Conservative Consensus on Gun Control?

What, if anything, is the conservative position on gun control that is intellectually defensible?

I ask because I believe what distinguishes conservatism from today’s liberalism is the idea that principles — not just raw power — matter. As I see it, the tension between principle and policy is in everything we advocate and do, but nowhere in as sharp a relief as in the issue of the Second Amendment.

I am forced to conclude that as conservatives, we must advocate for a new constitutional amendment spelling out what rights individual citizens ought to have with respect to owning weapons.

As I see it, on the one hand, we must oppose any and all attempts to impose gun control by the government, including bans on military hardware up to and including nuclear weapons. There is no intellectually coherent way to interpret the Second Amendment differently.

I don’t feel particularly knowledgeable about the jurisprudence of the Second Amendment, so I would appreciate those who know more to educate me. Having said that, in a general sense, the other freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights have a basis in the Anglo-American common law tradition. The ideas of free speech, for example, has been something in place since the Magna Carta. Freedom of religion may not have been practiced in a firm we would recognize as such, but it existed as a philosophy for some time.

The Second Amendment, on the other hand, seems to be of a revolutionary character — it amounts to the rejection of the state’s monopoly on violence. Having just fought a war of rebellion against the legitimate government (under the theories of government in place in the 18th century), the Founders enshrined (IMHO) the idea that the people have a right to violence specifically against the government.

Today, we get wrapped up in whether the Second Amendment allows us to have handguns for self-defense or not, and so forth, but it seems there is no reasonable way to doubt that the spirit of the Second Amendment is to preserve the ability of the people to fight the government — specifically, the federal government.

That does mean, of course, in a principled Constitutionalist sense, that the Second Amendment does allow people to own F-15’s, main battle tanks, and nuclear cruise missiles.

Of course, it is patently ridiculous in the real world to advocate such a position. “Home defense nukes” just isn’t a sane point of view to hold in our world. If people think Ron Paul is kooky, imagine how conservatives would sound if we were advocating for private citizens to own artillery with chemical warheads.

While the Founders may have intended for the citizenry to have the ability to have a second Revolutionary War against the Federal United States should the need arise, they did not foresee the development of mechanized weapons, chemical and biological weapons, and other technology that simply does not allow the application of 18th century ideas.

Is this not the perfect situation for how we, as conservatives, should respond to actual changes in the real world when such changes make the Constitution outdated?

If we accept the various court rulings allowing for regulation of arms, how then do we coherently oppose various court rulings creating rights that do not exist, or abrogating rights that do exist?

Practically speaking, we can agree to accept regulation only as a temporary patch while we work towards a new Amendment to update the Second Amendment to the world we live in, as opposed to the world the Founders lived in back in the 18th century.

And the question we will need to answer is, What is the modern purpose of a freedom to own weapons? Is it still to preserve the ability to have a second Revolutionary War if the Federal United States becomes a tyranny? Or is it something else? Self-defense against criminals? Self-defense against local police/officials?

It would be useful to have consensus on these issues as an intellectual matter.

-TS