"I’ll argue in this essay that individuals should be allowed to own firearms. In making the case for this position, I’ll defend the following two claims:
1. The best research does not show that gun ownership results in more harms than benefits. This fact, in addition to the substantial self-defense benefits
that guns offer and the value of personal liberty, supports a presumption in favor of gun ownership.
2. Even if the overall harms of gun ownership were to outweigh its overall benefits, there is still a presumption in favor of reasonably permissive gun ownership.
Since this essay gives a moral case for gun ownership, I won’t consider any appeals to the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. While I do believe that the Constitution does support an individual right to keep and bear arms (a claim affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago), the arguments in this paper imply that if the Second Amendment had never existed, the state should still allow the private ownership of firearms for purely moral reasons.35"
Recommended Citation
Tim Hsiao, The Moral Case for Gun Ownership, in Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues that Divide Us (Bob Fischer ed., 2019).
