March 16, 2026
Arguments about the right to own guns often turn out to be arguments about the meaning of the "right to keep and bear arms" in the Second Amendment. These debates are important, and I will say something about them later, but there is an even more essential issue.
As libertarians, we believe that people have rights. Each person owns himself and his legitimately acquired property. And if people have these rights, they have the right to defend them. If you have a "right" to free speech, for example, but don't have the right to stop someone who is using force to prevent you from speaking, your "right" doesn't amount to much.
As the great Murray Rothbard has said, "If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal aggressors. But for some odd reason, liberals have systematically tried to deprive innocent persons of the means for defending themselves against aggression. It should be clear that no physical object is in itself aggressive; any object, whether it be a gun, a knife, or a stick, can be used for aggression, for defense, or for numerous other purposes unconnected with crime. It makes no more sense to outlaw or restrict the purchase and ownership of guns than it does to outlaw the possession of knives, clubs, hatpins, or stones. And how are all of these objects to be outlawed, and if outlawed, how is the prohibition to be enforced ? Instead of pursuing innocent people carrying or possessing various objects, then, the law should be concerned with combatting and apprehending real criminals."
Some people argue that owning a gun isn't necessary to stop crime. That is the job of the police. In fact, though, states that do not impose many restrictions on individual ownership of guns have lower crime rates than those that do. As John R. Lott, Jr., the foremost authority on the statistics of gun ownership and crime, has said, "There is a clear consensus among economists about self-defense, gun-free zones, firearms and suicide, and concealed handgun laws. Among North American economists: • Eighty-eight percent say that guns are more frequently 'used in self-defense than they are used in the commission of crime.' • Ninety-one percent believe that gun-free zones are 'more likely to attract criminals than they are to deter them.' • Seventy-two percent do not agree that 'a gun in the home causes an increase in the risk of suicide.' • Ninety-one percent say that 'concealed handgun permit holders are much more law-abiding than the typical American.'• Eighty-one percent say that permitted concealed handguns lower the murder rate."
Some people acknowledge that people have the right to own guns, but they favor restrictions like gun registration. Lott's research shows that these measures aren't needed: "Whether in Canada, Hawaii, Chicago, or Washington, D.C., police are unable to point to a single instance of gun registration aiding the investigation of a violent crime. In a 2013 deposition, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said that the department could not 'recall any specific instance where registration records were used to determine who committed a crime.' The idea behind a registry is that guns left at a crime scene can be used to trace back to the criminals. Unfortunately, guns are very rarely left at the scene of the crime. Those that are left behind are virtually never registered-criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind guns registered to them. In the few cases where registered guns were left at the scene, the criminal had usually been killed or seriously injured. Canada keeps some of the most thorough data on gun registration. From 2003 to 2009, a weapon was identified in fewer than a third of the country's 1,314 firearm homicides. Of these identified weapons, only about a quarter were registered. Roughly half of these registered guns were registered to someone other than the person accused of the homicide. In just sixty-two cases-4.7 percent of all firearm homicides-was the gun identified as being registered to the accused. Since most Canadian homicides are not committed with a gun, these sixty-two cases correspond to only about 1 percent of all homicides. From 2003 to 2009, there were only sixty-two cases-just nine a year-where registration made any conceivable difference. But apparently, the registry was not important even in those cases. Despite a handgun registry in effect since 1934, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case. No more successful was the long-gun registry that started in 1997 and cost Canadians $2.7 billion before being scrapped. In February 2000, I testified before the Hawaii State Senate joint hearing between the Judiciary and Transportation committees on changes that were being proposed to the state gun registration laws.2 I suggested two questions to the state senators: (1) how many crimes had been solved by their current registration and licensing system, and (2) how much time did it currently take police to register guns ? The Honolulu police chief was notified in advance about those questions to give him time to research them. He told the committee that he could not point to any crimes that had been solved by registration, and he estimated that his officers spent over 50,000 hours each year on registering guns."
I mentioned at the start that I would have something to say about the meaning of "the right to keep and bear arms." The historian Joyce Lee Malcolm has done important research in this area in her definitive book Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard, 2002). She proceeds by a learned study of violent crime in England, from the Middle Ages to the present. In her survey, a constant theme emerges. As guns became more prevalent, violent crime decreased. This trend culminated in the nineteenth century, when death by murder was rare but guns were widespread. Often people think of English medieval life as relatively calm and peaceful, but in Malcolm's view this is a myth. "Medieval England was boisterous and violent, more so than court records reveal. This high rate of homicide and violent crime existed when few firearms were in circulation." Malcolm's interest in the Middle Ages is not confined to her primary theme of the relation between guns and violence. She introduces another theme that will concern
her throughout the book: the status of the right to self-defense. During this period, custom and law established the right of individuals to resist violence directed against them. In some instances, a person who killed his assailant stood immune from criminal penalty. In the Tudor and Stuart periods, "this era in which firearms first came into common use in everyday life as well as for the citizen militia in which the Englishman's right to have 'arms for his defence' was proclaimed, also witnessed a sharp decline in violent homicide" Developments in the eighteenth century should by now come as no surprise. "[A]t the very time that the individual right to be armed was becoming well established and guns were replacing earlier weapons, the homicide rate continued its precipitous decline." In the nineteenth century, once again, the number of guns increased while violent crime declined. "The nineteenth century ended with firearms plentifully available while rates of armed crime had been declining and were to reach a record low."
Let's do everything we can to preserve our right to own guns!