San Diego Objectivist Study Group

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in McDonald v. Chicago to re-affirm the 2nd Amendment that the right to bear arms is inherent in the individual, not in some collective, and that no federal, state, or municipal law shall be passed to infringe on this right. While this is the correct decision—correct with respect to the nature of rights as such—the judges in the majority, themselves, erred fundamentally in their deliberation toward this conclusion.

First, the decision is correct because only the individual human beings, by virtue of their nature as volitional, rational beings, have rights. Rights are inherent, not separable in the way a piece of clothing is separable from the body; no, “inherence” means an attribute of an entity, as having mass is an attribute of a physical object. A man’s right to life, liberty, property is as inherent in him as his having the abilities to see, hear, think. There is no difference in inherence whether the attribute is physical or mental. “Rights” are concepts of consciousness; specifically, they are moral concepts. The Court decision, therefore, is correct to return its opinion that the government, as instituted by the people to protect their rights, cannot intself infringe on the very rights it is to protect, specifically, on the derivative right of liberty to bear arms.

The decision, however, is flawedly reached. Rather than taking the principled approach and demolishing the opposition through reason, the majority took the pragmatic approach, rendering the decision weak and open to future revision. It had the shaky quality: there, but for the grace of 5 yays, go the nation. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., wrote for the majority. This is their reasoning: “We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, [the decision] does not imperil every law regulating firearms.” Yet, according to the news report, nowhere in the decision did the majority elaborate on how the government can still restrict and “regulate firearms in certain instances.” They left the door open to “be determined in future litigation.”

What the majority failed to affirm is the broader principle from which the current case could be decided: the principle iof the right to property. Writing in 1965, Ayn Rand said it best:

… that no rights of any kind can be exercised without property rights. 

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims. [TNL “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’” 29c]

This principle is absent in the reasoning of the Court ruling, for or against. Thus, though the decision was final and supreme, it is hollow of content. Government regulations of firearms “in certain instances” are still possible; every law abridging this individual right can still be wrangled and ”determined in future litigation.”

The Supreme Court’s decision today shows that even at the highest level of this branch of government, no one knows why individual rights must be protected, and no one knows how it can be done properly through the powers of government. While I am glad that the decision moved superficially one step toward more individual liberty, I am sad that the step taken was profoundly unprincipled.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Objectivist Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.