Handguns, Philosophers, and

the Right to Self-Defense

Nicholas Dixon
Alma College

Abstract: Within the last decade or so several philosophers have argued

against handgun prohibition on the ground that it violates the right to self-
defense. However, even these philosophers grant that the right to own
handguns is not absolute and could be overridden if doing so would bring
about an enormous social good. Analysis of intra-United States empirical
data cited by gun rights advocates indicates that guns do not make us safer,
while international data lends powerful support to the thesis that guns do
indeed increase homicide. If handguns do not make us safer, then appealing
to the right to self-defense as an objection to prohibition is moot. Prohibition
neither violates the right to self-defense nor sacrifices anyone’s interests for
the common good, since it makes each person less likely to be murdered
than the current permissive handgun laws. Moreover, we also must take
into account the right to life of victims of handgun crimes made possible
by liberal handgun laws. Consequently, invoking the right to self-defense
does not provide any sound reason against handgun prohibition over and
above familiar utilitarian objections, which are themselves refuted by the
empirical evidence.

P hilosophers, perhaps even more than academics in general, have a reputation

for being politically left-wing. Support of gun control is a view that is tradi-
tionally associated with the left. Surprisingly, though, I am to my knowledge the
only philosopher to have published papers calling for a prohibition of the firearm
that is most often used in violent crimes in the United States: handguns.1 On the
contrary, within the last decade or so six philosophers have published articles that
defend a robust right to bear arms.2 Four of these philosophers (Samuel Wheeler
III, Todd Hughes and Lester Hunt, and Michael Huemer) explicitly argue against
handgun prohibition. Even Hugh LaFollette’s nuanced defense of gun control
falls short of advocating a handgun ban and proposes instead a system of strict
liability on gun owners for any crimes committed with their weapons.3 My goal in
this paper is to address nonconsequentialist objections arising from these recent
articles, in particular the view that the right to self-defense against aggression

©2011. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 25:2. ISSN 0738-098X. pp. 151–170
152 Nicholas Dixon

by fellow citizens entails a right to own handguns. This objection is serious and
merits careful consideration by proponents of gun control, but it does not, I will
argue, undermine the case for handgun prohibition.

1. Summary of My Utilitarian Argument for

Handgun Prohibition
Before turning to nonconsequentialist defenses of handguns based on the right to
self-defense, a brief sketch of my original utilitarian argument for prohibition is in
order. Its starting point is a striking set of international data. The United States far
outstrips five other developed countries (Australia, Canada, Israel, Sweden, and
the United Kingdom) in both handgun ownership and handgun homicide rates
per 100,000 people. The United States’ handgun homicide rate is over twenty times
greater than that in these other countries, and its handgun ownership rate is over
nine times as high.4 My reason for singling out handguns for prohibition in the
United States is that they are, in this country, the firearm of choice of criminals,
being used in at least 72.2 percent of firearms homicides in the years 2006–2010.5
Substantially reducing the number of handguns in the U.S. will very likely sub-
stantially reduce the rate of total homicide. This prediction is based not only on
the noted statistics, but also on the following considerations, which constitute a
rudimentary causal theory. First, a large proportion of these crimes is currently
committed with handguns. Since 1970, approximately one-half of the homicides
in the U.S. have been committed with handguns. In 2006-2010, an average of
6,909 homicides (48.7 percent of all homicides) was committed per year with
handguns.6 Second, because of their cheapness, concealability, ease of use, and
lethality, handguns are ideally suited to the commission of crimes and criminals
are highly unlikely to be able to commit as many violent crimes by switching to
alternative weapons. Third, other weapons that assailants might substitute for
firearms are far less lethal than handguns, and in the case of firearms other than
handguns, although the wounds that they inflict are more serious, their lower
concealability makes it harder to inflict wounds in the first place.7
Since the appearance of my first articles, social scientists have performed far
more sophisticated statistical analyses of much more comprehensive comparative
data, and they provide strong support for my causal hypothesis that prohibition
would reduce homicide in the U.S. In three separate studies of fourteen, eighteen,
and twenty-one countries, Martin Killias has found that the prevalence of firearms
is strongly correlated with the firearms homicide rate. The first study indicated
a correlation of .746 (where 1 is a perfect correlation), with a probability of less
than 0.01 that this would happen by chance,8 the second produced a correlation
of .476–.610 (p < 0.031),9 and the third indicated a correlation of .54 (p < 0.05) when
the countries with extreme scores are excluded.10 More important, both Killias’s
and other studies have shown a correlation between gun ownership and total
(gun plus nongun) homicide rates. Most notably, in a 2000 study of twenty-six
high-income countries, David Hemenway and Matthew Miller found a correla-
tion of .69 (p < 0.00).11 This study is of special interest because it investigated
twenty-six of the twenty-seven countries with a population of over one million
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 153

defined by the World Bank as high income or highly industrialized. Focusing on

a more homogenous group of countries helps to narrow attention to the variable
in question—firearms—and minimizes the confounding effect of other causes of
homicide. Hemenway and Miller’s study found that the overall homicide rate in
the U.S. was 5.98 times higher than in the other twenty-five countries, thus obvi-
ating the objection that the total homicide rate in these other countries could be
just as high as in the U.S., due `to non-handgun homicides.12 Finally, in a study
of twelve countries using some of Killias’s data, Gregg Lee Carter concludes that
total homicide is correlated with gun ownership at a rate of .67 and with handgun
ownership at a rate of .84.13
In its review of the literature on the connection between firearms and violence,
the National Academy of Science concludes that “in comparisons among countries,
. . . there is a substantial association between gun ownership and homicide.”14
To complete the argument that these correlations indicate that handguns cause
murder, we need to rule out alternative explanations of the data. First, causation
may operate in reverse, in that handgun ownership may be a response to high
homicide rates, not a cause, because some people buy firearms to protect them-
selves against crime. Second, both handgun ownership and homicide rates may
be a function of a third factor, while not affecting each other. In this vein, some
proponents of gun rights argue that the United States’ very high handgun owner-
ship and overall homicide rates are both caused by some third factor unrelated to
guns. The second hypothesis is hard to reconcile with the data. Any causes that
lead Americans to buy more guns and commit more homicides than inhabitants
of other affluent societies—for example, a greater propensity to violence—should
equally affect homicide in general and not just homicides committed with firearms.
What we find, in contrast, is a far greater disparity between the United States and
Western European countries in firearms homicide than in non-gun homicide.
The American firearm homicide rate is 4.96 times higher than the average rate in
eighteen Western European countries, but its non-gun homicide rate is only 1.96
times higher than the European rate.15 While this data lends some support for the
existence of a greater propensity to violence in the United States independent of
firearms, the only plausible explanation of the far greater disparity in firearms
homicide is that the prevalence of guns is itself a significant causal factor.
As for the first alternative account in terms of “reverse causation”—gun own-
ership is a consequence, not a cause, of homicide—it does not explain why the
United States has such a high homicide rate in the first place. Its proponents are
reduced to speculating that “cultural factors” are decisive in the United States’
extremely high homicide rate.16 Indeed, the previous paragraph shows that it is
unlikely that such non-gun factors can account for the data. That the high level
of homicide in the United States does prompt some people to buy guns for self-
defense, a point that even proponents of gun control concede, is quite plausible,
but this is entirely consistent with two-way causation, with the high rate of gun
ownership itself increasing violent crime.
Michael Huemer criticizes international studies of the kind that I cite on the
ground that
154 Nicholas Dixon

[t]he casual comparisons between countries discussed here typically use only a
handful of data points, exclude many countries from consideration, and make no
attempt to control statistically for any other factors that might affect crime rates.17
Huemer does not, however, name any studies or say for which crime-influencing
factors they should control. In any event, Hemenway et al.’s study seems im-
mune to his criticisms, since it is based on an analysis of twenty-six of the world’s
twenty-seven countries defined as high-income and hence does “control, in part,
for some social and economic variables.”18 Twenty-six countries are more than “a
handful of data points” and the only one “excluded” was the one high-income
nation for which data was unavailable. Moreover, because of the unquestioned
existence of many other causes of homicide, it is harder to dismiss as coincidental
the correlation that, as the National Academy of Science confirms, multiple stud-
ies have consistently found between firearms and homicide.
Ironically, a recent pro-gun international study by two social scientists, Gary
A. Mauser and Don B. Kates, is much more vulnerable to Huemer’s charge of
cherry-picking favorable data and ignoring confounding variables. Citing their
own international data, they claim that “the determinants of murder and suicide
are basic social, economic, and cultural factors, not the prevalence of some form
of deadly mechanism.”19 To support their hypothesis, they point to countries with
low firearms ownership rates that have higher homicide rates than countries with
more guns. For example, they get extensive mileage from the extremely high homi-
cide rates in Russia, Estonia, and other former Soviet republics, all of which have
far fewer guns than the United States but a much higher murder rate.20 However,
we might just as well try to argue that smoking does not cause lung cancer on
the ground that eighty-year-old nonsmokers have a higher mortality rate than
forty-year-old smokers. The existence of huge confounding causal factors—the
far higher mortality rate of eighty-year-olds in general and the anarchic social
conditions in corrupt, organized crime-ridden former Soviet republics—does not
refute the original causal claims about smoking and guns. Of far greater value in
determining whether guns cause homicide are comparisons between the United
States and other affluent, stable democracies, such as Hemenway’s and Miller’s
study, which is conspicuously absent from Mauser and Kates’s article, that revealed
a significant correlation between guns and homicide. Mauser and Kates may be
right that “American homicide is driven by socio-economic and cultural factors
that keep it far higher than the comparable rate of homicide in most European
nations.”21 However, the onus is on them to identify these factors and show how
they, and not gun prevalence, are correlated with homicide. Moreover, they need
to explain how Hemenway et al.’s study, which was designed specifically to control
for confounding socio-economic and cultural factors, found such a clear correla-
tion between firearms and homicide. Finally, my thesis is that the widespread
ownership of handguns is itself a crucial social and cultural factor that is a major
cause of the extremely high homicide rate in the United States.
A more comprehensive defense of my utilitarian argument for handgun
prohibition requires more discussion of consequentialist objections, to which
I have responded in detail in the articles cited in note 1. The primary focus of
the current paper is, in contrast, to address nonconsequentialist objections to my
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 155

proposal for handgun prohibition. Interestingly, we will see that evaluating these
nonconsquentialist objections itself requires more analysis of the empirical data,
especially regarding the use of handguns in self-defense.

2. The Right to Self-Defense as

a Constraint on Utilitarian Calculations
Even if handgun prohibition would lead to a decrease in crime, it would not
necessarily be justified, since in doing so it may violate individual rights, which
constrain the government in its pursuit of worthwhile social goals. In this paper,
I will focus on what I regard as the strongest ground for the putative right to
bear arms, and the one on which the authors listed in note two put most weight:
the uncontroversial right to self-defense. If handguns are an especially effective
means of deterring and defending ourselves against aggressors, a prima facie
right to own handguns seems hard to deny. Samuel C. Wheeler III says that “be-
cause for many people in many situations, a firearm is the only practical means of
self-protection, they have a powerful right to own a firearm.”22 Todd C. Hughes
and Lester H. Hunt give a detailed account of a case in which a woman used her
handgun to shoot and kill a would-be carjacker who was also threatening her
and her one-year-old daughter with his own handgun.23
However, the right to self-defense is constrained by necessity and propor-
tionality requirements. If handguns, while sufficient, are not necessary to pro-
tect us from predators, using them would be gratuitous and not entailed by the
general right to self-defense. In the vast majority of cases, we can indeed protect
ourselves from being victimized by criminals without using any type of firearm.
These alternative methods of self-defense have the great advantage that, unlike
handguns, they create little or no risk of harm to innocent people due to abuse.
Still, some occasions will arise when displaying or firing a handgun will be the
only way to protect ourselves against attackers, and on these occasions the claim
that a prima facie right to bear arms exists is more plausible. Hughes and Hunt
and Huemer further their argument by considering cases in which an assailant’s
accomplice prevents an innocent victim from using her gun to protect herself from
the assailant.24 The accomplice, they suggest plausibly, has violated the victim’s
right to defend herself. But a handgun ban would be functionally equivalent to
the reprehensible actions of the accomplice, since it too violates innocent victims’
right to defend themselves.
At this point, two provisos are in order. First, there is a tendency to regard
the only right in question to be the right to own firearms. Concerns about crimes
committed with firearms are often relegated to the status of mere utilitarian fac-
tors or “policy considerations.” But it is puzzling indeed why crimes committed
with firearms—murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, etc.—are not
themselves clear violations of the victims’ rights. To the credit of Hughes and
Hunt, they recognize that gun crimes are a violation of victims’ autonomy and
that permissive gun laws that, according to proponents of gun control, make such
victimization more likely to happen, may themselves be a violation of potential
victims’ rights.25 We should view the gun control debate as a conflict between
156 Nicholas Dixon

the rights of gun owners and the victims of gun crime (these two sets of people
sometimes overlap), not as a conflict between gun owners’ rights and utility. This
point will become crucial in section four.
Second, few, if any, moral rights are absolute, since we can easily imagine
circumstances in which any given right will be overridden by more pressing
considerations. Such is the case with the right to self-defense. All of the authors
listed in note two concur with Wheeler, who says that whether the right to own
firearms in self-defense prevails “will depend on a weighing of the risks that
person will be exposed to as a result of being disarmed against the risks that will
be imposed by the person being armed.”26
A realistic appraisal of the rival risks provides a persuasive response to the com-
mon reductio ad absurdum objection that the same argument for handguns as a
means of self-defense would also entail a right for private ownership of Uzis, hand
grenades, or even nuclear weapons. As Huemer points out, the odds are hugely
stacked against the benefits of such weapons’ outweighing their enormous risks.27
Lance Stell also agrees that “we want to know what is the overall net effect of
American’s gun incidence and/or gun prevalence on its homicide rate,” which is
“a serious empirical question.”28 The right to bear arms that these authors propose
is a prima facie right, not an absolute one.
Ironically, then, even the nonconsequentialist debate over the right to bear
arms appears to boil down to precisely the factual issues that are central to
utilitarian analysis of gun control. What makes the debate distinctively noncon-
sequentialist, though, is that merely showing that restricting guns will produce
greater utility than allowing them is insufficient to justify gun control. Huemer
says, “the overriding of a right for consequentialist reasons requires a benefit
not merely greater, but very much greater than the harm to the rights-bearer.”29
In this way, claiming a right does not preclude discussion of consequences but,
rather, places a greater burden of proof on the person proposing that a putative
right be overridden. I agree with the above authors that comparing the risks and
benefits of handguns is central to the moral debate over whether a right to own a
handgun exists. My disagreement with them is primarily factual, in that I believe
that they underestimate handguns’ dangers and overestimate their defensive
efficacy. I have already in earlier articles made my case, summarized in section
one above, for believing that offensive abuses of handguns are a major cause of
the high homicide rate in the United States. What remains to be seen is whether
these abuses are offset by legitimate defensive uses of handguns by law-abiding
citizens. This issue is central to the current paper, since the claim that we have a
right to own handguns for self-defense is vacuous unless we have evidence that
owning them really does make us safer.

3. Analysis of Empirical Data

Purported to Show Guns’ Defensive Efficacy
Pro-gun philosophers typically cite data from within the U.S. to show that, by
preventing people from protecting themselves with guns against aggressors,
and by preventing knowledge of widespread gun ownership acting as a general
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 157

deterrent to potential aggressors, restrictions actually increase crime. To support

this claim, Michael Huemer, like several other pro-gun philosophers, makes
heavy use of Gary Kleck’s often-cited estimates of the number of times people
use guns defensively in order to prevent what they perceive as crimes.30 To the
extent that these guns are handguns,31 this certainly counts against the utility of
a handgun ban. Kleck’s estimates increased dramatically from 645,000 defensive
gun uses per year in the U.S. (1988) to (in a paper co-written by Marc Gertz) 2.5
million per year (1995).32
Kleck’s and Gertz’s (K & G) estimates have been heavily criticized, most notably
by David Hemenway.33 Hemenway identifies two sources of overestimation of
defensive gun uses in the K & G study. The first is “social desirability response
bias,” which is a product of people’s desire to present themselves in a positive
light. Many firearm owners view using their gun in self-defense as an act of cour-
age and self-sufficiency that reinforces the wisdom of their decision to purchase a
firearm.34 Some respondents may be tempted to engage in “strategic reporting,”
knowing that reporting successful defensive gun uses will help the pro-gun move-
ment.35 These and other factors combine to create a risk of false positives: people
who claim to have used a gun in self-defense when they did not in fact do so.
The second source of overestimation of defensive gun uses is the fact that,
even by Kleck and Gertz’s own estimate, defensive gun uses are a rare event. 66
of the 5,000 respondents to their telephone survey reported defensive gun uses
within the last year. On the basis of this 1.3 percent positive response rate, K & G
extrapolate that people use guns defensively 2.5 million times each year in the
U.S. If we assume that this 1.3 percent number is roughly correct (that is, 1.3
percent of adults use guns defensively every year), this means that out of every
100 respondents, 99 have the potential to be false positives, but only 1 could be
a false negative. There are therefore far more opportunities for false positives
than for false negatives. We have seen several reasons for fearing false positive
responses about defensive gun uses. Suppose that K & G are correct and the actual
incidence of defensive gun uses is about 1 percent. Even a modest false positive
rate of 1 percent would lead a survey falsely to report a 2 percent rate, doubling
the actual incidence of defensive gun use. Things get even worse for the K & G
estimate when we consider the estimates made by the Department of Justice
based on large National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS). According to the
NCVS performed at a similar time to the K & G study, only 34 of the 90,000 people
who were polled (0.04 percent) used guns defensively, yielding the estimate of
65,000 defensive gun uses annually. If the NCVS percentage is correct, then a 1
percent false positive rate in other surveys would yield a positive response rate
of 1.04 percent and thus overestimate the number of annual defensive gun uses
in the U.S. by a factor of twenty-six! All it takes is a very small percentage of false
positives to produce a huge overestimation of defensive gun uses.36 The K & G
survey, with its far smaller size and its poor sampling techniques, is much less
credible than the NCVS results.37
Moreover, Kleck’s numbers take no account of whether any given use of a
firearm was either necessary to prevent a crime or proportionate to the crime that
was threatened. Unnecessary or disproportionate uses of handguns, especially
158 Nicholas Dixon

those that involve actually firing them, should not only be deducted from the
defensive efficacy of these weapons but also added to the list of their offensive
abuses.38 In the light of social desirability response bias, we can hardly rely on
gun owners to admit that their handgun use was gratuitous, especially when the
surveys on which Kleck based his estimates simply asked how often they had
used their firearm defensively.
Huemer (among others) also cites a study by Lott that purports to show the
value of permissive concealed weapons laws in reducing violent crime.39 The
most significant of his findings in support of the value of concealed weapons (in
practice, handguns) is that liberalizing eligibility for concealed weapons permits
in several states was followed by decreases of 5–8 percent in murders, rapes, and
aggravated assaults. Lott’s study gained widespread media coverage, and was
cited heavily by pro-gun groups and by legislators in the states that have adopted
liberal “right to carry” (RTC) laws since 2000. However, Lott has been so severely
and cogently criticized that citing his work is of limited value in establishing the
crime-reductive effect of RTC laws.40
The most common criticism is that the decrease in crime that Lott found in
RTC states, compared to states with more restrictive concealed weapons laws,
is better explained by factors unrelated to RTC laws. In particular, the ten states
that adopted RTC laws in the late 1980s and that experienced a noticeable drop
in crime in the early 1990s already differed significantly from non-RTC states
even before the adoption of RTC laws. When Black and Nagin controlled for
these differences, Lott’s finding that adopting RTC laws reduce crime no longer
held.41 The states that adopted RTC laws are mostly rural and largely immune to
the crack epidemic that struck urban centers in the 1980s and early 1990s. This
epidemic caused a sharp increase in crime in many cities during this period,
while the crime rate in rural areas was actually falling. This hypothesis yields the
prediction that, when the crack epidemic subsided in the mid 1990s, urban crime
would drop sharply, as the non-RTC states enjoyed the benefits of the factors that
were causing crime to drop throughout the country. When Ayres and Donohue
studied crime rates beyond 1992 (when Lott’s data end) and extended them to
1999, they observed precisely such a drop, which was larger than the drop that
the RTC states showed in Lott’s study.42 Worse yet for Lott’s thesis, other studies
of RTC laws have not shown the reduction in crime that he claims they produce.
Ludwig found that such laws if anything are correlated with a slight increase in
crime rates.43 Furthermore, Kovandzic and Marvell studied the concealed weapons
permits issued county by county in Florida 1980 to 2000, the state that Lott says
best supports his hypothesis, and found no evidence that increases in permits
issued reduced crime. Like Ludwig, they found that the evidence if anything
weakly suggested more permits are linked to a slight increase in crime.44
We should also remember that Lott’s data, even if we set aside the objections
that we have considered, at best only establish the putative benefits of RTC laws,
not of an increase in the number of guns per se. Granting more permits does not
necessarily increase the number of guns, since many people will already have
handguns that they have either kept at home or else carried illegally.45 Of far more
interest than the relationship between the number of concealed weapons permits
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 159

and crime is the relationship between the number of guns that exist in each state
and crime. Miller, Hemenway, and Azrael studied just this relationship in all fifty
states in the U.S. in 2001–2003, and found that “states with higher rates of house-
hold firearm ownership had significantly higher homicide victimization rates of
men, women and children.”46 In sum, data from RTC laws lends no support to
the “more guns, less crime” hypothesis, and state-by-state gun ownership and
homicide rates directly count against it.
Let us set aside for the sake of argument Miller et al.’s data on the correlation
between state-by-state gun ownership and homicide rates and all of the criticisms
that we have seen of Lott’s claim that passing RTC laws has lowered violent crime
rates. Lott’s data would still offer no good reason to doubt my contention that
handgun prohibition, not liberalization of handgun laws, will reduce homicide
in the U.S. It may be an anomaly of heavily armed societies that, once a critical
level of handgun ownership has been reached, allowing nearly everyone to carry
handguns may sometimes reduce violent crime. However, the international data
cited earlier in this paper leaves little doubt that a far more dramatic and lasting
reduction in homicides and other violent crimes would be brought about by ban-
ning handguns. It is not a fait accompli that the U.S. has to remain a heavily armed
society, especially with regard to handguns. Prohibition would stem the open sale
of handguns, and we could steadily reduce the number of handguns in circulation
by amnesties, buyback schemes and confiscation. Gradually reducing the pool
of handguns in circulation would also make it increasingly difficult for would-
be criminals to acquire handguns by theft or illegal transfer from legal owners.
Stell too approvingly cites Lott’s claim that liberal concealed weapons laws
reduce crime by deterring potential wrongdoers. However, instead of going to
bat for Lott, Stell adopts a safer stance of skepticism regarding the empirical evi-
dence on the relationship between guns and crime. He concludes from firearm
ownership and crime statistics from the twentieth century that
[n]on-association between variation in the homicide rate and variation (always
increasing) in society’s gun aggregate rules out social causation.47
However, Stell is premature in concluding that the evidence indicates that no
connection exists between guns and homicide. He rightly criticizes proponents
of gun control for “selective slicing of the data” to misleadingly manufacture
correlations between guns and violence. But the set of data that he presents—
firearm ownership and overall homicide rates in the U.S. only through several
decades—is itself too narrow to support his skeptical conclusion. As LaFollette
points out in his response to Stell, the causes of homicide are enormously com-
plex, and we should not expect a simple correlation to emerge in “time-series”
data. Other factors can combine to obscure the very real causal impact that guns
have on homicide rates, especially over the long time periods covered by Stell’s
statistics. Especially effective is LaFollette’s reductio ad absurdum of Stell’s pattern
of reasoning, when LaFollette points out that a parallel argument would conclude
from smoking and longevity rates in the twentieth century that smoking does not
cause premature death. After all, for many decades in the U.S. the smoking rate
increased along with longevity. In reality, we know that smoking does indeed
160 Nicholas Dixon

cause lung cancer, and the only reason that this did not translate into a reduc-
tion in longevity was the countervailing impact of other factors, most notably
improved medical care.48
The elephant in the room that supporters of gun rights need to address—
and to do so more convincingly than Mauser and Kates—is the vast amount of
empirical evidence from international comparisons of similar countries, which
strongly indicate a causal connection between guns and homicide. International
comparisons are not inherently superior to data from within the United States in
shedding light on the impact of handguns. It is quite conceivable that interstate
and intercity comparisons could provide strong support for opponents of handgun
prohibition. Comparing different jurisdictions within the U.S. has the advantage
of minimizing the confounding effect of unrelated social and cultural variables
that differ from country to country.49 The problem for gun rights advocates comes
from the data itself: the widely cited intra-U.S. studies by Kleck and Lott fail to
provide credible support for the defensive value of handguns.
This brief analysis of the arguments and empirical evidence from within the
United States presented by the opponents of gun control to whom this paper is a
response shows that they give no reason to believe that guns reduce homicide. In
contrast, the international cross-sectional studies with which I began this paper
continue to give powerful support for my thesis that the high handgun owner-
ship rate in the United States is a significant cause of its extremely high homicide
rate—powerful enough to meet the heightened burden of proof that Huemer
demands. However, this paper does not pretend to present a comprehensive
utilitarian justification of handgun prohibition. Instead, its goal is to respond
to rights-based objections to prohibition. In the next section we will see that,
contra Huemer, invoking the right to self-defense neither puts a greater burden
of proof on proponents of prohibition nor adds any sound reason against ban-
ning handguns beyond utilitarian objections of the kind already considered in
the current section.

4. Does Handgun Prohibition Wrongly

Sacrifice Innocent People for the Common Good?
Even if I am right that handgun prohibition clearly saves more lives than it en-
dangers, Huemer advances another rights-based argument that would challenge
it. He gives a variation on McCloskey’s well-known example in which a judge
has to decide whether to execute an innocent person when this is the only way
to avoid public riots that will cause many deaths and injuries. Consistent with
his rights-based approach, he claims that such an execution would be wrong and
generalizes from this case to conclude that “it is wrong to violate one person’s
rights (in particular, his right to life) even if doing so would prevent several rights
violations of comparable seriousness.”50 In his view, this is precisely what hand-
gun prohibition would do to a person who would have been able to save herself
from murder if only she had not been legally barred from possession. How then
can we avoid placing a handgun ban in the unsavory company of a notorious, if
fictional, miscarriage of justice?
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 161

I have two responses to this argument. First, unlike in the case of the executed
innocent, we do not know in advance who the unlucky “losers” from handgun
prohibition will be. All that we know is that handgun prohibition will cause some
people’s death by denying them the means to defend themselves, while saving
some lives that would have been taken by handgun-wielding criminals. When
we execute the innocent prisoner, we clearly violate the rights of an identifiable
person, albeit with the noble goal of preventing equally serious rights violations
of even more people. In contrast, we do not know of any one person that she will
lose her life, bodily integrity or property as a result of handgun prohibition. Quite
the contrary, if my analysis in the previous section is correct, we know in advance
of each person that she is more likely to be saved from potential aggressors by
a handgun prohibition than she is to be victimized as a result of being denied
legal access to handguns. (Similarly, wearing a seat belt is in our best interests,
because of the very high probability that it will reduce our chance of injury in
accidents, even though we may end up being one of the very small number of
unfortunates who end up dying as a result of being pinned in place by a jammed
belt in a burning car.) Since prohibition is thus in everyone’s best interests, it does
not after all sacrifice a person’s rights for the benefit of others, which is what does
happen when the innocent person is executed.51
The same argument also serves as a response to Douglas Husak’s claim that the
case for handgun prohibition fails to meet the burden of proof that is incumbent
on those who propose restricting individual liberty, especially when criminal
sanctions are involved. He points out, reasonably enough, that under (hand)gun
prohibition, “some individuals are punished for owning guns notwithstanding
the fact that they are not dangerous.”52 Similar to Wheeler, Husak argues that “the
right of self-protection encompasses the right to own a gun,” on the ground that
guns provide “an effective means of self-protection [to] low-income homeowners
who are the least able to afford higher quality, more expensive substitutes.”53 He
invokes the same concern that other pro-gun philosophers share that handgun
prohibition would, in the name of the common good, violate each individual’s
legitimate right to self-defense. “The same characteristics that make a kind of gun
useful for criminal purposes are those that make it useful for legitimate purposes
as well—most notably, self-protection.”54
It is surprising that Husak cites the high number of violent crimes that are
committed with handguns as a reason against handgun prohibition.55 Rather than
acquiescing in an arms race between aggressors and victims, we would do better
to strive for a dramatic reduction in the number of handguns which would, as is
demonstrated by all other developed countries, dramatically reduce the homi-
cide rate. Husak tries to sidestep this kind of response by labeling it as utilitarian
and arguing that it is trumped by the right to self-defense. The Achilles heel of
Husak’s argument will be apparent from the response already given to Huemer:
the assumption that any given individual is made safer by owning a handgun.
My right to self-defense is violated by a handgun ban only if it makes me more
vulnerable to being victimized, but a handgun ban actually makes me safer and
thus furthers my interests instead of sacrificing them. The United States, with its
firearm and overall homicide rate many times higher than the average of other
162 Nicholas Dixon

industrialized countries, is an ongoing, decades-long experiment that shows that

gun ownership does not make us safer.
This highlights the crucial point that, while invoking rights does indeed act
as a constraint on utilitarian calculations, the extent of a right is itself constrained
by the empirical evidence. The very same empirical evidence that grounds the
case for handgun prohibition simultaneously undermines the objection based
on the right to self-defense. If the liberal laws that are necessary for my owning
a handgun for self-defense actually make me more likely to be murdered, the
claim that the uncontroversial right to self-defense entails a right to own a hand-
gun rings hollow. The general right to self-defense does not entail the right to a
practice that makes us less safe, any more than the right to universal health care
entails a right to have access to snake oil. This is because the right to self-defense
is results-oriented, in that it is not violated by denying access to a method that
would not make us any safer. It contrasts with process-oriented rights like free-
dom of religion, which would, for instance, be violated by forbidding people to
perform a certain prayer, even if we had good reason to believe that the prayer
would be ineffective.
It might be objected that my position involves denying that a right to self-
defense exists. On the contrary, I accept Wheeler’s contention that a right to defend
ourselves against criminal assaults is “predicated on the government’s occasional
inability to effectively prevent assaults.”56 We need, however, to avoid fetishizing
self-defense by regarding it as intrinsically valuable, when in reality its sole value
is instrumental, in that it protects such interests and life and bodily integrity. If,
as I claim, our lives and bodily integrity, protecting which is the raison d’être of
self-defense, are better protected by handgun prohibition, it would be irrational to
argue for handgun ownership on the ground that it permits us to defend ourselves.
My second response to Huemer, and ipso facto to Husak and Hughes and Hunt,
is a consequence of a point noted above in section 2, namely that any handgun
crimes that result from permissive handgun laws are themselves a violation of
their victims’ rights. An argument parallel to Huemer’s would ironically entail
that our current, permissive handgun laws also violate the rights of those who
are victimized by criminals using handguns, all in the name of preventing other
people—i.e., those who would otherwise use handguns for self-defense—from
being victimized. Even opponents of gun control, who claim that gun ownership
on balance reduces the number of violent crimes, would not deny that restrictive
gun laws prevent some potential criminals from committing gun crimes. If, as
Huemer claims, handgun prohibition is the moral equivalent of murder when
someone dies due to being unable to protect herself against an assailant, then our
current, permissive handgun laws, which predictably cause a large number of
killings, are just as comparable to murder. No good reason exists for regarding
the right to self-defense of people who desire to use handguns to protect them-
selves as more important than the right to life and other rights of people who
are victimized as a result of permissive handgun laws. Indeed, this consideration
calls into question Huemer’s claim that the burden of proof is on proponents of
handgun prohibition to show that it will save many more lives than it will lose.
Given that either prohibition or our current permissive laws each carry risks of
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 163

violations of comparable rights, a more reasonable requirement for both sides of

the debate would be showing that the balance of utility is in its favor.
Another argument against handgun prohibition that is partly independent of
utilitarian calculations pertains to guns’ role as an “equalizer” that enables smaller,
physically weaker people to protect themselves against assailants against whom
they would be far more vulnerable without firearms.57 Handguns are particularly
useful for such purposes, since even relatively weak or frail people can handle
them easily. To deny such people the opportunity to use handguns as an equalizer
would violate Hughes and Hunt’s liberal “equality principle,” which entails that
[the state] must not discriminate against some of its citizens and in favor of oth-
ers and, in particular, it must not function as a means by which the strong take
advantage of the weak.58
Discrimination against a group of people is doubly unfair when its beneficiaries
are themselves wrongdoers intent on violating the rights of this vulnerable group.
Hughes and Hunt point out that guns can be especially useful in helping women
protect themselves against violent male domestic partners, who are typically big-
ger and stronger.59 Similarly, Wheeler warns us of “the risks a prohibition would
impose on women, the small, and the elderly.”60
However, the “armchair” claim that handguns act as an equalizer for women
or other people who are threatened by physically larger assailants is not sup-
ported by empirical evidence. In fact, the most striking finding in Killias et al.’s
2001 study of international rates of firearm ownership and violent crime was
the strong correlation between gun ownership and firearm homicides of females:
.61 (p < 0.005). When the two countries that have a far higher homicide rate are
excluded from the study of twenty-one countries, the correlation is even higher:
.72 (p < .002).61 This is all the more remarkable, in that the study did not find a
significant correlation between firearm homicides of men and gun ownership. A
study of twenty-five populous high-income countries by Hemenway et al. found a
similar correlation (.71) between gun ownership and homicides of females and an
even stronger link (.87) between guns and firearms homicides of women.62 Killias
et al. hypothesize that, since the vast majority of female homicide victims are
killed by their partners, most of these murders occur at home, where the weapon
is typically kept. Liberal handgun laws that allow women to protect themselves
with these weapons actually have the opposite effect of making them more likely
to become victims of homicide, since they make it more probable that their most
likely assailants—their partners—will also be armed. If handguns really did make
women safer, the best policy would be for women to carry them at all times in
the house, especially when their partners are present. In reality, such a domestic
arms race provides neither harmony nor safety. In the U.S., which is because of
its very high gun ownership rate the best test case for the hypothesis that guns
make women safer, “women are at far higher risk of homicide victimization than
are women in any other high-income country.”63 Women in the U.S. are murdered
at a rate that is 5 times higher than that in the twenty-four other countries that
Hemenway et al. studied, largely due to the fact that the firearms homicide rate
of women in the U.S. is eleven times that of the other countries.64
164 Nicholas Dixon

Proponents of the purported right to own handguns for self-defense might

appeal, as a last resort, to the acts versus omissions doctrine. They could point,
that is, to the asymmetry between the governmental act of banning handguns, thus
preventing people from using them in self-defense, versus the omission involved
in failing to ban them, thus allowing more people to be killed and otherwise vic-
timized with handguns. On this view, the negative right to be allowed to protect
ourselves outweighs the positive right to be protected by the government.65 Let
us grant for the sake of argument that the burden of proof is on the person who
proposes that a right to be helped by the government takes priority over a right
to be left alone. I have two responses.
First, positive rights to be protected by the government are not negligible.
Government agencies have been severely reprimanded for failing to protect their
citizens against natural and human-caused harm. A notorious recent example was
the United States government’s weak response, both before and after the fact, to
Hurricane Katrina. It was also severely criticized for its failure to protect people
against severe physical deformities from the birth control drug Thalidomide in
the 1960s and, more recently, against heart attacks and strokes caused by the pain
relieving drug Vioxx. These harms are dwarfed by the carnage that is made pos-
sible every year by the liberal handgun laws in the United States. The analogy
with harmful drugs is especially apt, in that a substantial literature has emerged
in medical journals, portraying gun violence as a public health threat.66
Second, it seems sophistical to categorize the right to be protected by the gov-
ernment from aggressors as a positive right. Granted, protecting us from harm at
the hands of fellow citizens requires that the government act, but so too must the
government act in order to protect us from, for example, religious or racial harass-
ment. In reality, life, bodily integrity, property and freedom from harassment are
paradigm cases of negative rights, in that they require that we be left alone, whereas
paradigm cases of positive rights are those secured by redistributive welfare
programs. If every right that the government has a moral duty to act to protect
is a positive right, then the concept of a negative right would be vacuous. Both
the right to self-defense and the right to be protected by the government against
aggressors, which even libertarians concede is a legitimate function of the state,
are based on the negative rights to life and bodily integrity. I have argued that
these rights are better protected by the governmental act of handgun prohibition
than by allowing people to own these weapons for self-defense.
The surprising result of my discussion of the putative right to own handguns in
self-defense is that, pace Huemer, it does not provide any reason against handgun
prohibition over and above utilitarian objections of the kind discussed in section
3. If, as I have argued, permissive handgun laws make us less safe, invoking the
right to self-defense as an objection to prohibition is an empty appeal. I recognize
that my presentation of the international evidence in support of handgun prohibi-
tion and my critique of intra-United States data cited against prohibition might
not convince defenders of gun rights. These are complex empirical questions that
I have addressed elsewhere and that merit more attention than is possible in the
context of the current paper. Indeed, the main value of the current paper is to
show that both my case for prohibition and gun rights advocates’ case against it
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 165

stand or fall with the empirical evidence on whether widespread ownership of

handguns increases homicide.

5. Conclusion
The recent wave of scholarship by philosophers opposed to gun control shows
that proponents of handgun prohibition must take seriously the prima facie
right of potential victims of violence to defend themselves with these weapons.
However, banning handguns would bring about the enormous social benefit of
substantially reducing the homicide rate, thus preventing the even greater vio-
lations of other people’s rights that permissive handgun laws allow. Moreover,
handgun prohibition does not violate anyone’s general right to self-defense. It is
in each person’s own best interests, since it makes all of us less likely to be the
victim of a violent crime. Since the chances of any given person’s being victimized
by a handgun-wielding criminal are far greater than the chances of that person’s
justifiably using a handgun to prevent victimization, no one is sacrificed for the
common good by a handgun ban. If the empirical data in favor of banning hand-
guns that I have summarized is accurate and my critique of the data cited by gun
rights advocates is sound, these same considerations neutralize the appeal to the
right to self-defense as a ground for opposing prohibition.
Hugh LaFollette’s well-known and plausible defense of gun control, on the
ground that any right to own guns that exists is not fundamental and that the
balance of evidence indicates that allowing people to exercise it harms society,
pertains to guns in general.67 (Interestingly, we have seen that even opponents of
gun control accept that the right to own weapons is not absolute, thus reinforcing
my thesis that the debate over handgun prohibition is primarily a disagreement
over empirical evidence and not over fundamental principles.) I have focussed
on the specific issue of handgun control, taking into consideration empirical data
and philosophical defenses of handgun ownership that have appeared since the
publication of LaFollette’s article. Whereas LaFollette concedes that the domestic
U.S. data cited by defenders of gun rights is “suggestive” and claims only that
“the overall statistical evidence tilts in favor of gun control advocates, although
the evidence is disputable,”68 my assessment is less moderate. I have argued that
the pro-gun data is deeply flawed and heavily outweighed by the international
data supporting handgun prohibition. More important, I have responded in
depth to more recent attempts by such philosophers as Huemer and Husak to
portray handgun control as a sacrifice of individual rights in the name of the
common good.
I diverge most markedly from LaFollette in advocating an outright ban on
handguns, whereas he proposes instead that we continue to make them legally
available, while holding their legal owners strictly liable for any crimes commit-
ted with them.69 The “policy considerations” that prevent him from supporting
handgun prohibition are both familiar and reasonable, including concerns about
the feasibility of passing such legislation and then actually enforcing it. I fear,
though, that imposing strict liability on handgun purchasers, while a welcome
incremental step toward more effective handgun control, would have only a small
166 Nicholas Dixon

impact on the United States’ rampant homicide rate, which would remain several
times higher than that in all other developed countries.70 It would encourage a
handgun owner to make sure that other people do not misuse his or her firearm,
but it would have no impact on people who commit crimes with the handgun
that they themselves purchased, since they are already liable for their crime. It
would do nothing to keep guns from lawbreakers who have thus far escaped
conviction, nor would it stop people buying handguns to begin a life of crime,
or prevent their purchase by previously law-abiding people who proceed to use
the weapon to kill a spouse, relative, friend, or acquaintance after an argument.
Even in the case of straw purchases (those made by eligible buyers for people who
cannot legally own guns), a large number would likely be unaffected. Criminals
would likely seek lawbreaking associates with “clean” records to buy for them.
Such associates are not deterred by the punishments that are already imposed for
the crimes that they have already committed and plan to commit and the threat
of strict liability does not appear to add any significant additional deterrence in
such cases. Nor is it clear how much strict liability for stolen guns would reduce
the incidence of gun theft, since people who own handguns for self-defense would
likely continue to store them in an accessible place. The root cause of all of these
problems is the enormous, growing pool of handguns that would still exist in
any system other than prohibition.
I am more optimistic than LaFollette about the effectiveness and feasibility of
a handgun ban. No country can eliminate all handguns, but stemming the flow
of millions of legal handguns to the U.S. market every year, along with buyback
programs and seizing handguns after arrests, can significantly reduce the pool
of handguns in circulation. This in turn will reduce the number of handguns
that are available for illegal transfer or theft. Even an imperfectly effective ban
can significantly reduce the number of handguns and significantly reduce the
homicide rate. As for the concern that a handgun ban is politically unattainable,
we should not underestimate the power of cogent arguments to change the sta-
tus quo. We have ample precedent for dramatic social change that would never
have happened had its earliest proponents given up the cause on the ground
that the social reform in question was not feasible when it was first proposed.71
If the empirical data and moral arguments are as strong as I believe, passing a
handgun ban through Congress and then achieving widespread compliance will
eventually be eminently feasible.72

Endnotes
1. Nicholas Dixon, “Why We Should Ban Handguns in the United States,” St. Louis
University Public Law Review 12.2 (1993), 243–83; “Perilous Protection: A Reply to Kopel,”
ibid., 361–91; and “Handguns, Violent Crime, and Self-Defense,” International Journal of
Applied Philosophy 13.2 (1999): 239–60.
2. Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Self-Defense: Rights and Coerced Risk-Acceptance,” Public
Affairs Quarterly 11.4 (October 1997): 431–43; Wheeler, “Arms as Insurance,” Public Affairs
Quarterly 13.2 (April 1999): 111–29; Wheeler, “Gun Violence and Fundamental Rights,”
Criminal Justice Ethics 20.1 (Winter/Spring 2001): 19–24; Todd C. Hughes and Lester H. Hunt,
“The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” Public Affairs Quarterly 14.1 (January 2000):
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 167

1–25; Lance K. Stell, “Gun Control and the Regulation of Fundamental Rights,” Criminal
Justice Ethics 20.1 (Winter/Spring 2001): 28–33; Stell, “Gun Control,” in A Companion to Ap-
plied Ethics, ed. R. G. Frey (London: Blackwell, 2003), 192–209; Michael Huemer, “Is There
a Right to Own a Gun?,” Social Theory and Practice 29.2 (April 2003): 297–324; and Douglas
N. Husak, “Guns and Drugs: Case Studies on the Principled Limits of the Criminal Sanc-
tion,” Law and Philosophy 23 (2004): 437–93.
3. Hugh LaFollette, “Gun Control,” Ethics 110 (January 2000): 263–81.
4. Dixon, “Handguns, Violent Crime, and Self-Defense,” 241.
5. United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the
United States, 2010 (Sep. 2011). Retrieved December 6, 2011, from http://www.fbi.gov/
about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl08.xls.
6. Ibid.
7. For more detail on my response to “substitution theory,” see “Handguns, Violent
Crime, and Self-Defense,”245, and “Why We Should Ban Handguns,” 268–72.
8. Martin Killias, “International Correlations between Gun Ownership and Rates of
Homicide and Suicide,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 148.10 (1993): 1723. The authors
whom I cite adopt a very stringent standard for statistical significance of (p < .05).
9. Martin Killias, “Gun Ownership, Suicide and Homicide,” in Understanding Crime,
Experiences of Crime and Crime Control, ed. A. Alvazzi del Frate, U. Zvekic, and J. J. M. van
Dilk (Rome: UNICRI, 1993), 298.
10. Martin Killias, John van Kesteren, and Martin Rindlisbacher, “Guns, Violent Crime,
and Suicide in 21 Countries,” Canadian Journal of Criminology 43.4 (Oct. 2001): 438.
11. David Hemenway and Matthew Miller, “Firearm Availability and Homicide Rates
across 26 High-Income Countries,” The Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection, and Critical Care
49.6 (December 2000): 985–8.
12. Ibid., 986.
13. Gregg Lee Carter, The Gun Control Movement (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 3.
14. Charles F. Wellford, John V. Pepper, and Carol V. Petrie, eds., Firearms and Violence:
A Critical Review (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005), 5–6.
15. These numbers from the 1990s are cited on a largely pro-gun web site, GunCite,
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvinco.html, accessed July 30, 2010.
16. For instance, Hughes and Hunt suggest that the high homicide rate in the U.S. is
caused by the extensive array of rights that it extends to defendants in order to prevent
unjust convictions (“The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” 3). Similarly, Wheeler
argues that we should look at the vast disparity in income and wealth between rich and
poor in the U.S., and its disastrous “war on drugs” as the main cause of its high rate of
violent crimes (“Gun Violence and Fundamental Rights,” 20). These and other hypotheses
are plausible as partial explanations, but this is quite consistent with my claim that hand-
gun prevalence is a cause, albeit a major one, of violent crime. For more depth on why
alternative explanations of the disparity between the homicide rate in the United States
and other countries do not disprove my handgun hypothesis, see my “Why We Should
Ban Handguns,” 256–8; “Perilous Protection,” 365–70; and “Handguns, Violent Crime,
and Self-Defense,” 245–6.
17. Huemer, “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?,” 312.
18. Hemenway and Miller, “Firearm Availability and Homicide Rates,” 987.
168 Nicholas Dixon

19. Gary A. Mauser and Don B. Kates, “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and
Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence,” Harvard Journal of Law
and Public Policy 30.2 (2007): 663.
20. Ibid., 650–2.
21. Ibid., 672.
22. Wheeler, “Gun Violence and Fundamental Rights,” 21.
23. Hughes and Hunt, “The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” 6–9.
24. Ibid., 8; and Huemer, “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?,” 306–9.
25. Hughes and Hunt, “The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” 9.
26. Wheeler, “Gun Violence and Fundamental Rights,” 19. See also Huemer, who offers
a review of the empirical data on the abuse of guns to commit crimes and legitimate uses
of guns in self-defense, in order to show that the prima facie right to own a gun prevails
(“Is There a Right to Own a Gun?,” 312–7).
27. Huemer, “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?,” 323. For the same reason, Wheeler says
“rights to exotic armaments [tanks, missiles, etc.] do not exist in contemporary situations”
(“Self-Defense: Rights and Coerced Risk-Acceptance,” 439).
28. Stell, “Gun Control and the Regulation of Fundamental Rights,” 30.
29. Huemer, “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?,” 317.
30. Ibid., 312–4.
31. Kleck does not distinguish between different types of firearm in his estimates.
32. Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature
of Self-defense with a Gun,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (1995).
33. David Hemenway, “Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use: An Explanation of
Extreme Overestimates,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 87.4 (1997): 1430–45.
34. Ibid., 1431, 1438.
35. Ibid., 1439.
36. In “Is There A Right to Own a Gun?,” 313, Huemer acknowledges the existence of
Hemenway’s critique, but Huemer’s response fails to account for the arguments that I have
just summarized from Hemenway. Huemer complains that “Kleck’s figures would have
to be very large overestimates in order for the harms of guns to exceed their benefits,” but
Hemenway’s point is precisely that the comparative rarity of defensive gun uses, along
with social desirability response bias, makes very large overestimations very likely to oc-
cur. Huemer also complains that “it is not clear prima facie that an overestimate is more
likely than an underestimate,” but this again neglects Hemenway’s point that there are at
least 99 times more opportunities for overestimates than for underestimates.
37. Hemenway, “Survey Research and Self-Defense Gun Use,” 1433–4.
38. For more detail on my objections to Kleck, see Dixon, “Handguns, Violent Crime,
and Self-Defense,” 250–1.
39. John R. Lott, Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws,
2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Huemer summarizes Lott’s find-
ings in “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?” 314–6.
40. See reviews of More Guns, Less Crime by: David Hemenway, New England Journal of
Medicine 339.27 (December 31, 1998): 2029–30; Peter Squires, The British Journal of Criminol-
ogy 39.2. (Spring 1999): 318–20; and Jens Ludwig, Contemporary Sociology 28.4 (July 1999):
466–7. For a more extended critique of Lott, see John J. Donohue III, “The Final Bullet in
 HANDGUNS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE 169

the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis,” Criminology and Public Policy 2.3 (July
2003): 397–410.
41. Ludwig, review of More Guns, Less Crime, 466.
42. Donohue, “The Final Bullet,” 398.
43. Jens Ludwig, “Concealed-Gun-Carrying Laws and Violent Crime: Evidence from
State Panel Data,” International Review of Law and Economics 18 (1998): 242.
44. Tomislav Kovandzic and Thomas Marvell, “Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns
and Violent Crime: Crime Control Through Gun Decontrol?,” Criminology and Public Policy
2.3 (July 2003).
45. Squires’s review of More Guns, Less Crime, 319.
46. Matthew Miller, David Hemenway, Deborah Azrael, “State-level Homicide Victim-
ization Rates in the U.S. in Relation to Survey Measures of Household Firearm Ownership,
2001–2003,” Social Science and Medicine 64.3 (Feb. 2007): 656.
47. Stell, “Gun Control and the Regulation of Fundamental Rights,” 30. He gives a more
extended analysis of why he believes that the data show that guns do not increase crime
in “Gun Control,” 199–204.
48. LaFollette, “Controlling Guns,” Criminal Justice Ethics 20.1 (Winter/Spring 2001): 35.
49. A drawback for such comparisons, though, is that the impact of different gun laws
on different states, counties, and cities within the U.S. is difficult to measure, because of
the ease of carrying guns across unguarded city, county, and state borders.
50. Huemer, “Is There a Right to Own a Gun?,” 318.
51. The argument in this paragraph amounts to rejecting Huemer’s premise 6, which
states that “[g]un prohibition would violate a group of people’s right of self-defense, pre-
dictably resulting in the deaths of many of the victims” (ibid., 317). A policy that makes
people less likely to be harmed by assailants does not violate their right to self-defense.
52. Husak, “Guns and Drugs,” 479. See also Hughes and Hunt’s argument that handgun
prohibition violates the autonomy of law-abiding citizens who would have used their
weapons for legitimate self-defense (“The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” 12).
53. Husak, “Guns and Drugs,” 485.
54. Ibid., 454.
55. Ibid., 482.
56. Wheeler, “Arms as Insurance,” 113.
57. Stell, “Gun Control and the Regulation of Fundamental Rights,” 31; and Hughes
and Hunt, “The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” 14–8.
58. Hughes and Hunt, “The Liberal Basis of the Right to Bear Arms,” 15.
59. Ibid., 16.
60. Wheeler, “Self-Defense: Rights and Coerced Risk-Acceptance,” 436.
61. Killias et al., “Guns, Violent Crime, and Suicide in 21 Countries,” 438.
62. David Hemenway, Tomoko Shinoda-Tagawa, and Matthew Miller, “Firearm Avail-
ability and Female Homicide Victimization Rates Among 25 Populous High-Income
Countries,” Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association 57.2 (Spring 2002): 102.
Their findings are especially significant, in that “reverse causation” is very unlikely to be
a factor. It is very unlikely, that is, that the particularly high rate of victimization of women
in the United States itself caused so many people to buy guns, since men own the vast
majority of household guns.
63. Ibid., 104.
170 Nicholas Dixon

64. Ibid., 102.

65. I am grateful to Marc Ramsay for this objection.
66. For a recent example, see Garen J. Wintermute, “Guns, Fear, the Constitution, and
the Public’s Health,” The New England Journal of Medicine 358.14 (April 3, 2008): 1421.
67. Hugh LaFollette, “Gun Control.”
68. Ibid., 279.
69. Ibid., 280–1.
70. For a related critique of the Brady Bill, another compromise measure that tries to
reduce violent crime, while allowing widespread handgun ownership, see my “Handguns,
Violent Crime, and Self-Defense,” 243–4.
71. For more depth on my critique of the objection that handgun prohibition is not
feasible, see ibid., 255–7.
72. An embryonic version of this paper was presented at the Canadian Philosophical
Association meeting in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I am grateful to commentator Marc Ramsay
and audience members for invaluable feedback.