Gun Politics/Balance of Power

Advocates for citizens having the right to bear arms often point to totalitarian regimes that passed gun control legislation as a first step of their reign of terror. The sequence is said to be gun registration, followed some time later by confiscation. Nazi legislation is the most famous example of this sequence, but it also occurred in Marxist regimes.

However, this does not indicate that gun controls always precede totalitarianism. Many places, such as New York, New York have had such laws for many years without becoming totalitarian.

Some persons oppose registration of guns or licensing of gun owners because if captured, the associated records would provide military invaders with a means for locating and eliminating law-abiding, (i.e. patriotic) resistance fighters. Location and capture of such records is a standard doctrine taught to military intelligence officers. The likelihood of invasion is often dismissed.

Weapon ownership is classically a right of a sovereign. In the U.S., citizens theoretically are sovereign, though their sovereignty is expressed collectively. Most countries which successfully pass gun control laws do not consider their citizens sovereign. This may be a root in the different attitudes of European and U.S. citizens on gun-control.

Some of the controversy surrounding this issue in the United States is based on interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which (according to gun control advocates) protects the "right to keep and bear arms" only as it relates to "a well-regulated militia," and (according to gun rights advocates) is an absolute guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms.

In the United States, the debate is also heavily centered on historical and other claims about the exact meaning of the Second Amendment. Federal courts since 1939 have fairly consistently ruled that the right protected is not an individual right, but a broad consensus of scholars appears to be that this interpretation is novel and not historically accurate.

On May 6, 2002, Theodore B. Olson, the Solicitor General of the United States Department of Justice, filed briefs with the United States Supreme Court stating that it is the opinion of the government that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm, and that that right is not tied to the maintenance of state militias.

See gun politics