Against Gun Bans and Restrictive Licensing

Hsiao, Timothy

doi:10.7710/1526-0569.1531

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This is supposed to be because such a policy violates the right of some to self-defense, and violating weighty rights is only justified when very great gains can be made by doing so. Similar arguments have been endorsed by (perhaps among others) Timothy Hall (2006), Deane Peter-Baker (2014), Timothy Hsiao (2015), and Lester H. Hunt (2016). We think our reasoning is applicable to all variants of the argument, but we will focus on Huemer's formulation, because we think it is one of the argument's more prominent and compelling statements.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…Outside special circumstances (for which whatever provisions are feasible should be made), this means that a gun control policy need only make people safer on average in order to be justifiable from the perspective of protecting the right to security. Of course, there are other arguments against gun control-for instance, from the claim that it would actually backfire and increase crime, or from the autonomy of gun owners (Huemer 2003: §3;Hsiao 2015), or from the recreational value of guns (Huemer 2003: §4.1), or from the supposed role of public gun ownership in preventing tyranny (Wheeler 1999). But Huemer considers the self-defense argument the "main argument on the gun rights side" (2003: 306), and it is the one we will focus on.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gun Control, the Right to Self-Defense, and Reasonable Beneficence to All

Crummett¹,

Swenson²

2019

Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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One of the strongest arguments against the implementation of gun control measures is that such measures violate the right to self-defense or security against attack. The argument, defended by Michael Huemer and others, claims that even if a particular gun control measure has good results overall, it infringes, in a manner which is prima facie seriously wrong, the rights of those who end up being killed or significantly harmed due to their resultant inability to defend themselves. We claim that uncertainty on the part of the government about who will be harmed by a particular gun control measure underwrites a strong response to this argument. If gun control measures save lives on balance, then they may increase each person's chance of remaining safe relative to the information available to the government, even if they will cause some people to be harmed who otherwise would not have been. We draw on Caspar Hare's arguments for the claim that there are no conflicts between morality and reasonable beneficence to contend that this fact would vindicate gun control policies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gun Control, the Right to Self-Defense, and Reasonable Beneficence to All

Crummett¹,

Swenson²

2019

Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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“…(Wheeler 2001, 21-22, emphasis in the original) Jeff McMahan (2015) has asserted that the empirical premise gun advocates must defend is that "members of society as a whole are safer when more of them have guns." David DeGrazia (2014) argues against gun rights as empirical evidence suggests handgun ownership is on average self-defeating because it increases net risk for the owner, while Timothy Hsiao (2015), Michael Huemer (2019), and Lester Hunt (2016) have argued that even if widespread public gun possession should be shown increase the overall risk to society, individuals have an undefeated right to defend themselves with guns when it would improve their personal security interests. Likewise, for both gun control and gun rights advocates, the right to arms for the sake of resisting political oppression is typically thought to be predicated on how effective guns are at protecting a population's rights against their government or an oppressive majority (Crummett 2021;Wheeler 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defense with dignity: how the dignity of violent resistance informs the Gun Rights Debate

Demetriou

2022

Philos Stud

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Perhaps the biggest disconnect between philosophers and non-philosophers on the question of gun rights is over the relevance of arms to our dignitary interests. This essay attempts to address this gap by arguing that we have a strong prima facie moral right to resist with dignity and that violence is sometimes our most or only dignified method of resistance. Thus, we have a strong prima facie right to guns when they are necessary often enough for effective dignified resistance. This approach is distinctively non-libertarian: it doesn't justify gun rights on the basis of (mere) liberty or security. Nonetheless it is compatible with libertarian defenses of gun rights based on a liberty right to guns, and, if sound, in fact lowers the bar for gun rights in some ways, as it justifies access to guns even when nonviolent means would better achieve the liberty or security aims of potential victims. And although this defense of gun rights is most readily categorized as "conservative" or rightist, it relies upon principles and intuitions about dignity popular among progressives in other domains, such as in disability, women's, or LGBT rights debates.

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Gun Violence as Industrial Pollution

Metcalf¹

2018

Public Affairs Quarterly

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I offer a new proposal to prevent some of the harms of gun violence in the United States. First, I argue that gun violence is a negative externality of gun production, on an analogy with industrial pollution. Second, I outline a law that the United States might use to internalize the violent costs of gun production. This law would provide a financial incentive for gun manufacturers to reduce gun violence in whatever legally permissible way they can, not necessarily by reducing the prevalence of gun ownership. Thus, strictly speaking, my proposal would be a form of gun violence control, not gun control per se. Third, I show that this approach to controlling gun violence avoids the three main pro-gun-rights arguments: the Consequentialistic Argument, the Moral Rights Argument, and the Legal Rights Argument. I conclude by explaining why even libertarians should have few principled objections to my proposal.

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Against Gun Bans and Restrictive Licensing

Cited by 3 publications

References 18 publications

Gun Control, the Right to Self-Defense, and Reasonable Beneficence to All

Gun Control, the Right to Self-Defense, and Reasonable Beneficence to All

Defense with dignity: how the dignity of violent resistance informs the Gun Rights Debate

Gun Violence as Industrial Pollution

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