The liberal justification of the right to bear arms is explicitly moral. This moral argument can take two different forms, one of which is based on our inherent right to life. The right to life is the cornerstone of liberal individual rights: John Locke argued that enshrined in “the law of nature” is the right of self‐​preservation (Locke 1924, 122). For Locke the right of self‐​preservation entailed inter alia 1 a right of self‐​defence (Locke 1924, 122; 125–126). The conception of individuals as sovereign and morally separate that is central to liberalism 2 implies that a right to life or to self‐​preservation means that one may act on this right oneself, and not have to depend upon others acting in one’s interests – indeed that is the whole point of individual rights. 3 The right to self‐​defence is not viewed by liberals as a mere convention – something that certain cultures happen to respect or valourise for potentially arbitrary reasons – but rather a natural and deontic right that inheres in us simply in virtue of our being persons worthy of moral consideration, and not our happening to live within this or that set of social conventions. Natural rights provide a basis for evaluating legal systems insofar as they tell us what protections the legal system ought to provide, independently of those protections it might happen to provide. Given that in the contemporary United States, the threats to one’s life that one might face will often require a firearm to extinguish, the legal right to bear arms is the logical implication of the deontic right to self‐​defence.

The other liberal argument for the right to bear arms is a consequentialist one: when citizens have the right to bear arms, violent crime and property crime are more effectively deterred, and moreover, deterrence works in a far more egalitarian way.

When the right to bear arms is not legally enshrined, those who are already committed to engaging in certain criminal acts such as assaults and thefts, the additional criminal act of unlawfully obtaining and/​or using a firearm is only a minor additional risk for them to take, given that they are already taking the risk of engaging in violent crime or property crime in the first place. However, for those who live otherwise law‐​abiding lifestyles, the marginal risk of obtaining a firearm illegally in order to protect themselves from crime is much larger. Making guns illegal is not a way of disarming a population, but typically a way of disarming the otherwise‐​law‐​abiding sub‐​set of a population.

While existing professional armed law enforcement in the United States no doubt plays some role in deterring crime, a general individual right to bear arms would expand this deterrence in way which not only increases the level of deterrence, but also make it more equally available. Rather than only those who can afford effective private security, happen to live in neighbourhoods the local police care more about, and/​or have above average physical strength combined with an inclination to use it for self‐​defence, where there is a right to bear arms anyone who can point and shoot is immediately able to achieve maximal self‐​defence. An absence of a legal right to bear arms means that those who are – for any reason – less able to defend themselves, or who are less likely to receive assistance in deterrence or defence. Gun control laws therefore tend to disadvantage women (Long 1997; Pryor 2017), as well as those who live in areas with high crime (which in the United States are typically black neighbourhoods). In the US between 2011 and 2013 black men were killed with a gun at double the rate white men were, 4 and in 2015 black people were more than twice as likely to be killed by the police as white people (The Guardian 2015). Where there is inequality between abilities to self‐​defend without a gun, and between the safety of different communities, recognising a right to bear arms lessens that inequality by equalising the physical power of those who are domestically abused with their abusers in the former case, and by allowing the law‐​abiding to provide deterrents to crime in crime‐​ridden communities in the latter case.

Both of these liberal justifications for the right to bear arms are moral in character: the former identifies our moral rights to self‐​defence as the justification for the legal right to bear arms, and the latter identifies the beneficial consequences of the right to bear arms, namely more and equally distributed public safety. Nonetheless the Second Amendment is often referenced in the liberal discourse, given that there is, in fact, a legal provision for ensuring a right to bear arms in the United States. However, the Second Amendment is not leaned upon as the grounds for any argument for the right to bear arms; it is merely a legal device which can be used as a means to the end of ensuring the legal right to bear arms. The two main strands of liberal argument in favour of the right to bear arms do not make heavy use of the idea that the absence of a right to bear arms would be unconstitutional. This notion of unconstitutionality is rather a strategic aspect of their overall cause, not the main thrust of their argument. There are of course liberal reasons for supporting the US Constitution, and for trying to ensure that it is not violated by the various branches of government. An effectively constitutionally‐​limited government is bound to be more liberal insofar as those constitutional limitations take the form of protecting citizens from infringements of their liberty. 5 But crucially, the argument for the right to bear arms is not given merely because the right is protected by the Constitution. This entanglement of the liberal case for the right to bear arms with the Second Amendment means that there is a danger for liberal discourse to overlap with the conservative one vis‐​à‐​vis the Second Amendment, which, as we shall see, undermines the primary liberal argument.