Wednesday, November 02, 2005

A good point

Anonymous captures one of the fundamental conundrums about (free or American) government: the right to keep and bear arms.

In a previous post, C0lumbusGuy asserted that government is based on a monopoly of the lethal use of force, and that law exists only where there is government. Anonymous argues, if this is so, then any RKBA country must not have law, since its citizens in fact have their own right to lethal force. (Apologies for missing the post until now.)

I think it's possible to generate any number of responses to this, in varying levels of technical interest, from the trivial, such as defining legitimate spheres of government and private action and assigning force rights accordingly, to the philosophical, such as, sovereignty resides in the people, not their government, so they are free to delegate pieces of it as they choose (this is what is used to justifiy federalism, the idea that we have two governments rather than one).

The more interesting, practial problem to RKBA, though, is that it is important only to the extent it enables rebellion (this is why the huntin' ducks motif is such a joke), but rebellion is a crime. Even if that's not a direct contradiction (and it's not), it's certainly in the direction of one.

Regardless, it's clear that Anonymous is thoughtful on the topic. PajamaGuy would be honored to have his definition of government; if it's not monopoly over force, what is it?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

web page hit counter