On the Second Amendment, Continued

In my previous post, I argued that the Second Amendment is aimed at a right of the citizenry to overthrow the central government if it became tyrannical, but that, for various reasons, that is now an outdated and irrelevant right, and we should therefore discard it, ideally by repealing that odious Amendment. But one could make an argument like this: we have a bit in the Constitution protecting the right to own guns; might there not be some other good use we can make of it, even if that wasn't the original purpose? In this post, I aspire to show that there are no other good uses for the Second Amendment, and why.
First of all, let me just get this out of the way: the use of guns on non-humans, either innocent animals who never did anything to hurt you or on inanimate objects like targets, is not the proper subject of a Constitutional right. Seriously. Think about it for two seconds. Hunting, a fundamental right? That should be in the founding, constraining document of a democratic government? Or target shooting? Seriously. It fails the laugh test, I think. But to develop the argument just a little bit, when you put something in the Constitution, the idea is that it is a right that you really don't want to let people decide is unimportant. Suppose that it were true that in order to protect the right of hunting, or target shooting, you needed to adopt public policies that would dramatically increase the number of human deaths. Does anyone really want to argue that the political system ought to be made incapable of deciding that those deaths are not worth it, for a little bit of sport? Seriously.

The one argument that is worth attacking at any length, I think, is this self-defense thing. I stated in my previous post why I don't think the Amendment is specifically about self-defense, but we're canvassing alternate uses of it in this post, so here goes. Yes, one has a "natural right" to self-defense using deadly force when assailed with deadly force, or with slightly sub-deadly force (if one believes in "natural rights" at all, that is). But the entire point of government is that everyone gives up some of their "natural rights" in exchange for a life which is better (again, if you believe in "natural rights" at all). Either increased security (Hobbes), or actual net gains in enjoyment of "natural rights" (Locke), or the enjoyment of "political rights" (Rousseau). And the right of self-defense is not a primary right; rather, it is a derivative of the right to life. I have a right to life, the logic works, and therefore you don't have a right to take it away from me, and therefore I have a right to stop you trying to take it away from me, including by killing you if that is necessary to prevent you killing me. Thus, the right of self-defense.

But even John Locke, the only one of the three listed above who is truly enthusiastic about natural rights, concedes that by surrendering some nominal rights one may reap greater enjoyment of one's rights in the real world. In this case, you surrender your right to defend yourself using this one particular form of deadly force (bring back broadswords!), in exchange for your assailant's giving up his right to assail you with that particular form of deadly force. The result is that everyone dies less, an overall improvement in enjoyment of the natural right of life. Now, sure, to some extent that's dependent on the ability to actually get guns out of the hands of criminals, but part of the reason we in this country find that so impossible is that there are almost as many guns as people in this country, and we keep making new ones. If we stopped making new ones, and the police routinely confiscated and destroyed any gun they found, eventually there would be a lot fewer guns out there, including a lot fewer guns in the hands of criminals. Keep in mind that in Britain the police don't carry guns themselves! I don't think they would do that if criminals armed with guns were a routine happening on that isle. It is possible to make way fewer criminals have firearms in their possession; doing so, coupled with having way fewer law-abiding civilians have firearms in their possession, would make everyone way better off. Claiming the right of self-defense using firearms, which purports to be a part of the right to life, ends up actually reducing our ability to enjoy the right to life. So self-defense is not a valid reason to keep the Second Amendment around. We should just get rid of it.