The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Hi Dwyer,

If I might chime in here, there is I think a very good principle to use when determining how much and what kinds of self defense are appropriate for use by the citizenry. We agree that an individual reserves the right of self-defense, but that right is not unbounded. The individual is limited to use only so much self-defense as is reasonably needed to secure her or his rights. Any more and the individual becomes the brute, the aggressor.

So nukes are way too much force. Inevitably, they go far beyond what is needed for us to reasonably secure our rights. How bout bazookas? Probably too much. Uzis? Probably too much. And the list goes on. Somewhere in there -- perhaps between rifles and fists -- we'll find the "reasonable" methods of self defense, and hand guns might well be among them.

Jordan

Post 21

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 1:30pm

Actually Jordan since you mention an Uzi, I would want the freedom to own an automatic weapon. Granted a semi-auto is adequate for self-defense but automatic weapons are just a hella fun to shoot :)

Post 22

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 2:22pm

Jordan, I would submit that automatic weapons and possibly even RPGs would be acceptable for self-defense by the logic of your first paragraph. The point is this -- can your weapon be used to single out the person violating your rights without harming innocent bystanders? A handgun, a rifle, semi-automatics and full machine guns -- all can be aimed at just the perpetrator. A nuke, not so much so. If anything, the limitations on armed self-defense in densely populated areas should be focused on the penetrating power of bullets, rather than the machine that fires them -- a full-automatic machine gun with lower-velocity bullets that can't penetrate apartment walls and floors, or a shotgun with small pellets, is arguably less of a hazard to innocents than a high-velocity single-shot rifle with bullets that can penetrate multiple walls. In thinly populated rural areas, pretty much anything should be allowed.

Post 23

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 2:53pm

I always thought Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned did a good job of what weapons of self defense to have and effectively use - including covering nukes.....

Post 24

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 3:06pm

John,

Would shooting galleries suffice? I've never shot an uzi. That does sound like fun!

Jim,

I'd say automatics and RPGs are generally off limits not only because their spray risks popping a few innocent bystanders, but also because they'll injure the perpetrator way more than needs be. After all, it's not always reasonable to kill or critically maime the bad guy. Sometimes all we need to do is shoot him in the leg, or maybe just wave the gun around menacingly. It would be brutish to choose killing over, say, firing a warning shot.

That said, I think your point regarding lower-velocity bullets is a good one. There are a number of less-lethal technologies with which we would effectively defend ourselves. I suppose the better weapon is one that can hit the right target with the the least amount of force needed to stop the attacker.

Jordan

Post 25

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 4:11pm

Well, I was always told use a Colt for the individual, a shotgun for the crowd in defending oneself..... these others, well, guess it would depend on the nature of the crowd...

Post 26

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 4:12pm

Jordan -- If you've received credible death threats from a large gang, a semi-auto might not be sufficient deterrence. And, it doesn't matter how fast a gun fires, or how many times you have to pull the trigger -- either the bullets can penetrate the walls, floor, or roof and enter into your neighbor's dwelling, or they can't. To take an extreme example, if you have a full-auto machine gun with a 200 round magazine with low-powered bullets in an apartment building with brick walls and reinforced floors and roof and windows with bulletproof glass that the bullets can't penetrate, then your neighbors are reasonably safe if you need to defend yourself even if you empty the magazine. And if you live alone in a rural area where your closest neighbor is a half-mile distant, than even an RPG or bazooka wouldn't pose a threat to innocent bystanders if you confronted an intruder in your house. OTOH, a Dirty Harry-style Magnum pistol only holds 6 shots, but even a single shot from it could pose a substantial risk to your neighbors if it was in a Japanese-style apartment building with paper sliding doors as partitions.

Basically, I don't think the government should be in the business of protecting criminals who have initiated force against you, they should be in the business of protecting innocent bystanders.

Post 27

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 6:36pm

I'm enjoying the humor here.

Granted a semi-auto is adequate for self-defense but automatic weapons are just a hella fun to shoot :)

And a fast way to expend ammo, too! On automatic an M16, the U.S. standard issue rifle, can empty a 20-round magazine in about 1.5 seconds.

if you have a full-auto machine gun with a 200 round magazine

A 200-round magazine? Don't you mean belt, such as for an M60? By the way, an M60 is not something to carry around shooting Rambo-style, unless you are Rambo. :-) An M60 weighs 23.1 pounds. The ammo would add more weight.

"The M60 is generally used as crew-served weapon and operated by a team of two or three men. The team consists of the gunner, the assistant gunner (A-gunner in military slang), and the ammunition bearer. The gun's weight and the amount of ammunition it consumes when fired make it difficult for a single soldier to carry and operate." (source)

Post 28

Monday, June 30, 2008 - 6:57pm

Ah - ye just gotta love Rambo...;-)

Post 29

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 5:20am

Jim,

In post #18 I think you had the clearest, sanest response to this issue. Which was to ask the question: "How do we draw the line between nukes and dull butter knives?" At this point we don't know.

Claiming private ownership of WMD "by right" seems like a kind of sterile and juvenile form of intellectual masturbation - I mean no one's right to live would have any meaning when common sense tells us that every city has any number of people that are either incompetent or malignant enough to guarantee that the entire population would most likely be toast in days. It would render the concept of rights nonsensical.

Bill may be on the right track. Possession of a weapon that is selective in its targeting as opposed to mass destruction is a good start to finding intelligent dividing lines.

I have no idea how to go any further except to say that anyone so willing, even enthusiastic in parting company with common sense while answers are still unknown is not doing any of us any good. The liberal whose laws get in my way of defending myself, (and makes it hard to get the butter on my toast) is an enemy of rights. But a kook with a private nuke is a mass murderer. Why would we want to see either of those positions associated with Objectivism?

That's what I really hate about this discussions.... Certainly not the intellectual challenges in parsing the principles, but rather the way it has to look to anyone considering Objectivist principles - "Oh, you mean those guys that argue everyone ought to own their own nukes." But it's even worse than that - just how big an umbrella is "Objectivism"?

If someone claims common sense and pretends they respect life while saying every dingleberry in the world has an inalienable, univeral, natural right to mess about with a nuclear weapon in their second bedroom... well, I think that person should be chucked permanently into that "Dissent" area - out of intellectual respect for the rest of us - as an issue of ROR intellectual integrity. Now, maybe that makes me an advocate of censorship - if so, throw me in there instead. Really! But this is one line we should start to draw - it's right in front of us - who are we? Advocates of reason or kooks?

Post 30

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 10:35am

Steve -- good post. Sanctioned it. I would, however, caution about being too quick to squelch dissent and opposing views. I think it is valuable to have people who stake out extreme positions, and then let the allegedly sensible people try to point out why that extreme view is wrong.

For example, KZ arguing that we should allow private ownership of nukes got me thinking about WHY that position seems intuitively wrongheaded. It lent some clarity about what critieria I would use to distinguish between allowing lesser weapons, and how that may or may not devolve by steps into the "dull butter knives kill people, ban 'em cause it's for Teh Childrunz" argument. Read an interesting link on Reason.com yesterday, arguing that the Second Amendment's wording does allow nukes, and that if that is obviously a bad thing, then the redress is to amend the Second, not allow a 5-4 decision by SCOTUS to do a de facto endaround on the Constitution.

We need our Mary Ruwarts, asking impertinent questions about the age of sexual consent. We may not want such people on the ballot, but individualists have a long and checkered history of chucking out dissenters who, gosh darn it, have excessively unique (dare we say "individual") ideas.

We need a big tent.

Post 31

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 10:54am

Jim,

I take your point from post #26. Here's to slow bullets!

Jordan

Post 32

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 11:08am

"A 200-round magazine? Don't you mean belt, such as for an M60? By the way, an M60 is not something to carry around shooting Rambo-style, unless you are Rambo. :-) An M60 weighs 23.1 pounds. The ammo would add more weight.

'The M60 is generally used as crew-served weapon and operated by a team of two or three men. The team consists of the gunner, the assistant gunner (A-gunner in military slang), and the ammunition bearer. The gun's weight and the amount of ammunition it consumes when fired make it difficult for a single soldier to carry and operate.' "

Merlin, I may have gotten my facts wrong. I recall playing one of the Rainbow 6 FPS (First Person Shooter) games a few years back, and for one episode in an urban multi-story building setting I recall having a choice of several machine guns, a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) or another big capacity gun. My (perhaps faulty) recollection was that at least one of them had a big round magazine, not a belt, of either 100 or 200 rounds.

Dunno if my recollection is faulty, or whether the game designers portrayed a belt-fed machine gun as one with a magazine to simplify the graphics. Perhaps someone here who knows far more about guns than I do would know if such a bad mofo of a weapon does in fact exist.

Post 33

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 1:02pm

Merlin, I may have gotten my facts wrong. I recall playing one of the Rainbow 6 FPS (First Person Shooter) games a few years back, and for one episode in an urban multi-story building setting I recall having a choice of several machine guns, a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) or another big capacity gun. My (perhaps faulty) recollection was that at least one of them had a big round magazine, not a belt, of either 100 or 200 rounds.

Jim, there are all kinds of machine guns around the world and most of what I know about them is from being in the U.S. Army 40 years ago. Most machine guns then were M60's (7.62 mm), with many mounted on helicopters. It started being replaced by the M240 and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW, 5.56 mm) in the late 1970's and 1980's. The M60 and M240 are belt-fed. The M249 is belt-fed or magazine-fed. I'd guess it's mostly used as belt-fed. From the same article:

"The M249 is an air-cooled, gas-operated, fully-automatic-only firearm that fires from an open bolt position. It can accept belts of linked 5.56x45mm NATO (.223) ammunition through the top-mounted feed tray or M16-type magazines through the side-mounted port. The latter allows a SAW gunner to use riflemens' magazines in an emergency if he runs out of belted ammunition, though this often causes jams as the magazine spring cannot adequately keep up with the weapon's high rate of fire."

There are two general kinds of magazines - box and drum. See here for some pictures of the former. Box magazines usually hold 20 or 30 rounds, although the article says 40-round ones do exist. Drum magazines ordinarily hold 50 to 100 rounds. It would not depend on a spring like a box magazine does. It seems drum magazines are rare, unless talking about Prohibition-era gangsters. See here.

So generally speaking 200 rounds implies a belt. Of course, the maker of a video game or movie can be creative and ignore practical reality. I vaguely recall in the Rambo movies that Rambo had the ammo belts wrapped around his body. Despite being twisted and constrained like that, somehow the ammo belt fed the gun without a glitch while he fired on automatic. :-)

Post 34

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 5:00pm

After googling pictures of the M249, I think what the gamemaker portrayed was an M249 with one of the underslung boxes as shown here:

http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w38/totaltacticalwarfare/Images/Models/M249Para.jpg

equipped with two boxes of 100 rounds each, which according to this:

http://www.enemyforces.com/firearms/m249.htm

is an available option (also has 200 round boxes). Basically, it IS a belt of ammo, but encased in a plastic box, which to a non-expert like me could be mistaken for a magazine.

Post 35

Tuesday, July 1, 2008 - 11:37pm

Actually, automatic weapons were necessary for the Korean grocers to protect their property against the rioters who were seeking to trash it in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. They needed the automatic weapons to repel the racist mobs who were seeking to torch their stores as they stood on top of their roofs trying to defend them.

You say that the right to bear arms should fall somewhere between rifles and handguns. Why? What's wrong with rifles? In certain cases, they can be more accurate than handguns.

- Bill

Post 36

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - 8:17am

I much prefer a rifle. It is a lot easier to shoot and handle than a handgun. I went to a gallery and shot several pistols and then tried the MP5 submachine gun, and I was able to have more control over the MP5 and my aim was a hell of a lot better. But your right Merlin in that the ammo cost me an arm and a leg, well not literally :)

Post 37

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - 9:18am

I looked up the MP5 here. At 800 rounds/min a 30-round magazine would empty in about 2.25 seconds and a 15-round magazine in half that time.

I note that the MP5A4 and MP5A5 have a three-shot burst firing mode. Also, per here the M16A2 (introduced in the 1980's) and (it seems) the M16A4 (now standard issue for front-line U.S. Marine Corps and some U.S. Army units) are not capable of full automatic but only 'burst automatic'. The M16A1 had the former but not the latter. 'Burst mode' or 'burst automatic' is another term to include in your arsenal :-) of knowledge.

From the article about the M16A2: "The action was also modified, replacing the fully-automatic setting with a three-round burst setting. When using a fully-automatic weapon, poorly trained troops often hold down the trigger and "spray" when under fire. The U.S. Army concluded that three-shot groups provide an optimum combination of ammunition conservation, accuracy and firepower."

Belt versus box magazine. Another distinction here seems to be how the rounds enter the chamber. With a belt the rounds are linked and are pulled into the chamber by the gun. With the box magazine the rounds are not linked and a spring in the magazine pushes the rounds into the chamber.
(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 7/02, 10:00am)

Post 38

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - 1:24pm

A handgun or a sawed-off shotgun can be the better choice for self-defense in close quarters. A rifle, while more accurate due to the longer barrel, means you have to deal with more weight and the extra length of the stock and barrel. People should be allowed to own either or both, and judge for themselves which works best for their specific needs.

Post 39

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 - 3:40pm