In the constitution, it is a given right to bear arms and there shall be no infringement on that right. In MLK’s letter, he wrote of just and unjust laws. He described an unjust law as, “ an unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” A moral law is that every person’s life is equally valuable. We have known our government to make unjust laws in the past that oppressed minorities, but I argue that there are some laws that infringe on our rights to bear arms and oppress groups of people, therefore creating a power inequity. The first example of this is the integration of the National Firearms Act (which still exists today.) The goal of this act was to get rid of dangerous weapons to lower crime rates. [https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/national-firearms-act] They couldn’t, at the time, ban these weapons because it went against the 2nd amendment and the people imposed it. So instead, the government imposed a substantial tax on these weapons: $200 (equal to about $2700 in 2021.)
Arguably this made the problem worse by only making these weapons affordable to the rich. In this Era, the people who used these weapons were members of organized crime, who had the money to buy weapons no matter the price.
The Actual Tommy Guns Used in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
What this law really did was block the middle and lower class from obtaining them, creating a further imbalance of power: putting the law-abiding citizens at a disadvantage to criminals when defending themselves. Today, the same types of laws are imposed that specifically tax firearms and ammo heavily. This does not achieve the goal of lowering gun violence because the guns aren’t illegal, they are just made more expensive and therefore only accessible by the rich/powerful. These taxations deny the lower classes the means to defend themselves that are easily accessible to the rich and powerful. I believe that every life should have access to the same means of defending themselves and the government has installed a system that they claim “lowers gun violence” but instead makes it so the poor are unable to afford it. So why doesn’t the government recognize the error in ineffective gun laws? I argue there is a master-slave dialectic between the government and the people. Hegel argues that the master cannot recognize the slave because 1.) He/She is only master because He/She doesn’t recognize the slave as autonomous, and 2.) If the master were to recognize the slave, that would mean the master is no longer master. If the government agrees that the laws of their creation are ineffective, they, therefore, recognize that the people they govern are better lawmakers than themselves and therefore hurt their own legitimacy. By recognizing that their laws are ineffective, they further lose their image as masters and may give the people more of a feeling of autonomy.