The Right to Own a Gun Is the Right to Own Yourself

The following argument also applies to those who believe that God owns you instead of the government.  Modern statists do not want any competition for your loyalties, including God.

There are many angles to the debate over whether people have the right to keep and bear arms. Gun control advocates like to bicker and haggle over the meaning of the Second Amendment even when our rights exist outside of paper documents. When that doesn’t work they resort to social utility arguments about what’s best for the “good of society.” Or they create propaganda painting gun owners as dangerous anti-social psychopaths.

But all of this is irrelevant and ignores the fundamental question.

Who owns you?

Liberty lovers understand and cherish the principle of self-ownership. That is, that every individual has property in themselves.

They, not the government, are sovereign.

Because people own themselves, they have the right to use the legitimate amount of force or violence necessary to protect themselves against harm as long as they do not violate the rights of others in the process. The debate over modern firearms as the means of self-defense is merely a reflection of our technological advances. People do not debate whether we can own swords or bows and arrows because they are primitive compared to the power of a semi-automatic rifle or pistol. If this debate were to take place 400 years ago they would have been relevant.

As a result, people must be able to adequately match a potential threat with equal or greater force. As technology changes so does the means by which we defend ourselves.

The Second Amendment directly acknowledges the right to keep and bear arms, but it tacitly acknowledges the right to self-defense and by extension the right of self-ownership.

Beneath all their rhetoric and doublespeak and Orwellian terminology gun control advocates do not believe people ultimately own themselves. They believe the government owns them.

Such a claim sounds radical or melodramatic but it makes sense once you closely examine their perspective and their arguments. When they say people shouldn’t be allowed to own certain weapons or they “don’t need them,” they aren’t talking about the government as well. They are talking about private individuals. They speak as though government has the final say on what a person needs in order to protect themselves.

More importantly, when they say “you don’t need” a certain weapon much of the following rationale for that argument revolves around the claim that law enforcement is sufficient to protect you from harm.

Let’s put aside for a moment that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment was to ensure the people could overthrow a tyrannical government. The inevitable conclusion one must arrive from the argument that you don’t need a gun because the government has the sufficient means to protect you is that they have final authority regarding the defense of citizens because it owns them. In other words, the government has total control over what people are allowed to use to legitimately defend themselves.

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