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Gun rights aren't absolute, but property rights are
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Throughout college and up till about five years ago, I was known to engage in heated political debates with friends, usually at parties around the keg -- you know, where most of the world's problems are never solved. Since then, however, I've realized you're not usually going to change people's minds, especially when they're drunk.
On top of that, my New Year's resolution for the past few years has been to refrain from trying to reason with unreasonable people. I'm sorry if that comes across as an implication that my opinions are usually right, but hey, I'm a libertarian -- and an anarcho-capitalist at that -- so they usually are. Therefore, I not only no longer seek out debates with political foes, but I can barely tolerate engaging in them in person anymore either.
So that means that if you really care what I think, you're pretty much stuck reading my blog. It also means that if you decide to solicit my political opinions, there's a good chance you'll end up as the subject of a blog post too.
Take, for instance, a colleague of mine, who yesterday asked what I thought about a provocative Calvin Klein billboard ad depicting a threesome. I told him I didn't think anything about it because I hadn't seen it, so he described it to me and asked if I thought the government should have a right to prevent companies from using "inappropriate" advertising. I told him of course not, given that I believe the state is completely illegitimate and shouldn't exist in the first place.
I still love the looks I get when those words spill past my steamy, voluptuous lips. (Ew, that even grossed me out; I should totally be banned from writing that.)
Anyway, once I elicit the deer in the headlights look by telling people the state should be abolished, I have to explain why no act is immoral unless it constitutes an initiation of violence against someone else. Thus, the state is immoral and therefore illegitimate because its very existence is predicated upon violence toward the innocent. My colleague's response was that this billboard was immoral because his daughters could've seen it and been offended. So I asked if his daughters had actually seen it. He said no. In other words, my colleague wasn't even offended by personally witnessing the billboard ad, much less witnessing it in the presence of his kids; he was just taking offense on behalf of other people who may or may not have been offended by it.
Does anyone really wonder why the state meddles in virtually every aspect of our lives when we buy into tyrannical governance allowing majorities to control the behavior of minorities? After all, when power changes hands so frequently, everyone's going to be offended by something someone else does, and in fairly short order. Whee, land of the free!
From what I gathered, the Calvin Klein billboard was posted on private property. So against my better judgment, I attempted to explain that property owners have the right to do whatever they like with their property as long as it does no tangible harm to someone else. (In other words, hanging an "offensive" porny picture for everyone to see: OK; hanging a porny picture in such a manner that it falls on someone and causes him physical harm: not necessarily OK.) I attempted to explain this by sharing the example of the Oklahoma state legislature, which a few years ago usurped the property rights of private employers by passing a law forcing them to allow employees to keep firearms in their cars on company property. My colleague believes gun rights are absolute, that one should be allowed to carry them on private property because "your car is your property."
Sorry, wrong answer. Your property rights end where someone else's begin. The reason guns are so controversial in the first place is because we have public property, which shouldn't even exist. The state obviously wants to own as much property as possible because this allows it to justify controlling our behavior more and more and more.
However, arguing that a company doesn't have the right to set its own gun policies on its own property is akin to arguing that a homeowner doesn't have the right to prevent others from walking onto his property with a sidearm. My colleague acknowledged that he would indeed have the right to remove me from his property if I decided to, say, set up camp on his front lawn one night with a six pack and an arsenal of automatic rifles, but he just couldn't grasp the idea that a private company enjoyed that same right. In fact, his response to me was that for me to hold the opinions I do, I'd "have to place property rights above everything else."
I didn't record yesterday's conversation, but I think my response to this comment was, "Well, duh!"
In very simple terms -- and yes, this is a very simple concept for people who actually like freedom -- there is no such thing as private property if property owners don't retain full control over its use. Anyone who claims that gun rights somehow supercede property rights in general is full of it (and in all honesty rather confused) -- without the right to control the use of your own property, you wouldn't have the right to carry a gun in the first place.
So, yes, this means that no matter how pro-gun you happen to be -- I'm as pro-gun as anyone, inasmuch as this means one has the right to arm himself in public as well as in private -- you have no right whatsoever to carry a gun on private property without the permission of the property owner. If you believe otherwise, you by definition must admit that you believe that the initiation of violence is legitimate -- and this doesn't do you much good when private or public criminals decide to come for you.
