I think I have been thinking.
I accept that this is an odd thing to say. I am wise enough to know as much. I have never been a fool, and I keep senility at bay.
Nor am I a metaphysician. I admire Monsieur Descartes. “I think, therefore I am” was a neat trick, I think. But he has his place, and I have mine. I am not a philosopher, and were I to see angels, I would not expect them to be dancing on the head of a pin.
No, I seek by opening in this way merely to classify. Is what I am doing mere ‘thinking’? Should it better be described as ‘contemplating’? Or even ‘cogitating’? ‘Ruminating’ even, though I hesitate to use a word so bovine in its connotation. I am not an old cow.
Having thought about it, I shall settle for ‘thinking’. Doing so enables me to speak to Noah with conviction. “I have been thinking,” I am able to proclaim.
“Oh, yes? About what?”
“About your stance on firearms. You say that the possession of firearms should not be banned.”
“I do. They should not. People need firearms to hunt and protect themselves. The trekboers, for instance, needed to shoot for the pot, fend off predators, and keep marauding tribesmen at bay.”
“Colonists need guns? That’s what you are saying?”
“Don’t be perverse, Wanda. You know what I am saying. It is that people originally needed guns, and out of this need there developed a right to possess them.”
“Don’t they surrender this right when they create a State to protect them?” I ask. I am not going to let Noah become glib.
“No. Socialists may believe that rights derive from the State, but liberals certainly don’t. They believe that rights inhere in the individual and the commons acquire them only by delegation.”
“Not absolute”
“Moreover,” Noah continues, “the delegation is not absolute, but contingent. The commons, which I shall now term the State, enjoys the right only to the extent of the delegation. It is not an exclusive right.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “But, so what?”
“The correlative of the right is a duty. It is to provide, as agent, the protection the individual would otherwise personally provide. So the State’s right to exercise force is coupled with a duty to protect the individual who, as principal, invested it with the right in the first place.
“What I am saying is that, if the State becomes unwilling or unable to discharge the duty of protection, the individual’s right of self-protection revives. If you want a rationale for this proposition, you can say that it was never completely surrendered but existed residually.”
“Ok, suppose individuals do retain the right to possess arms. Are you saying that it is unqualified, unfettered if you like?”
“Come, come, Wanda, you have stopped thinking. The object of vesting the right and concomitant duty in the State was to curb the exercise of that right to the detriment of the commons. That was the compact to which arms-bearing individuals subscribed.”
“So you concede that the State can regulate and, in some circumstances at least, prohibit the use of arms?”
“Sure. This is not the Wild West.”
“How far does the control go?” I ask. “Don’t, for goodness’ sake, say it depends on the circumstances. I have had enough of that mantra to last an unlawyerly lifetime.”
“Intention to possess”
“But it does. Emphatically, it does depend on the circumstances. The State can say the individual can possess arms only for necessary self-protection. It can say that a person must declare an intention to possess by registering for the purpose. And so on.
“What shape the controls take will depend on the condition of society from time to time. If it is peaceable, little will be required, but if it is riven by division and hatred, the opposite will be true. Absent a state of emergency, however, the individual cannot be completely deprived of the basic right to possess and carry arms.”
“Against whom will the right be exercised?” I ask.
“Against the State, if it goes rogue. Against hostile aggressors, if they go wild. Against intruders, if they force entry. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
“All very airy-fairy. Give me a concrete example,” I say, a bit testily. There is only so much jurisprudence a nice girl can take.
“In the Zulu riots of a few years back, the State lost control. Heavily armed men filled the gap. Bridges were manned, patrols were conducted and, so I understand, in some townships strangers were shot on sight. None of this is to be applauded, but as Dickens puts it, it was the worst of times.”
“In your arms”
In bed that night, I return to the subject. “Take me in your arms,” I say to Noah.
“I shall,” he replies. “It is my delegated, if contingent, right!”
Really! These lawyers and their rights, I think.
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