Tonight I discuss the gun legislation with a friend during dinner. He against the citizen are allow to own hand guns, and I take the default libertarian position to support citizen’s freedom to own guns. He initial argument is hand gun has no practical use, is dangerous and induce damage to things. I don’t want to use the self defense argument, so I try to counter his arguments one by one. I use the example of Ferreira racing car to demonstrate no practical use is not a necessary condition to make something illegal. Then I use archery to demonstrate something is dangerous in the wrong hands cannot justify the take it away from law binding citizens. Causing damage to things per se is nothing wrong, except when you start shooting irresponsibly. However, my friend made a very good point, hand gun is has all these three properties combined, only katana or medieval swords falls in this category to a certain extend. Then the discuss shifted to where to draw the line marking what’s legal and what’s not. Fully automatic and high power amour piercing guns is already illegal. Why should we extend the coverage to hand guns or even rifles but not katana? Who has the authority to draw this line? Should we simply use majority rules, so that the minority has to follow the majority regardless of their moral argument? I don’t have a good answer other than the plain old libertarian argument to support allowing citizens to guns. Maybe I will think a bit hard to justify the cause when I got my firearm license.
Owning a firearm without permit is prohibited. Gun is therefore illegal to own, without a license. I think the point isn’t so much whether it’s of practical use, dangerous or causing damage. You can basically use anything as a weapon if you wish. You can simply pick up a cleaver knife in the kitchen and it can achieve the same purpose. A very distinctive trait of firearm is that it can kill from a distance. Gun, being small and portability make it especially dangerous.
That’s why fully automatic guns is prohibited, it is too powerful. Semi-automatic is not that powerful and it is not that easy to kill someone from a distance, unless you are trained. If the government going to prohibit firearm, why not prohibit martial arts?