units.
These were the dreaded SS Einsatzgruppen, sent into Soviet Russia behind the advancing German armies for the express purpose of murdering as many Jews as they could find. Organized into units ranging in size from platoons to battalions, approximately 3,000 government-employed psychopathic killers were set to work in a program of systematic mass murder. Unlike the recent horrors committed by the threeAmerican psychopaths, the horrors committed by these government-employed psychopaths were not limited to one time in just one day before they came to an end. No. They were repeated many times in a day, day after day, for months on end.
Again and again, hundreds and thousands of defenseless people, including women and children, were shot down, often machine-gunned in front of trenches they had been made to dig and into which they fell dead, in mass graves. Such murders came to an end only when replaced by the more efficient method of mass murder represented by gas chambers, which accounted for 4 million more murders of Jews added to the 2 million carried out by mass shootings.
If only the victims had been armed! If the 6 million murdered Jews had been armed, and ready to fight for their lives when the Nazis came for them, they might have been able to make at least one Nazi pay with his life for each Jewish family taken away. That would have worked out to roughly a million Nazis. The anticipation of such an outcome might well have been enough to prevent or at least abort the Nazi’s policy of mass extermination. It would have been an enormous illustration of the principle that guns in the hands of victims serve as a control on guns in the hands of murderers or would be murderers, or aggressors of any kind. In Aurora, Newtown, and Charleston, the murders took place in a movie theater, a school, and a church, respectively. If some of those on the scene had been permitted to have guns in their possession, the number of victims would almost certainly have been far less. Anyone near the killer and in possession of a gun, would have been able quickly to stop him.
The last thing the needs is “gun control” in the sense of depriving its citizens of their right to own guns. What it does need is control over the use of guns by its government.
The people of the and their elected representatives have literally lost much of their control over their government and its use of its weapons. Since 1945, the has been engaged in four wars—, , , and —not declared by Congress, despite the fact that the Constitution clearly provides that Congress shall have the power to declare war. The same process of growing government power, concentrated in the Executive Branch, that has eliminated the need for Congress to declare war, has removed judicial protection for economic freedom and thus practically all restraint on the power of Congress to interfere in economic activity.
This has resulted in Congress possessing far more power than it is directly capable of exercising, with the further result that it has had to delegate most of its additional law-making powers to 67 independent regulatory agencies. In 2014, these agencies, located in the Executive Branch, wrote a total of 79,000 pages of regulations, each carrying the force of law. According to The American Spectator, the cumulative total of pages in the Federal Register now exceeds 1.4 million. The regulatory agencies, moreover, exercise legislative, executive, and judicial power. They act as prosecutor, judge, and jury. Thus, we now have 67 unelected, unaccountable bodies writing the equivalent of laws and authorizing the use of guns to enforce them. Gun control requires the abolition of such agencies.