The right to bear arms is a human right.

Northfield, Minnesota residents use personal arms to foil an 1876 bank robbery attempt. (Credit: Minnesota Historical Society)
David Hogg, survivor of the 2017 Parkland high school shooting and founder of the gun control advocacy group March For Our Lives, is being hosted by the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum for a dinner program on February 4th. This appearance was sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights. This is an ostensibly reasonable decision and not much of a surprise. Supporters of additional firearm regulations often argue their position buttresses human rights. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, has argued that firearm regulations are not a violation of civil rights–albeit with exceptions. David Hogg himself has stated that Americans “have no right to a gun.” This framing ignores the nature of the Second Amendment and the history of gun control, both in the United States and globally.
Referencing the nation’s most successful firearms manufacturer, a 19th-century-tagline quipped “God created men, Sam Colt made them equal.” Indeed, civilian owned firearms have historically served as a great equalizer, a tool for the oppressed to resist their oppressors and victims to resist crime. In particular, women have benefitted from carrying firearms for self-defense.
When despots have sought to roll back human rights, they have inevitably targeted gun rights. The disarming of the oppressed has augured the coming of totalitarianism. Bolshevik Russia disarmed its populace before the Red Terror. Nazi Germany disarmed its Jewish population on the eve of the Holocaust. The Chinese Communist Party and Cambodian Khmer Rouge presided over disarmaments that paved the way for both nation’s killing fields.
For most of American history, white supremacists have used gun control to enforce racial tyranny. A particularly egregious 1825 Florida law authorized all white men to seize firearms in free Black possession. The United States witnessed a wave of gun control legislation several years later in response to the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion. In his majority opinion in the notorious Dred Scott v. Sanford, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued against the notion of Black citizenship on the grounds that this would entail to them the right to bear arms. In doing so, Taney recognizes a right to bear arms as a human right in the process of denying it.
Gun rights were restored to Black Americans along with other civil rights during Reconstruction. The state of Texas recognized the right to bear arms as a racist regime in 1859. Texas revoked its recognition of the right to bear arms during Reconstruction when the state was forced to extend dignity to each of its citizens. Explicitly colorblind gun control statutes were a key part of Southern racial tyranny. One Florida Supreme Court Justice wrote in 1941 of a handgun registration law “never intended to be applied to the white population.” In turn, those challenging Jim Crow recognized gun ownership as a human right. Anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells noted that Black Americans turned to firearms for the defense denied them by an unjust legal system.
This is not to argue that modern gun control legislation stems from racist or totalitarian motives. Yet, those that push for gun control, including Hogg, typically recognize the existence of systemic racial biases. They entrust these very institutions to oversee restrictions. This dissonance is particularly strong in those who seek to eliminate firearms from circulation entirely. A state program of disarmament would be the only means to remove guns from the societal sphere of a nation with more firearms than people. Doing so would empower these flawed institutions and be contrary to the very foundations of our republic. The task of disarming America’s most vulnerable would necessarily fall to the very institutions that have perpetuated racial inequalities.
The very concept of human rights begins with the inviolability of human life. From time immemorial, the English tradition and its American successor have recognized the importance of self-defense as the defense of that very inviolability and firearms as legitimate instruments of self-defense. The possession of tools of self-defense thus deserves recognition as a fundamental human right. History shows we ought to be wary of those who seek to take them away.
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