The Unrealized Cost of Disarmament

Meadowhall Shopping Centre

On January 2nd, there was another stabbing at Meadowhall in Sheffield, England. That's my hometown. I used to visit Meadowhall regularly as a teenager. It's a massive, very active mall — the kind that you can appreciate only when you are young, and grow to dread more with every year that you age. Meadowhall had a movie theater that I visited with schoolmates, before heading home via bus and tram, without adult supervision, as was normal. Some of that was the culture, some of it was the era.

Mohammed Yusoof, 20, and Ayaz Luiz, 24, were charged in the latest incident, names that betray a story. The official release about the recent stabbing neglected to give context or motive, leaving only the names of the perpetrators as a potential clue. The responses that the police X (Twitter) post received by online users were simultaneously amusing and revelatory.

Those respondents seemingly scandalized the law enforcement body by speaking about how the names of those men revealed a pattern. It’s a country in which the truth is rarely spoken, Islamic attacks are buried, and even Muslim child rape gangs were protected for decades to avoid upsetting “community relations” (as if there could be morality in defending peace at the expense of truth and justice).

The law enforcement account chose to respond by calling people racist, turning off replies, and sharing a link to a page about how they don’t allow controversial responses. Aside from those that employed sarcasm and humor, many of those responding talked about practical solutions, and what they thought ought to be done better. In so doing, they showed a culture that is blind. Many called for long prison sentences for anyone carrying a knife. Others sought deportation of the men involved.

While it would be appropriate to deport criminal immigrants, that wouldn't solve the problem. Many of the perpetrators have been in England for generations, and thus are no longer immigrants. Even if a major deportation scheme was started, the results on violent crime would not be immediate.

All of this shows a very narrow lens on the issue. The bigger picture is that the unavailability of guns in England has not led to a decrease in violent crime, or an end to some people’s reckless indifference to human life. While it is true that the importation of violent foreign cultures will bear catastrophic consequences, it is also the case that there will always be evil people.

What is being completely disregarded in such conversations is the rights of victims and potential victims. In the advocation of disarmament, such as by giving long prison sentences to those who possess knives, they assert that victims must remain defenseless. That’s not a moral good, it’s a false ideal that only works in some kind of utopian vision in which there are no villains. In the real world, disarmament deprives man of his moral right to defend his person and his loved ones. Man has a right to life, and therefore a right to the means necessary to preserve his life.

While a knife may not the best weapon to defend oneself, and a gun far more of an equalizer (especially against multiple opponents), the point here is not an evaluation of different weapons of self-defense, but more precisely the moral right to employ them. A society in which the right to defense is absolutely abrogated to civil authorities becomes one in which there is no defense at all, only clean-up crews, because invariably, those civil authorities are not present when attacks take place.

Let us then take the disarmament advocate’s dream of a disarmed society with close-at-hand law enforcement. That’s the ‘security’ of a prison. All objects that can be used as a weapon are banned, and there is total subjugation to the authorities. Is this really an ideal? It’s a false peace that necessitates the denial of one’s duties and of his obligation to seek to do good that he might merit his last end. Moreover, even in those circumstances, devoid of the freedom that enables man to live as a rational being ought, stabbings are hardly uncommon. Thus, disarmament is as impractical as it is immoral. It fails to achieve its end, instead depriving only the law-abiding of the ability to defend themselves.