Anytime, I would rather be marginalised and respected

Earlier this week, a most ordinary middle-aged man assembled an arsenal of rapid fire assault rifles in a Las Vegas hotel room and in less than 10 minutes, perpetrated a massacre of unprecedented horror, even by the US atrocious standards of mass killings. 

By the time of writing, 59 people were dead, and 527 injured, a total of 586 victims. As with previous mass shootings, the tragedy will rekindle America’s gun control debate. Chances are, the debate will leave Americans no wiser. 

Much of the rest of the world, particularly the other western democracies, take a rather dim view of the US obsession with gun ownership.

The US has by far the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, with an estimated 112 guns for every 100 people. It is the only country with more guns than people. It also has the highest murder rate in industrialised countries, in the order of 4 murders per 100,000 people, compared with less than one person per 100,000 in most of the other industrialised countries.

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT

Gun ownership is a constitutional right in the US as per the Second Amendment which states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”  The reference to militia is the source of controversy as to whether the framers of the constitution intended the right to be exercised by collectively i.e. a right of the States to maintain armies, or individually. 

In 1939, the Supreme Court ruled that the right is collective, in 2008 it ruled the other way. Subsequent rulings have affirmed the individual right interpretation.

The purpose of which it was established is not contested. Its purpose was to provide citizens with a means to defend themselves against a tyrannical government.  The American colonies had won their freedom from a tyrannical English King by raising militia. 

Unlike us, who were colonised by a foreign power, the English were their kith and kin.  

POLITICAL DOCUMENTS

Few, if any political documents can match the declaration of independence in conveying political grievance:

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

TYRANNY

I tend to see the Second Amendment not in the context of the US today, but that of the many societies where tyranny continues to be the biggest threat to life, limb and freedom. 

In Myanmar, ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people is underway.  A world that swore never again after the Rwanda genocide is looking the other way.  The celebrated Nobel Peace Prize laureate  Aung San Suu Kyi who is now the de facto Prime Minister, has also gone mute.

This seems to me to precisely the kind of predicament  the circumstance for which the right to bear arms was conceived. I cannot think of a reason that would justify people being defenseless against genocide. No right can be as fundamental as that of self-preservation either of an individual or a community. 

The idea that citizens should not be armed derives from a political theory which contends that the State ought to have the legal monopoly of violence.

The Weberian State (named after German sociologist Max Weber who formalised it), is rooted in the idea of the state as a social contract by which free individuals surrender their natural right to self-defense in favour of common defense. The Weberian State has three critical flaws.

EVIL INTENTIONS

First, it requires that the State be benevolent, by which we mean that the State cannot have evil intentions. 

But the State is constituted by human beings who have capacity for evil, and as we know, power corrupts.

I contend that the atrocities committed by megalomaniacs to their societies over the last century exceed the harm that would have occurred if these societies remained stateless.  Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge may have killed as much as a quarter of Cambodia’s population. It is doubtful that such atrocities would have occurred if Cambodia had been a failed state like Somalia. 

Additionally, the State needs to be neutral, that is, it should not be controlled by any one faction in society. It is noteworthy that the right to bear arms did not originate with the American constitution but with the English Bill of Rights enacted in 1689, a century before America’s Second Amendment.

It gave protestants the right to “have arms for their defence suitable to their condition” and simultaneously restricted the (Catholic) monarch’s  ability to maintain a standing army.  In essence, the Bill recognised that the State was not impartial, and sought to maintain a balance of terror between the State and citizens.

PROTECT CITIZENS

Second, that the State would have the capability to protect citizens better than they can protect themselves. We do not need to be told that this is a serious flaw in the theory.

The State failed us spectacularly in Westgate, in Garissa University, in Mpeketoni and in countless other terrorist attacks. The persistence of “mob justice” is a manifestation of State failure in providing even the most basic security services.

Security experts estimate that there are in the Horn of Africa region more unlicensed small arms and light weapons in civilian hands than all the armed state agents (soldiers, police, prison warders and gamekeepers). That our States have acquiesced to such a fundamental challenge to their legal monopoly of violence is testament to just how fragile and pretentious these post-colonial states are.

In Kenya, estimates are in the order of between 500,000 and 700,000, which works out to between three and five illegally owned weapons for every person armed by the State.

MARGINALISED

Most of these arms are in northern Kenya.  It is of course the case that these regions are historically marginalized, but it is also the case that they have been and remain less vulnerable to the predations of the State than the unarmed populations.

If the people of Kisumu City were as well armed as the people of West Pokot, it is doubtful that the state would have the confidence to unleash the post-election violence in 2007 and in 2017. 

Between being “included” and subjugated on the one hand, or marginalised and respected on the other, I will choose the latter every day of the week.

I do not own a gun, reason being that I see no need of having a feeble handgun to main or kill poor robbers who are more effectively and harmlessly deterred by other means, such a fierce dogs. What I would like to have is the means to make State goons think twice before they attempt to violate my human rights and civil liberties, such as a cache of “bump stocked” AR15 assault rifles.

In our constitution, we have vested sovereignty in ourselves, “the people” and entered into a covenant that obliges every citizen to respect, uphold and defend the constitution.  In his voluminous treatise Defense of the Constitutions, John Adams reflects on the idea thus:

LIBERTIES

“If by the people is meant the whole body of a great nation, it should never be forgotten, that they can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march 500 miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet; and, therefore, the proposition, that they are the best keepers of their own liberties, is not true. They are the worst conceivable; they are no keepers at all. They can neither act, judge, think or will, as a body politic or corporation.”

Adams proceeds to make the now well established twin principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. 

We have done that, as has every country where constitutions have been trampled on by despots. This being the case, Adam’s contention begs a question that we are now compelled to ask? How are defenseless citizens to defend constitutions against regimes with despotic aspirations? 

CONSTTUTIONAL ORDER

It is instructive that when such has occurred, it is by force of arms that constitutional order is restored.  It stands to reason then that a balance of terror between citizens and the State preferable to re-establishment of constitutional order in the aftermath of reigns of terror and genocidal wars.  

The following amendments to the Constitution are suggested:

“The people have the right to possess arms within their domicile, for their safety and legitimate defence.” (borrowed from Mexican constitution)

“County governments have the right to raise militia for the defense of the Constitution, and to maintain such armaments as are deemed necessary to do so.” 

David Ndii, an economist, is currently serving on the NASA technical and advisory committee. He leads the NASA policy team. [email protected]