Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns,talk.religion.misc
From: [r--s] at [cbnewsc.cb.att.com] (Morris the Cat)
Subject: Don Kates on Religion and Self Defense
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 14:26:13 GMT

Date: Fri, 11 Jun 93 13:20:15 EDT
Organization: Blue Moon BBS ((614) 868-998[0245])
 
IS SELF-DEFENSE A RIGHT?
Don B. Kates, Jr.
 
The following addresses the question as to why the anti-gun
people seek to ban guns, but never seriously advocate severe
penalties for criminal use thereof.
 
Maria Sanchez [pseudonym], a 29 year old Los Angeles woman,
could hear the men outside her basement tenement a apartment talking
about breaking in. "She's alone", one of them said (incorrectly,
since her 8 year old child was there also). Sanchez was unable to
call police since she was too poor to have a phone. But she did have
a gun with which she fired two warning shots when she heard the men
breaking into the building. When they nevertheless broke down her
door she killed the first man in. The others fled.
 
Maria Sanchez's acts were determined to have been legal by the
Los Angeles Police Department. They declined to file charges, a
decision in which the prosecutor's office apparently concurred. It
was noted that the dead man was a transient with a long crime
record.
 
But is such a killing moral? The Methodist view (set out in an
article by Rev. Allen Brockway) turns on whether the men were going
to kill or only rape. If it was only rape Methodists deem it her
moral duty to submit rather than do anything that might imperil her
rapist's life.
 
In his article "Is the Robber My Brother", Rev. Brockway
answers "yes, for though the burglary victim or the woman accosted
in the park by a rapist is not likely to consider the violator to be
a neighbor whose safety is of immediate concern, criminals are
members of the larger community no less than are others. As such
they are our neighbors or, our brothers.  Though violent criminals
are in the wrong it is equally wrong for their victim to kill them,
save in those extremely rare circumstances when the unambiguous
alternative is one's own death."
 
The Presbyterian Church USA disagrees since it condemns taking a
criminal's life under ANY circumstance -- even if the victim
believed they would kill her and her child after the rape. As Rev.
Young (director of the Presbyterian Criminal Justice Program),
testified before Congress: "The General Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church USA has declared in the context of handgun control and in
many other contexts, that it is opposed to the killing of ANYONE,
ANYWHERE, FOR ANY REASON."
 
Like many non-religious opponents of handgun ownership, Rev. Allen
emphasizes that there is no objection to rifles which are
owned only for sport. Handguns -- "weapons of death" -- are what the
General Assembly condemns, making no distinction between their use
by criminals inflicting death illegally and their use by victims in
lawful self-defense: for "To be opposed to killing is to be opposed
to the instruments that make killing possible, that are designed
only for killing." and "There is no other reason to own a handgun
(that we have envisioned, at least) than to kill someone with it."
 
Different from the Methodist and Presbyterian views is the
Roman Catholic view which is stated in terms of "just war" and is
also applicable to personal self-defense: Victims "have a right and
even a duty to protect their existence and freedom" (Pope John Paul
II) for, though even defensive violence will ever be "a sad
necessity in the eyes of men principled, yet it would be still more
unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men." (St. Augustine)
Thus the Catholic view allows (or perhaps even requires) lethal force
(necessary) to preserve the victim's life against murder.
 
But does Catholic theory agree with traditional Anglo-American
law in allowing deadly force to resist rape or robbery? Today at
least some Catholics, like some Methodists, disagree, holding that
deadly force is an immorally disproportionate alternative to
submission. Thus New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, a former Catholic
seminarian, asserted that, assuming Bernhard Goetz was shooting to
resist robbery, "If this man was defending himself against attack
with reasonable force, he would be legally, but not morally...."
 
Non-religious condemnations of self-defense, and thus of even
the mere ownership of guns for defensive purposes, as "vigilantism"
are as common as religious ones. Indeed, some secular opponents go
farther yet, rejecting even sport as a legitimate purpose of gun
ownership: "No private citizen has any reason or need at any time to
possess a gun.  This applies to both honest citizens and criminals.
We realize the Constitution guarantees the 'right to bear arms' but
this should be changed." (The Detroit Daily News).
 
The cultural historian Garry Wills denounces "gun fetishists"
as both immoral and unpatriotic, "anti-citizens", "traitors, enemies
of their own patriae", arming "against their own neighbors."
 
The WASHINGTON POST considers "the need that some homeowners
and shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend themselves"
a shameful distrust in their fellow Americans, an atavism "giving
strength and power to the worst instincts in the human character."
 
Ramsey Clark decries that perceived need [to protect one's
self] as an insult to America for "A state in which a citizen needs
a gun to protect himself from crime has failed to perform its first
purpose, and results in a return to barbarism and anarchy, not order
under law -- a jungle where each relies on himself for survival."
 
Pursuant to these views, the more moderate anti-gun
organizations (like Handgun Control, Inc.) have as their ultimate
goal enactment of a federal law mirroring that which they have
succeeded in having enacted in Washington, D.C. Under the DC law:
a) no one may buy a handgun;  b) rifles and shotguns may be owned,
but only for sport;  c) to assure that they will never be used for
self-defense they are required to be kept both disassembled and
unloaded, so that anyone who uses a gun in self-defense is subject
to prosecution.
 
Thus the reason anti-gun groups seek to ban guns, not punish
criminals, is that they see the problem as "violence", in which they
include self-defense. Indeed, they see self-defense as the paradigm
of violence.