The non‐​conservative, radical advocate for gun rights contends that the normative questions surrounding gun ownership are far more important than the legal questions, as the latter set of questions should simply be about how to enforce the normatively correct position, whatever it happens to be. Perhaps it is a happy coincidence that, almost without exception, one’s reading of the Second Amendment aligns neatly with his opinions on gun rights and the policies associated therewith, though we might reasonably doubt this. More likely, on this question and others, almost everyone is working backwards from a set of preferred policies to a constitutional theory that would uphold them. Ostensibly serious legal and political thinkers indulge this, the silly game that surrounds the more obviously political issues in constitutional law, and keep up the pretense, sure that, in any case, the authority of the Constitution must be taken for granted. The radical, by definition, does not take such a contentious premise as the authority of the Constitution for granted.

So what of the philosophical question? Having considered the shortcomings of ideal theory, it becomes apparent that many of the arguments against it apply to the current debate about gun ownership. The proponents of gun control, broadly defined, seem to believe that private citizens with firearms are likely to pose a danger to society, while agents of the state (e.g., soldiers and law enforcement officers) will act justly and nonviolently, using their weapons only to protect the innocent. If we take seriously the idea that the incentive structures surrounding individuals bear on their behaviors, then this assumption appears untenable, for agents of the state, when they commit violent attacks and injustices, are rarely held accountable for their actions. This is to say that their incentives to act in accordance with the demands of justice are much weaker than are the incentives for an ordinary member of society. It should therefore worry gun control advocates that their preferred policies would target ordinary members of society while leaving government agents untouched. But it doesn’t seem to, because they are engaged in an ideal theoretic exercise, one in which the government is a benign, trustworthy instrument of justice.

The radical gun rights position suggests that this asymmetry is both foolish and dangerous, that we shouldn’t equivocate in applying our assumptions about how human actors behave within certain incentive frameworks.

To begin with, we know that the police are far deadlier than mass shooters—that, in point of fact, one would have to combine years’ worth of mass shooting deaths to total the number of Americans killed by police in 2017 alone. While definitions of “mass shooting” differ, under even the most inclusive, police shooting deaths far outnumber mass shooting deaths. Under more appropriate and restrictive definitions, police kill more Americans in just one year than mass shooters have in several decades . Moreover, school shootings present an even smaller risk than mass shooting more generally. As a matter of fact, the American student is today safer in the classroom “than at any time in recent memory.” Choking on your food, for example, is much more likely to end your life than is a mass shooting, to say nothing of the risks associated with activities like driving in cars or swimming. In the wake of a tragedy, no one likes to hear such facts, as they seem to minimize the pain and loss of the survivors and the families of victims. The hypocrisy of gun control advocates is striking, or it should be; obsessed with the extraordinarily small risk presented by mass shootings, they strain at a gnat yet swallow a camel. They plead for gun control—really disarmament—for the dominated as they exempt the dominators. Opponents of systematic violence might be expected to begin with disarming the state. As Jake Allen of the Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club points out, “If we’re going to call for gun control, we should start with the heavily armed police state. The weapons that ordinary people have access to are small potatoes compared to the firepower that most police departments possess and deploy regularly against society’s most marginalized communities.” Allen’s point is simply too sensible to be taken seriously within respectable political circles, for whom the serious questioning of power structures seems impertinent. They assume the government is good and build a theory of gun ownership from there.

The acceptance of such glaring asymmetry speaks to our subordination and moral degradation. We identify with our captors, slavishly devoted to them, happy to be humiliated and maltreated. We have lost the desire, characteristic of psychologically healthy mature adults, to be free and independent, to deal with other adults confidently as co‐​equals, the rights of all parties duly respected. What except Stockholm Syndrome explains this embarrassing willingness to defer and submit? The egoist writer and publisher Dora Marsden deftly captured this point: