Commentary No. 22, Aug. 15, 1999
"Guns and the Rights to Own Them"
Every country has a military force, and it by definition bears arms. Every country has police forces, and they also always bear arms (although until about twenty years ago, the London constabulary boasted that they did not bear arms). The question, in all countries, is whether anyone else has the legal right to bear arms. In many countries this is today a burning question and it is almost always politically controversial.
The question comes in two main versions. In one kind of situation, there is asserted to be a high crime rate, in which police protection is deemed by some persons to be insufficient, and these persons wish to protect themselves by arming themselves. In another kind of situation, there is a group who feels that their rights are being violated by the government in power and by those who are its supporters and feel that they must arm themselves to counter the government. The United States is a good case in point for the first situation. (but we could talk of post-apartheid South Africa) Northern Ireland is a good case in point for the second (but we could talk of Angola or Chechnya). Colombia is a good example of both situations combined in one country. Let us see how the debate about who has the right to bear arms works out in the cases of the U.S. and northern Ireland.
The United States has long had a fierce internal debate about the right of citizens to bear arms. There are those who feel that every individual in the United States has the right, almost the obligation, to own a weapon. They oppose any government interference with this right, even the registration of weapons or the limitation of the kinds of weapons one can purchase. They usually give three quite different reasons. One is that the U.S. Constitution expressly permits this, in the Second Amendment to the Constitution to form militias (an article whose interpretation is subject to much debate). The second is that a large number of citizens wish to bear arms in order to engage in the legitimate recreation of hunting, and this is perfectly reasonable. And the third is that citizens need to have arms to defend themselves against criminals. This latter argument has become more intense in the last thirty years as there was a perceived increase in the degree of criminality.
Those opposed to this argument, and in favor of restrictions (even of the complete elimination) of the right of ordinary persons to bear arms argue that the widespread ownership of weapons leads to access of weapons that result in accidental deaths and even worse, access for sick and deranged persons who use the arms to attack other persons in the country. The recent outbreak of attacks on schoolchildren, either by other schoolchildren who have used serious weapons or by adults, is cited as the danger. That there is a clear correlation between the availability of arms to the population and the number of such tragic, senseless deaths can be seen by comparing the statistics of such attacks in the United States (fairly unrestrictive in access to arms) and most European countries (fairly restrictive). The rates in the U.S. are very much higher than in Europe.
The answer of defenders of free access to arms purchases is twofold. One is pragmatic. It is argued that government restrictions on the purchase of arms hardly affect serious criminals but do affect the ability of other persons to defend themselves against criminals. The other argument is more political. It is that governments can not always be trusted, and that citizens should have the right to have arms in case they need to use them against oppressive governments.
Let us turn to the situation in northern Ireland. There, a civil was has been going on for a very long time. The politics of the situation is basically simple. The Catholic population feel that they are being oppressed by the Protestant majority, who are a majority only because northern Ireland was partitioned from the rest of Ireland in 1922, precisely in order to ensure a Protestant majority. After a long period of constant violence, a truce was arrived at about one year ago, in which a new political compromise was to be implemented that would hopefully permit the end of the civil violence. This truce has now been endangered because, at a critical moment in the transition, the representatives of the Protestant population have insisted that the IRA, the armed movement that has been fighting for the rights of the Catholics, should formally disarm before Sinn Fein, perceived at its political arm, might be admitted to the interim government, whereas the IRA has argued that it will only disarm after the political compromise has been fully implemented. At the moment, we are at an impasse.
Looked at politically, the arguments within the two countries, which could be replicated in many other countries, seem to take opposite positions. In the United States, the political left is largely opposed to free access to weapons, whereas conservative forces are largely in favor of free or freer access to weapons, and the far right is the most vigorous on this question. In Northern Ireland, the political lineup is in many ways the opposite. The left tends to sympathize with the reluctance of the IRA to lay down its arms at this point, which seems to them premature, whereas the more conservative forces tend to think this is an essential prerequisite to moving forward politically.
What is really happening is quite simple. Those who trust the government in power, primarily for political reasons, see no reason why persons other than soldiers and police should have weapons. Those who distrust the government in power, and think that it is fundamentally oppressive, now or potentially, are in favor of widespread access to arms.
In general, in the modern world-system, the liberal center has been relatively comfortable with the overall political situation in most countries and has therefore hewed to the line of "law and order" as enforced by governments, and wanted to suppress arms among all non-government persons. The left and the right, especially in their more aggressive formulations, have tended to be suspicious and have wanted to preserve their political options. Whenever law and order have broken down to any significant degree, ordinary citizens have immediately taken back into their own hands the role of protection and have armed themselves. This can happen very rapidly, as among the upper strata in South Africa in the last few years, or among ordinary persons in Colombia. The list of countries could easily be extended.
The right to bear arms cannot be dissociated from the state of the political struggle not only within individual countries but within the world-system as a whole. To the extent that faith in the states as mediating, compromising structures declines, which has been happening to a significant degree in the last 20-30 years, the acquisition of arms goes up immediately. A disarmed population exists only where there is genuine optimism about the future and a reasonably degree of confidence in the state structure. We are not living in such a time, and so we are living in a time when more and more people bear arms.
But, if more and more people bear arms, there will be more and more arbitrary and "irrational" use of such arms. One cannot have one without the other. The solution will only come when a new order emerges out of the generalized chaos into which we have been moving for the last few decades and which will continue now for some time. One cannot successfully or usefully isolate the question of the right to bear arms from the larger question of the basic historical social system within which we are living.
Looked at over the long run of the modern world-system, the trend for some 400 years was towards the reduction of arms in the hands of persons other than soldiers and police, as the state assumed more and more effectively the role of protection and secured greater legitimation amongst its citizens. This curve has started to go down only in the last thirty years, but the rate of decline in the curve (that is, the increase in the percentage of citizens who bear arms) has been quite rapid. It is a measure of the declining legitimacy of the state in the modern world-system, itself a sign of its crisis.
In the meantime, schoolchildren get killed.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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