“In a world marked by evil … the right of legitimate defence by means of arms exists. This right can become a serious duty for those who are responsible for the lives of others, for the common good of the family or of the civil community. This right alone can justify the possession or transfer of arms.” (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, “The International Arms Trade: an Ethical Reflection” in Origins 8 (24), 7 July 1994, p. 144).
That same quotation was restated in a letter, on July 11, 2001, to the International Conference on Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in all its Aspects. I suspect that the same quotation, used twice, under the direction of the Vatican, should not be considered out of date.
Key word in that document is
can. The right to self-defense
can justify the possession or transfer of arms.
What the Vatican is saying (and rightfully so!) is that it is
not ruling out a pro-gun stance; such a position could conceivably be correct.
Any suggestion that the standard, right-wing, paranoid, American notion of gun rights is the authoritative teaching of the universal Church is a rather pitiful attempt to equate the social teachings of our faith with our country’s culture of fear.
Besides, the Church
doesn’t impose specific political ideas, for the most part. That’s part of how the Church in the modern world works - they don’t insist that they know which economic system or government works best. They stick to opposing obviously immoral things (like abortion), ruling out extremes (like communism), and leaving the rest up to others. They give us Christian principles, but don’t apply those principles for us.
Here’s a letter someone wrote in to Newsweek about the Virginia Tech massacre that sums up my views very well:
Only in America could a deranged young man walk into a gun shop and purchase a 9mm Glock 19 that can fire five rounds a second with a magazine that holds up to 33 hollow-point bullets to tear up internal organs and that can be reloaded in under two seconds. The NRA’s obsession with citing the constitutional right to bear firearms apparently overlooks the fact that at the time the Constitution was written it took more time to load a rifle than it takes a present-day gun to fire off 50 rounds. Such a gun has one purpose only: to kill people - as many and as quickly as possible.
All pro-gun rebuttals to arguments for strict gun control arguments spectacularly demonstrate the straw-man fallacy.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” - No one claimed that the guns are morally responsible. The goal of strict gun control laws is not to “punish” the “guns” but to make
killing people harder. It wouldn’t
eliminate the causes of violent crime, but it
would make things like what happened at Virginia Tech impossible while we work out long-term solutions to our country’s violence issues.
I’ve been to Australia and Europe. There’s a reason places like Italy have very little violent crime. There’s a reason the subways in London are much safer than those in New York City.
We wouldn’t need to protect ourselves against people with guns if they didn’t have the guns to begin with.
And the argument that “Criminals will just get and use guns anyway!” just doesn’t hold water when you actually compare places like the United States with Italy or Australia on this count.
What happened at Virginia Tech wouldn’t happen most places in Europe. Scream and call me horrible for trying to “manipulate a tragedy” if you want, but it’s a
fact that demands political and ideological change for our country.
penWindow(‘cr/2264.htm’)
Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:
or perhaps because you only post replies that consider very limited scenarios.