Oh, no…passengers with guns? - Gun Rights

The March/April 2002 column ("The real day of infamy?"), prompted an unusual amount of criticism and I thought I'd address some of it. My last article covered the events of 9/11 and suggested the airplanes would not likely have been hijacked and used as missiles had passengers been permitted to bear arms while flying.

The point was made as part of a more general argument that "Liberty is not just the condition for bad people to act, it is also the necessary condition for good people to act," and therefore, "Restricting liberty in hopes of rendering bad people harmless comes at the price of incapacitating good people and rendering them helpless." The unstated implication of my argument was that people should have the liberty of carrying arms -- yes, even on airplanes.

This provoked some passionate reaction. If people could carry on airplanes, the terrorists would also be armed. This would lead either to gun battles on board or to terrorists being armed while no one else was. How would that state of affairs guarantee safety? Better that a few trained sky marshals or pilots have arms and the rest of us be disarmed.

One reader wrote: "I grant you it is unfortunate that trained, armed, disguised officers were not on the planes on the morning of 9/11. Had they been, the results would have been, of course, much different. But I don't see how arming everybody makes us all safer. Somalia, where nearly every male is armed, is not a terribly safe place."

Another wrote: "Your premise is that if airplanes were not gun-free zones, armed passengers aboard the planes...would have been able to overpower the terrorists and prevent the event. But if the passengers could be armed, then so could the terrorists. In practical terms, who would decide which passengers could go aboard armed and which could not? The task would be unmanageable."

For many months now, this column has been used to examine the relationship between liberty and safety. If I've not been clear enough on this point, I will now try to be especially blunt: Liberty does not guarantee safety. If safety is what you want, you will continually forgo more and more liberty. If you think it's possible to establish and permanently hold onto some "reasonable" balance between the two, you are sorely mistaken.

Safety, when construed as the prevention of evil, is achieved by imposing prior restraints on people's conduct. Basically, by stopping them before they have done anything harmful, while still innocent of wrongdoing, if you will. Good and bad alike are equally restrained -- in order to control the bad.

This sort of safety is inconsistent with, and requires the destruction of liberty. In this sense, safety and liberty cannot both be pursued and cannot be "balanced." The maxim that no man can serve two masters applies. A choice must be made.

People find it very difficult to make a permanent choice in favor of liberty. Instead, they want to decide on a case-by-case basis. They desperately want safety and think people should be reasonable in giving up some liberty in order to have safety. It does not seem to them that it is a lot to ask; the restrictions often seem so minor. But often what's really at stake are conflicting ways of deciding what's right and what's wrong.

It is for this reason that the clashes over restrictions are often so heated, despite the seemingly small or relatively unobtrusive nature of the particular restraint or demand (like being asked to remove your shoes for airline security checks).

There are at least two ways of trying to decide what a proper course of conduct is. By far, the most common is to consider what result one wants and then to choose the means that seems, from experience, most calculated to secure that result. That choice is "good," meaning essentially, productive of the desired result. Courses of action that are actually counterproductive to the desired result are "bad." In general, this manner of deciding upon the goodness or badness or what action to take is known as having and exercising "prudence." Its ultimate goal is what Aristotle argued was man's greatest good -- happiness.

If safety in air travel is our goal, we might ask what the best course of action is to guarantee that result. As one of my readers surmised, that would be if all the bad guys were disarmed or could be assured of having only meager weapons like box cutters; while a handful of armed and trained certified good guys had guns with which to oppose them. Thus, safety seems assured and no one (on the airplane) has liberty or freedom to act except the agents of the state. A pretty good illustration of what the pursuit of safety inevitably leads to.

For example, if anyone can carry guns in public, that means that criminals will have them too. The criminals will respond to the threat of armed victims by banding together to attack in gangs or with even more powerful weapons in order to intimidate or kill their potentially armed victims. Thus, we are better off if everyone is disarmed, except for the police.