Kicking the Liberals' Teeth In

[Selene]

Carol:

I can understand my name being on your finger tips as you type, but were you not addressing Mr. Coates?

Adam

[caroljane]

Carol:

I can understand my name being on your finger tips as you type, but were you not addressing Mr. Coates?

Adam

Yes. I was reading too hastily. Mea maxima culpa. This is likely the only time you will ever be confused with Phil. But that I thought you made the same comment that he did, is something of a tribute to both of you, n'est-ce pas?

[Brant Gaede]

Carol:

I can understand my name being on your finger tips as you type, but were you not addressing Mr. Coates?

Adam

Carol was the first to realize that you and Phil are the same person. It's still hard to believe; the deception is that good!

--Brant

[caroljane]

Carol:

I can understand my name being on your finger tips as you type, but were you not addressing Mr. Coates?

Adam

Carol was the first to realize that you and Phil are the same person. It's still hard to believe; the deception is that good!

--Brant

Carol:

I can understand my name being on your finger tips as you type, but were you not addressing Mr. Coates?

Adam

Carol was the first to realize that you and Phil are the same person. It's still hard to believe; the deception is that good!

--Brant

Good lord, you could be right! Have they ever been seen together? The schoolmarm spankings...ooohh....love/hate....evil twins...lizards from... no!! go awayy!!

[caroljane]

Actually, Phadam, I wanted to ask a question about the title of this topic. Was it just a reflexive caption for the political and pr wars which as we all know are vicious and kick in more sensitive parts than teeth? Or does it express a visceral wish to defeat and make suffer those who don't agree with our politics?

[Philip Coates]

Dear Cadaunce,

The title represents my declining effort here at coming up with good titles.

[caroljane]

Dear Cadaunce,

The title represents my declining effort here at coming up with good titles.

Well, that's a relief. I get easily alarmed at threats to teeth, since I spent most of my childhood brushing mine under severe tutelage and enduring torture at our medieval dentist's. There was nothing wrong with my teeth beyond the usual cavities, but my mother was paranoid on the subject since she unfortunately had bad ones and lost them at a young age. I still have all mine and they will probably see me out, but just the thought of them being kicked in due to my political views is alarming to a timid soul such as myself.

[Philip Coates]

Point taken. I can try to come up with better titles in the future, but my making an effort or 'editing' my posts is contingent on people once in a while commenting on the -good- points I make or posts I make, not just looking for any flaws.

Try to do better or I'll have to do a root canal....

[syrakusos]

First, I object to "liberal" as a pejorative. Hayek and Friedman both identified with it. ... That said, I must object to the kicking in of peoples' teeth, liberals like Hayek and Friedman most especially.

In the Froma Harrop topic, I made my point about "liberals" (so-called) versus "conservatives" (so-called). I find too much verbiage on boards here and elsewhere that are nominally objectivist, Objectivist, or libertarian, which patter I can only call "crypto-fascist." Taking a cue from Ayn Rand totally out of context, they align with Big Business against Labor, with America versus the World (militarily), with Western culture versus the World (philosophically). Myself, I deny the validity of such dichotomies.

Ayn Rand suggested that capital punishment is moral, but perhaps not practical, and left it to jurisprudence of the future to decide the issue. That much is easy for the "God, Guns, and Gold" gang to accept, even as they justify the continuing murders perpetrated by governments of Texas, Georgia, Iran, and China. But there is no basic acceptance of Ayn Rand's suggestion that if the police have a legal monopoly on force, then handguns might best be illegal. Not at all. The "God, Guns, and Gold" gang insists on everyone's right to self-defense. It is a good Lockean argument. I might agree. But it is not what Ayn Rand said on the matter. And she got her specific language from the German sociologist Max Weber. (I will be blogging about this myself later in the week.) Weber's essay "Politics as a Calling" went beyond John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" in defining the purpose of government -- and Weber quoted Trotsky to make his point.

To me, these are all ideas worth pursuing. I find them interesting and relevant. What I do not find is much consonance with my own thoughts on boards such as this, where conservatives gather to kick in the teeth of liberals.

If you stop to think about it, you don't find a lot boards where mathematicians, or physicists or WHO epidemiologists gather to do violence to the advocates of theories which they find weak in peer support. I think that the difference is that in science, we actually have standards of truth, but in politics (and religion), we do not. Most of what passes for "philosophy" here and on similar forums is just religion and politics.

[Peter]

Michael E. Marotta wrote:

But there is no basic acceptance of Ayn Rand's suggestion that if the police have a legal monopoly on force, then handguns might best be illegal. Not at all. The "God, Guns, and Gold" gang insists on everyone's right to self-defense.

end quote

I want to thank Michael for his thought provoking letters and nuanced reasoning.

I am not picking and choosing which parts of the Constitution have "authority" over me and which do not. However, I place my moral authority over that of the Constitution, or authority in any form. It is not a slippery slope toward Anarchism or lawlessness. I would expect to pay the consequences if I were caught harboring an escaped slave in America in 1840. I would ALWAYS attempt to evade detection from any despotic government like Nazi Germany if I were harboring Anne Frank. However, from our government my inclination would be to make my civil disobedience a test case.

Though the Constitution places the retaliatory use of force in the hands of the government or its law enforcement branches and auxiliaries, downwards from the military, to the FBI, to State militias, County and City enforcement all the way through to private security firms, and finally with the individual in an emergency as long as force is only being employed in retaliation. The right to bear arms is the proof for this final, individual link of the chain of legal force. The Private Security Firm and the individual can only employ the retaliatory use of force in an emergency if the emergency affected them.

Just what constitutes emergency situations is another great topic.

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor

Notes.

This is a personal page belonging to Richard Lawrence. If you are looking for the Objectivism Reference Center, go here:

Ayn Rand on Gun Control: An Investigation

Background

In the spring of 2001, a dispute arose on the newsgroup humanities.philosophy.objectivism over the question of what, if anything, Ayn Rand had ever written about the subject of gun control. While it was clear to all involved that there were no major, well-known passages that were explicitly about this topic, some people maintained that the topic had been covered in some more obscure location in Rand's writings. However, these people could never specify exactly where this passage could be found.

To help resolve this controversy, I searched Ayn Rand's writings for words and phrases that might be related to gun control, using the Objectivism Research CD-ROM (available at either Objectivism.net or The Ayn Rand Bookstore). This CD contains all of Rand's major writings, including all of the essays she wrote for The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter, her columns for the Los Angeles Times, and her Letters and Journals. If a comment by Rand about gun control exists in any of these sources, it should be possible to find it using the CD's search tools. The relatively small number of selections not contained on the CD, such as the short stories from The Early Ayn Rand, are not likely to contain any comments on gun control -- and in most cases are positively known by this author not to contain any such comments.

The results of my searches were as described below.

Findings

First, a few quick technical notes to help with the interpretation of the results: The search hits listed for each word or phrase are the total hits, including any duplications caused by the reprinting of material in multiple places. For example, a single essay might have originally been in The Objectivist Newsletter and then reprinted in one or more of Rand's books. These counts also include the writings of Leonard Peikoff that are included on the CD-ROM. The search function looks for an exact match to whole words, so that variants of the same word, such as "gun" and "guns," can produce different hits. Finally, searches are case-insensitive. For example, "Second Amendment" and "second amendment" would be equivalent. Now, on to the results.

The following search terms produced no matches at all:

"gun control"

"weapons control"

"control of weapons"

"weapons restrictions"

"restrictions on weapons"

"firearm"

"second amendment"

The following search terms produced hits as described:

"guns" -- 40 hits. Many of these were obviously irrelevant, such as a character in Atlas Shrugged describing the "naval guns" shooting at Ragnar Danneskjold. "Guns" was also frequently used as a metaphor for the use of force in general. The following mentions were the closest to being relevant:

A minor character in Atlas Shrugged mentions "hunting guns" (along with "fishing tackle" and "snapshot cameras") as one of the "amusement" items for which workers didn't get any money at 20th Century Motor Company. The inclusion of hunting guns along with other inoffensive items could be taken to suggest that Rand considered the use of guns for hunting to be normal and inoffensive.

The following remark from the title essay of For the New Intellectual:

No advocate of reason can claim the right to force his ideas on others. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others. No rational society, no co-operation, no agreement, no understanding, no discussion are possible among men who propose to substitute guns for rational persuasion.

If men of good will wish to come together for the purpose of upholding reason and establishing a rational society, they should begin by following the example of the cowboys in Western movies when the sheriff tells them at the door to a conference room: "Gentlemen, leave your guns outside."

At least one reader took this comment to suggest that police authorities have a role of restricting gun possession in some situations. However, the word "guns" in this passage is clearly a metaphor for force in general, and the situation described does not appear to be intended as literal advice for sheriffs dealing with cowboys.

"gun" -- 49 hits, again mostly irrelevant. The most relevant passages were the following:

In The Fountainhead, a major character owns a handgun and considers committing suicide with it. Rand's narrative of this incident does not include any suggestion that there is anything unusual or wrong about him having a gun.

In Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden carries a handgun: "He carried a gun in his pocket, as advised by the policemen of the radio car that patrolled the roads; they had warned him that no road was safe after dark, these days." Passing over the irony that Rand has the police in a highly collectivist state advising a private individual to carry a gun, there is nothing in this passage to suggest support for gun control. It could be interpreted to suggest the opposite, since Rand has one of her heros carrying a privately owned gun, and even contemplating (later in the passage) its use against the police. (In subsequent passages of the novel, other of Rand's heros, including Dagny Taggart and Francisco D'Anconia, use guns. However, in the later parts of the novel the culture has broken down into open armed conflict, so these passages are not as clearly relevant to the question of carrying arms in a peaceful society.)

The following remarks from the Journals of Ayn Rand: "With modern technique and modern weapons at its disposal, a ruthless minority can hold millions in slavery indefinitely. What can one thousand unorganized, unarmed men do against one man with a machine gun?" This passage could be taken to suggest that weapons in individuals' hands are necessary to fight against tyranny (an argument sometimes used against gun control). However, it says nothing about the role of guns in a free society, so could be considered off-point.

"bear arms" (as in, "the right to keep and ...") -- 1 hit, from the Letters of Ayn Rand, in a letter to a Mr. Flynn: "A man has a constitutional right to bear arms. But if a man has declared that he intends to murder you, it is not your duty to provide the knife and place it in his hands." This is the only instance I could find where the subject of a right to bear arms was directly mentioned. However, Rand only mentions in passing (on her way to an analogy) that such a right exists in the Constitution. She does not expound at all on what this right might involve.

"objective control" (this phrase was included due to its frequent use by those who claimed that Rand did support gun control) -- 6 hits, all duplications of matches from two essays (these essays appear in multiple places, hence the duplication of hits):

"The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man's rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man's right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control" (From "What Is Capitalism?")

"A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control, i.e., under objectively defined laws." (From "The Nature of Government")

These passages make no specific mention of the content of those objectively defined laws, and thus offer no direct support for or opposition to gun control.

"weapons" -- 61 hits, mostly mentions of "intellectual weapons" (or some similar phrase) or weapons in a military context. See the entries for "gun" above for the only passage that had any relevance to the specific issue of gun control.

"firearms" -- 4 hits, none even remotely relevant. Three are from fictional scenes where people are carrying firearms. One is from a hypothetical scenario in Leonard Peikoff's book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and therefore not from Rand's pen at all. Even in this case, the subject under discussion is epistemology, not law. (Firearms are mentioned as a clue in a hypothetical effort to solve a crime.)

All of the passages indicated above require substantial interpretation -- to the point of distortion, in my opinion -- in order to make them into direct comments on gun control. At best they contain indirect hints at what Rand's views might have been.

Expanding the phrase searches to include the "NEAR" operator -- that is, to look for cases where one word was near the other, rather than right next to it -- produced exactly two additional hits. One was a use of the word "second" in a sentence after one that mentioned the First "Amendment." This find was obviously not relevant. The other new hit was the following passage, produced by searching "objective NEAR control":

"The rest is a matter of consistent implementation -- the first step of which is to delegate to the government the right to use force in retaliation, and only in retaliation. (This is necessary in order to take the homicidal power, force, out of the reach of human whims and human irrationality, and place it under the control of objective laws.)" (From "A Nation's Unity" in The Ayn Rand Letter)

This passage offers essentially the same level of discussion as the two previously quoted passages on "objective control" -- which is to say that it offers nothing specific about gun control per se.

Conclusions

Earlier claims notwithstanding, no passages could be found showing explicit support for gun control -- or any explicit position about gun control, for that matter. As a whole, the comments about guns that were found provide weak evidence that Rand opposed gun control. Rand refers to a "right to bear arms," a phrase more common to opponents of gun control than to its supporters. She also portrays characters in her fiction owning and using guns without any negative commentary or repercussions to those characters. However, any position on gun control that might be gathered from this indirect evidence would be an implied one, which is not a very good substitute for an explicit and detailed position statement. Such a detailed statement was apparently never offered by Rand, at least not in any of her published writings.

Updates

February 2003

Since placing this essay on the site, I have gotten several emails about it. Typically, those who write want to argue that even though Rand didn't say anything explicit about gun control, other aspects of her philosophy make it clear what her position would be. Unfortunately, these authors disagree on what this supposedly obvious conclusion is. Some say that her championing of the individual and opposition to statism lead naturally to an anti-gun-control position. Other say that her description of government as having "a monopoly on the legal use of physical force" implicitly supports a pro-gun-control position.

Regardless of whether one believes either of these arguments, the point of my essay stands: Rand did not write down any explicit position on the issue of gun control. Other authors are free to extend or apply her other ideas to produce a conclusion about gun control, but this does not constitute proof that Rand would have agreed with their arguments.

Beyond these speculative arguments, two additional pieces of evidence have been brought to my attention since this research was done:

In the November 1980 issue of The Intellectual Activist, Peter Schwartz published the article "Guns and Knee-jerkism," which criticized gun control. Although Rand did not have any direct editorial control over TIA, she did know Schwartz personally, and she endorsed the magazine in a speech delivered in November 1981. It is unlikely that she would have given such an endorsement if Schwartz was publishing material that she had serious disagreements with. This is an indication that Rand also opposed gun control.

In a discussion of this subject on a newsgroup, I was told that Rand was asked about gun control during a recorded interview with Edwin Newman. She declined to state a firm conclusion, but said that her initial thought was that she did not see any reason why personal gun ownership should be prohibited. I do not have a copy of this recording, so I have been unable to confirm Rand's exact statements.

Anyone with specific information (not speculation) to offer is encouraged to send it to me. An email link is provided at the bottom of the page. I will incorporate any findings to future updates of this page.

[9thdoctor]

Anyone with specific information (not speculation) to offer is encouraged to send it to me. An email link is provided at the bottom of the page. I will incorporate any findings to future updates of this page.

There’s a Q&A on the subject, I think from one of her FHF talks, though there wasn't much to it. She said she was not opposed to a firearm registration system, that’s all I remember about it. It wasn’t a firm answer at all.

[Selene]

Folks:

IF, Ayn was for any type of gun control, she would have been, and would be now wrong.

First of all, gun control has never worked anywhere. I can make a gun in my basement. I can make an automatic with the machinery we have.

Secondly, my crossbow is quite silent and quite lethal.

Finally, the mechanism required to enforce a ban on guns will only create an underground market which will run to the sounds of profit.

Adam

[Brant Gaede]

Anyone with specific information (not speculation) to offer is encouraged to send it to me. An email link is provided at the bottom of the page. I will incorporate any findings to future updates of this page.

There’s a Q&A on the subject, I think from one of her FHF talks, though there wasn't much to it. She said she was not opposed to a firearm registration system, that’s all I remember about it. It wasn’t a firm answer at all.

She wasn't strong on self defense and an armed populace to counter tyranny. That's because, I think, of her European background, sex and emphasis on ethics instead of rights. I give her a pass on this, however, and a lot of other stuff.

--Brant

fill in the blanks, respect the times--and our time

[caroljane]

Folks:

IF, Ayn was for any type of gun control, she would have been, and would be now wrong.

First of all, gun control has never worked anywhere. I can make a gun in my basement. I can make an automatic with the machinery we have.

Secondly, my crossbow is quite silent and quite lethal.

Finally, the mechanism required to enforce a ban on guns will only create an underground market which will run to the sounds of profit.

Adam

Traffic lights don't work either, nor seatbelts nor driver licencing, since people will always run the red lights unbuckled while driving without a license, sometimes in a stolen car.

[Brant Gaede]

Folks:

IF, Ayn was for any type of gun control, she would have been, and would be now wrong.

First of all, gun control has never worked anywhere. I can make a gun in my basement. I can make an automatic with the machinery we have.

Secondly, my crossbow is quite silent and quite lethal.

Finally, the mechanism required to enforce a ban on guns will only create an underground market which will run to the sounds of profit.

Adam

Traffic lights don't work either, nor seatbelts nor driver licencing, since people will always run the red lights unbuckled while driving without a license, sometimes in a stolen car.

You are both wrong. It has to do with the meaning of "worked."

--Brant

[Selene]

The state has no right to deprive the individual of his/her innate right to protect their life, liberty and property with the available tools, one of which is a firearm.

I understand your point about using the word work, I included it to create the basis for the argument I expected to be presented.

Adam

[Robert3750]

On 1/17/2012 at 10:22 AM, Selene said:

The state has no right to deprive the individual of his/her innate right to protect their life, liberty and property with the available tools, one of which is a firearm.

I understand your point about using the word work, I included it to create the basis for the argument I expected to be presented.

Adam

 

Sorry to post on a very old thread, but I only recently found this forum.  I'm thinking of this statement from Jon Galt's speech in AS:

Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.

It was always made clear by Rand and others that morality doesn't change due to numbers, ie if it's wrong for one man to rob another, then it's wrong for 10, 100, a million men to rob one man or group of men.  Therefore, it's as wrong for government to initiate force as it is for one man to do so.  With regard to gun registration, on what basis could the government compel it?  Simply purchasing a gun does not initiate force.  The purchase is a purely voluntary act involving no force or fraud.  Therefore, the registration is not a retaliation against anything.  It is, in fact, an initiation of force.  Therefore, registration violates the principle of non-initiation stated by Galt (Rand).