Gun Control Critical Analysis

¶ … Gun control and the regulation of fundamental rights, is written by Lance K. Stell. It was printed in Criminal Justice Ethics Journal in 2001. The writer has focused on fundamental rights of citizens and argues whether they are entitled to possession of guns or not. He refers to Aristotle and LaFollette and some other philosophers to gather his arguments and find adequate philosophical support for them. The author believes in the right to possess guns. But this is not clearly mentioned in the article and has to be extracted from reading between the lines.

The targeted audience for this article is students of public policy and philosophy since it contains regular references to great thinkers of ancient times and also discusses current policy on gun-control. The article discusses social control with reference to major philosophers and their views on gun-control.

The article is significant to students of public policy and philosophies who need to identify the intellectual reasons for advocating or opposing gun-control. While the article doesn't take extensive about current laws, it does focus on social control and how it can help us develop a better gun-control policy.

The strength of the article lies in its philosophical reasoning. To say that gun-control laws must be passed because firearms incidents are the rise or that certain number of students were killed in a school doesn't really sound like an intellectually driven argument. The author therefore refers to Aristotle and Lafollette to explain the logic behind gun-control laws or lack of the same. The author begins by discussing Aristotle's views on gun-control. He states that Aristotle felt that government must always employ people from the class of citizens who have the right to bear arms such as the warriors. But Aristotle then went on to argue with Hippodamus about his theory on gun-control stating that if only one class was allowed to possess arms, the rest wouldn't remain loyal to the state. Aristotle's views thus appear shaky and the author agrees that "the thought is essentially confused. It denies what it affirms -- equality of citizenship but inequality of citizenship-constitutive rights -- precisely the incoherence of which Hippodamus was guilty." The other thinker whose views are incorporated at length is LaFollette. According to Lafollette, it was important to first decide if guns served any real public interest. Laws of gun-control, to him, was not only an issue of whether we should support or oppose gun control "but to decide who can own which guns under what conditions.'" Subsequently he concluded that "I see no compelling reason to think that owning a gun is a fundamental interest."

The philosopher saw no major reason to argue in favor of gun-possession and felt that since it was not a serious-citizenship-rights matter, it ought to be discussed on moral grounds. And morally, he assumed, gun-possession didn't serve any social or public interest. Another good aspect of the discussion was reference to empirical data. The author has used less anecdotal evidence and has referred to empirical data from Department of Justice to support his arguments against gun-control.

The weaknesses of the article are numerous. For one, the author never mentions his stance on the issue clearly. It can only be extracted from various points raised by the author in the article such as " ... If fundamental rights should, as far as reasonably possible, have equal value to their possessors, then the state has a duty not to prohibit possession of "equalizers," especially since it recognizes no duty whatsoever to protect any individual from violent victimization." Secondly it appeared absolutely unnecessary to include Aristotle's views when they failed to bring any valuable point to the discussion. The author also fails to reach sound conclusions. The notes provide some background information on vital issues such as strict gun-control and general gun-control but since these points are not mentioned within the text, the notes do not account for much. The author doesn't recognize weaknesses of his article though he mentions the futility of Aristotle's views.