Mdthbs

Many people on the right who are in favor of the right to own guns do so based on reasons such as safety. For example, in the wake of pretty much any mass shooting, you will have people come out and say that the solution is to equip even more people with guns so that they can intervene and take out the shooter in such situations. Other examples include simple home security against robbers and what not.

But these same people also tend to oppose gun control policies such as competency tests and strict licensing prior to the acquiral of a gun. How is the co-existence of these two sentiments justified?

One would think that if the usage of guns is purely a matter of safety, then competency in using those guns would be a high priority. After all, if we want to equip people with guns to protect us from robbers or deranged shooters, we would want to ensure that they are as competent in using those guns as possible. And if a person can't pass a competency or licensing requirement, then perhaps they shouldn't own one.

So, what arguments are offered by these people to justify opposing gun competency tests?

Note that I am well aware that many people oppose competency tests because safety is not their primary concern. Rather, they just really like guns, and competency tests is a possible barrier that could prevent them from getting more of them, so they oppose it. My question is not about these people, I am speaking solely of people that concede that safety is their primary concern yet they still oppose competency tests. What arguments do they use to justify such a position?

In America gun ownership is a right set out in the constitution. Now pause for a moment and consider how you might feel if something you consider to be a right was going to have competency requirements e.g. the vote or water.

Going beyond the mindset and considering more practical matters

An amount of competency required to ensure the a person could use a gun safely to protect themselves or others (and not put others in more danger) would be hard for most people to achieve. This would require discipline and skill. Thus, tests would likely be hard for most to pass meaning them losing the right.

Competency requirement require someone to set out rules determining who is 'competent' and someone to assess people against those rules. In other words someone to assess if you are fit to be entitled to something that is supposed to be a right. These people have control over who can and can't own/bear arms. There has been a history of such assessors using questionable criteria to exclude particular people.

Tests require administration from the state/government. The right to bear arms is partly to protect personal liberty from the government/state.

Given the above it is highly possible that such requirements would pave the way for strict gun controls and even the banning of bearing/owning arms. Compulsory licencing would make this much easier to implement. The UK went down a similar path of licencing arms then removing a large amount of them.

Whenever there is a test, there is someone who will administer the test. And there is a long history of abuse of such tests, e.g. literacy tests to restrict the franchise. How do you stop Jim Crow from saying "you failed" because he doesn't like your skin color?

(And if you ask me, the first step shouldn't be a test, it should be the requirement to own and use a gun safe unless the weapon is under the physical control of a qualified adult.)

It's one of three situations, from most to least likely:

1. Despite safety ostensibly being the primary concern, it's not.


2. They're not well justified arguments.


3. They're arguments based on particular forms of manditory competency training or certification that are ineffective.

For the first, even when not explicitly stated, many arguments about using particular techniques to help improve firearm safety implicitly rest on constraints from other assumptions about the regulation of ownership. In the U.S., most freqently this is that owning firearms is a right that cannot be greatly restricted. (Whether you believe this is a greater good or merely a situation that cannot easily be changed is irrelevant to this particular argument.) Thus any gun control policies (involving training requirements or otherwise) that would be seen to overly restrict this right cannot be implemented. Note the proponents of such argument may be very much in favour of training, and object only to it being mandatory for gun ownership.

It would help if you could provide examples of the arguments you're talking about, so we could indeed verify that these arguments don't "oppose competency tests because safety is not their primary concern."

For the second, while it would seem clear that better trained and more competent firearm owners would increase safety, there has been resistance to studying this in the U.S.. This could be used to argue that we don't have good data about the effectiveness of training (or many other things), and thus shouldn't make it a requirement until we do. This doesn't appear to me to be justified given the studies that have been done, inside and outside the U.S., however.

Third, there are plenty of what even firearms advocates agree are very poor mandatory training courses for concealed carry. There's an argument to be made that these are really no more useful than no training at all and thus are not worth the burden they place on the applicant.