The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of "the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms"

"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."  That's the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and that's the constitutional statement of the Lockean natural right that has been exercised in black armed self-defense.

As I have said in a previous post on the decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court has correctly interpreted the Second Amendment as recognizing the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right, a natural right, and a limited right.  The "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is not only for service in a state militia, because it is also necessary for individual self-defense, and therefore it is an individual right.

It is also a natural right or what William Blackstone called "the natural right of resistance and self-preservation" through armed self-defense.  Similarly, St. George Tucker, in his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, spoke of the "right of self-preservation" as allowing a citizen to "repel force by force" when "the intervention of society in his behalf may be too late to prevent an injury."  This was what Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature" in the state of nature--the natural power and propensity of individuals to use force to repel and punish violence or the threat of violence against themselves.

Locke explained this right to punish threats to one's self-preservation as rooted in the biological psychology of self-ownership--that every human being senses or feels that he owns his own body and thus has the right to protect that body's existence and well-being.  We now know that this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body--and the evolved propensity to guard that body from threats.

We can also explain now how this propensity to punish violent threats to our existence and well-being was made more effective by the Darwinian evolution of the human power for killing at a distance--first by throwing rocks, then by shooting arrows, and later by firing guns that shoot projectiles.  Paul Bingham has shown how much of human evolution can be explained by the evolution of killing at a distance.

Locke recognized that punishment could be costly for the punisher, because "such resistance many times makes the punishment dangerous, and frequently destructive, to those who attempt it" (ST, sec. 126).  The costs of punishment come mostly from provoking violent attacks from those who are being punished.  So, the power to punish could never be effectively executed until the risky costs of punishment could somehow be reduced, so that the immediate costs of coercive punishment could be less than its immediate benefits in enforcing social cooperation.

Locke never explains how this could have happened. One likely explanation is that human beings became the first animals capable of killing at a distance by throwing rocks at their victims.  Once this developed as a technique for hunting large animals, it could then be used to kill or threaten other humans who deserved punishment.  Many people could throw stones at a misbehaving individual, and the punishers could do this with little risk to themselves. Thus, the evolved human power to punish violators of the law of nature through killing at a distance could be a crucial evolutionary adaptation for Lockean liberalism.  The expansion of social cooperation enforced by cheap punishment of cheaters has evolved from the expanding range of the weapons for remote killing--from rocks to bow-and-arrow to guns and other weapons.

Moreover, Bingham has provided a Darwinian evolutionary explanation confirming the insight of those political philosophers (like Aristotle and Machiavelli) who claimed that the structure of political order depends on whether the access to weapons of coercive power is confined to a few or open to many.  Oligarchic regimes must ensure that the people are disarmed.  Democratic regimes need the people to be well-armed.  That explains why overturning the American Southern regime of white freedom to dominate blacks required black armed self-defense.

And yet this Lockean individual and natural "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is still a limited right because everyone has an equal right not to be harmed by gun violence, unless someone has committed some offense that justifies violent punishment.  For that reason, while people have a right to be armed for self-defense or for resistance to tyranny, they do not have a right to keep and bear the most dangerous weapons in circumstances that are likely to risk harming innocent people.  This allows for reasonable gun control laws.

In my next post, I will consider how this right of the people to keep and bear arms has been manifested in the history of black armed self-defense in America.