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.
The government and its use of its weapons are falling increasingly out of the control of the American people and their elected representatives. A government whose activities are beyond the capability of an intelligent, conscientious Representative or Senator to understand, is a government that is out control. Those in charge of it do not, and cannot, know what they are doing, despite the fact that they are doing it with guns. Most of them do not even read and carefully study, let alone fully understand, most of the bills they are called to vote upon. Routinely, they enact laws whose consequences they do not know and whose essential terms they cannot even define. To put it mildly, this is an extremely dangerous state of affairs.
Genuine gun control, not the variety urged by the leftist-dominated media, requires a radical rollback in government activity. The rollback must proceed to the point of the government having the authority to use its weapons only against those who have committed acts of aggression, i.e., the initiation of physical force, against the person or property of others. This, of course, includes the use of defensive and retaliatory force against foreign governments that have committed acts of aggression against the United States and its citizens.
Failure to stop and reverse the advance of government power and our and other governments’ increasingly uncontrolled threat to use their guns is capable of resulting in a number of people murdered by their governments later in this century far exceeding even the total recorded for the 20th Century. The more than a quarter of a billion people murdered by their governments in the last century may well be exceeded by billions of people being murdered by their governments in this century.
Who might want to murder billions of people? Who are the waiting mega-Communists and mega-Nazis of this century that would put such plans into effect if they should ever come to power? They are the people who share such sentiments as those expressed by Britain’s Prince Philip when he wrote, “I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist… I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.”
The murder of billions of people is implied in the thinking of anyone who holds the belief that there are “too many” billions of people. The billions who constitute the “too many”—the allegedly “surplus,” “unnecessary,” “environmentally destructive” billions—they are the potential targets of a future mega-holocaust.
True, such a holocaust is not inescapably implied. Population might fall simply as the result of a voluntary fall in the birth rate. Indeed, this has actually taken place in many of the world’s advanced economies. And if population does not fall as the cumulative result of voluntary individual choices, or fall “sufficiently” to satisfy the likes of Prince Philip, moral abominations short of mass murder, might also achieve the goal of mass depopulation. Compulsory sterilization and forced abortions, such as practiced in Communist China, come readily to mind. But add a strong enough dose of psychopathic hatred for mankind, plus uncontrolled government power in the hands of the haters, and murder on the scale of billions becomes a definite possibility.
This essay first appeared in 2012. How many people in 1912 could have foreseen that in just two years, the world would be plunged into generations of mass killing and mass murder, inspired for the far greater part by the collectivist ideologies of nationalism and socialism? Is it impossible that the world of the years ahead will similarly be marked by the rise of environmentalist dictatorships dedicated to the eradication of the billions, native or foreign, whose existence they perceive as destroying the “environment” or as standing in the way of the living standards of those who will be allowed to remain?
Have the anti-human ideologies already at the fore in the early 20th Century been replaced by an ideology of individual rights and economic freedom? Is the world moving away from collectivism and socialism and toward laissez-faire capitalism, or, to the contrary, is even the slightest trace of economic freedom described as laissez-faire and blamed for the existence of the last economic crisis, thereby impelling the world toward still more government control and still less economic freedom?
There is clearly a potential threat to human life and well-being looming on the horizon that is of unprecedented proportions. It is present in the openly expressed hate-filled, murderous ideas of many people. Sooner or later, in response to this or that crisis or series of crises, these ideas will be translated into physical action if not overcome by other, pro-human ideas. The likelihood of a catastrophic outcome is steadily increased by the continuing increase in government power and corresponding reduction in individual freedom. With each passing decade, the United States resembles less and less the country of its founders and more and more a country such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. If the trend of the last several generations continues, it is only a question of time before the United States will become indistinguishable from a totalitarian dictatorship.
To be secure against the threat of a totalitarian regime with a policy of mass murder, or the threat of tyranny of any kind, the American people must retain their right to keep and bear arms and restore it wherever it has been abridged. They must reestablish control over their government. Congress must regain its exclusive right to declare war and its exclusive right to legislate. The courts must be required to uphold economic freedom. The government must be reduced in size and scope to the point that conscientious legislators can understand its operations in detail and be in a position intelligently to enact laws designed to control them. That is what is required to establish genuine, meaningful gun control.
The American people must not allow themselves to be misled into giving up their right to own guns by the occasional, and almost always avoidable, tragedies that accompany gun ownership, such as a small child finding its way to a loaded gun and pulling the trigger. On the basis of such a standard, people would also have to give up driving cars, to avoid the tragedies that often accompany automobile accidents, and also even using horses and buggies, in order to avoid the tragic accidents that can result in connection with them. What must always be kept in mind is the incomparably greater potential danger of untold numbers of children losing their parents and their own lives to government-employed murderers unleashed on a disarmed population.
To impose gun control on their government, the American people need in addition to arm themselves in a way that is more fundamental than merely possessing physical weapons. They need to arm themselves intellectually and morally as well, by reading and studying the works of the great modern defenders of freedom, above all, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. This will enable them to counter and overcome the vicious ideas that underlie the misuse of government power and its continuing growth. An armament of physical weapons combined with knowledge and moral conviction will ensure that the American people will never find themselves in the position of helpless, terrified people being led as sheep to the slaughter. They will never allow themselves to be either the victims or the perpetrators of a holocaust, for they will have regained control over their government and its use of its weapons. They will have achieved the kind of gun control that secures their lives and property and threatens the lives and property of no one else.
Summary and Conclusion
By far the largest number of guns and the biggest and most powerful guns, up to and including nuclear weapons mounted on ICBMs, are in the hands of the government. Guns stand behind every aspect of government. They are essential to the government’s being able to impose its will. The overwhelming focus of any serious program of gun control therefore must be on controlling and restricting the government’s use of its guns. Today’s practice of equating gun control with control exclusively over the guns of private citizens would be reasonable only if a half-ounce mouse represented a greater threat than an 800-pound gorilla.
As controls on the powers of government, the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights are implicitly gun controls. Future discussion of gun control must be carried on in this context. On every occasion on which statists urge gun control in the sense of depriving the individual citizen of his Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, defenders of individual freedom must seize the opportunity to urge additional restrictions on the use of the government’s guns. They must urge that in addition to such well-established principles as that the government is not to use its guns to abridge the freedoms of speech and press, it is also not to use its guns to abridge the freedoms of production and exchange, including the freedoms to charge and offer prices and wages that some people consider too high or too low.