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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25034 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Nobody I am aware of argues that 2A describes an inherent, inalienable and unconditional right.

I guess you're not at all familiar with the topic then.

Here's Hobbes:

The RIGHT OF NATURE, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, hee shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.

Here's Locke:

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.

And it is of course explicitly because of this conception of a natural right of self defense, which was specifically popular in the early American Republic that the Anti-Federalists decided to include it in the Bill of Rights which they saw as necessary to secure against violation of natural rights that may come from the powers granted to the State through the Constitution.

To quote Hardy:

Early Americans wrote of [the right to arms] in light of three considerations:

  1. as auxilliary to a natural right of self-defense;
  2. as enabling an armed people to deter undemocratic government;
  3. as enabling the people to organize a militia system.

The second amendment was indeed understood to secure an inherent right to self defense. Much of it was implicit in the minds of its drafters due to the fact that English common law recognized it as a background principle, but it was actually talked about specifically in the constitutional ratification debates that preceded the bill of rights.

St. George Tucker writes in 1803 in the earliest published scholarly commentary on 2A:

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. Amendments to C. U. S. Art. 4. This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty ... The right of self defence is the first law of nature: In most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game : a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

The thing about people using violence to defend what they perceive to be their natural rights is that absent some consensus about what these other rights are and what the ground facts are, these claims will overlap.

For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.

Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.

This is certainly a valid conception of natural rights, but also a rather trivial one: might makes right. It generally leads to long-lived feuds between clans and families which have wronged each other.

Hobbes speaks of "Judgement, and Reason", Locke of "to judge, whether they have just cause". This sounds to me like implicit prerequisites to the right to self-defense: if your judgement is obviously impaired, it seems unlikely that society will respect your right to self defense. (I still think they are overly optimistic if they believe that reasonable people will not make overlapping claims wrt their natural rights, but that is besides the point.)

Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically, all historical societies which I am aware of have avoided giving the means for effective self defense to these groups. The right not to get tortured or killed is a right which most civil societies bestow to any humans in their jurisdiction from the moment they are born. Other rights, e.g. the right to vote, or carry effective means for self defense, or consent to sex are granted conditionally. (Related potential scissor statement: "as the right to bear arms is a consequence of the natural right of self defense, illegal immigrants should be allowed to bear arms").

All societies consider trade-offs when it comes to enabling their people to practice self-defense. As @cjet79 has pointed out, guns are excellent tools for self-defense. But the kind of guns which are legal to own in the US are probably not what is always optimal for self-defense.

For example, consider tamper-resistant explosive vests as a weapon for deterring rapists. If a potential victim packing a firearm will deter 80% of the would-be rapists, wearing a well-known rape prevention vest which works by turning the wearer and anyone within five meters into bite-sized chunks whenever its sensors detect that a rape attempt is happening might deter 90% (all the ones who believe that they could startle their victim before she can draw). Yet despite offering marginal gains, wearing such a device in public would be illegal everywhere in the world, because societies will not consider the benefits in isolation but also the trade-offs. If the device blows up one subway car full of people by accident per three marginal rapes it prevents, that means that it has negative utility for broader society.

The difference between Texas, New York, and Germany is simply that the societies balance these trade-offs slightly differently.

Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically,

You misunderstand. It is inarguable that they do in fact have such a right. Nature provides that they do. An insane person can decide to just revolt and kill anybody they perceive as a threat. The world is structured in a way that makes this impossible to totally prevent.

The question that you decide to shift this to here isn't whether this is a natural right, but whether such a natural right ought to be enforced by the government, inasmuch as it doesn't violate other rights.

The idea that this is not a natural right is incoherent with your line of reasoning unless you embrace the Roussean view that there is now essentially no such thing, and that all rights have become civil rights which are provided at will by the State which is now the font of all such things.

The problem you have is that the US was founded specifically in a rejection of this concept and an embrace of the idea that rights are ordained by God, not the State. Under the theory that good government is government that recognizes natural law and aligns itself with the liberties that God provided us as much as it practically can.

You may disagree with this policy, but unlike you are claiming, this is a difference of nature, not of degree. This is why Charlie Kirk said that some gun deaths may be worth it and why his opponents can't fathom how he could say such a thing, because this isn't about some consequential end of State policy, but about the deontological application of natural law.

Just to be surei understand you, do you believe in a right to self defense?

Like are we disagreeing that this is a fundamental right, or are we just quibbling about whether guns fall into an extension of that right?

For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.

Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.

This is absolutely not the equilibrium. If we are gonna use the terms of economics I'd say there are very high transaction costs for violence.

The equilibrium is more like: you can use violence or the threat of violence to protect a few things that you greatly care about. The things you can protect or enact with violence are heavily limited by what others are willing to protect with violence.

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