Morally, it is the inalienable right of an innocent individual – one who initiates neither force nor fraud – to own weapons, including guns. Practically, honest persons are then better equipped to defend themselves against criminal assault. Further, we maintain that there is an even more important practical reason for honest men and women to own and to know how to use guns: The ability to defend their rights and lives against a government devolving into dictatorship. History shows that oppressive regimes such as Nazi Germany or Cambodia, imposed stringent gun control laws over their citizens before imposing complete dictatorships.
Not surprisingly, history also shows that disarmed civilians are powerless to protect themselves against a dictator’s murderous atrocities—but that armed civilians, prepared and able to defend their rights and lives, stand a vastly greater chance of survival. Two concrete examples will be illustrative of this point: Hitler refused to fight Switzerland despite the fact that conquering it would’ve made victory over Europe far easier. His reasoning? Every male of fighting age owned a military grade weapon. This fact made the Swiss a formidable obstacle Hitler chose to avoid. In the same vein, the men and women of the Warsaw Ghetto held off an entire Nazi Panzer unit for over a month with a handful of firearms and homemade explosives.
We therefore maintain that a civilian populace, armed and proficient in the use of guns, forms an effective bulwark against foreign invaders and domestic tyrants, and that this deterrent, even in the 21st century, cannot be underestimated.
There are those who maintain that the right to bear arms should extend to weapons of warfare (the moral and legal province of the state) and that if individuals could afford such weapons as Howitzers, rocket launchers, and atomic weapons, they should not be barred from owning them.
Our position is that this conclusion is deeply irrational. One’s self-defense does not include the capacity to hold entire neighborhoods, cities or states hostage. Individual self-defense against the spontaneous violence of the criminal element in society does not require the capacity to level a city. It requires the tools necessary to save oneself from the forms of criminal violence one would actually confront. Our standard respecting the types of weapons any individual should be able to possess, is whatever the police use. Since the police only face what civilians face (and often after the fact) the civilian should have the right to equip himself with the weapon that fits the threat. Just as any police officer does. In practical terms this means that bans on ‘assault’ type weapons – often used by police during the total breakdown of civil order- are unconstitutional and should not be allowed.
To sum up, we recognize two points: 1) that different criminal scenarios require different weapons to effectively engage those threats, and that this reality precludes bans on all guns; We remind our reader that though a proper society delegates retaliatory force to the state, all self-defense scenarios occur when the possibility of deferring to that delegation is impossible. The innocent victim, left to his own devices in an emergency, should not be inhibited by the state from defending himself in the most efficient way possible. 2) We must never conflate warfare with the spontaneous violence of one individual or group against an innocent victim, but rather must understand that warfare is one state against another state; a whole people against another whole people and that no weapon of mass warfare can be categorized as falling under the Second Amendment.