There are many instances even without epidemics when gun sales boom. If we surveyed the buyers, they’d provide many sensible reasons for their sudden decisions to buy guns and ammo. Let’s look at it from a Hobbesian angle. Thomas Hobbes’s work as political philosopher deserves the highest respect. His insights are many, cogent and logical, raising challenges to this day.
Adopting his perspective, what is the meaning of booming gun sales? To begin with, he sees the “city” or “state” as the political power that a multitude of individuals erects that takes on the task of directing the defense of the city’s citizens. This defense contract is inferred as follows (quotes are from De Cive):
“…that single persons do contract each with other, may be inferred from hence; that in vain sure would the city have been constituted if the citizens had been engaged by no contracts to do or omit what the city should command to be done or omitted.”
In other words, since the city [i.e., state] has the powers that it has, and judging from their purpose and utility to the inhabitants, the city not existing for no reason (in vain), there necessarily must be such compacts.
“Because, therefore, such kind of compacts must be understood to pass as necessary to the making up of a city, but none can be made (as is already shown) between the subject and the people; it follows that they must be made between single citizens, namely, that each man contract to submit his will to the will of the major part, on condition that the rest also do the like. As if everyone should say thus: I give up my right unto the people for your sake, on condition that you give up yours for mine.”
This inferred or hypothesized social contract, indicated by the words “as if”, ends the state of nature in which all have a right to all. This theory, while having some difficulties such as explaining how to view citizens of one city who are conquered by citizens of another city, nonetheless has a strong central point to make, which is that the city has a raison d’être.
Elsewhere, Hobbes explains that this reason for its being which is the prime objective of the city’s political power is the safety of its citizens: “Now all the duties of rulers are contained in this one sentence, the safety of the people is the supreme law.”
Supreme or sovereign authority is the city’s hallmark. It has to be exercised continuously because defense faces continual threats:
“For unless this is be done, there is not that wary care and heed taken for the defence and peace of single men, which ought to be; and therefore will not deserve the name of a city, because that in it, for want of security, every man’s right of defending himself at his own pleasure returns to him again.”
When Americans in exceptional numbers rush to gun stores, it is a vote of diminishing confidence, perhaps even no confidence, in the powers of their “city”, the political powers-that-be, to provide that security, that safety, that defense of the people that is the supreme law that spells out the duty of the state.
One can suggest what were those measures taken by governments that triggered the rush for newly-acquired means of self-defense, and the buyers will offer reasons. The bottom line from a Hobbesian perspective is that every man’s right of self-defense was returned to some extent to each man who sought out arms. This had to be because of the judgment that the chances of the government being able to live up to its prime duty of the safety of the people had perceptibly diminished.
Booming gun sales signal a government failure, not a complete breakdown, but a diminished capacity. They are consistent with the view of Hobbes that the state of nature is one in which each man has to be wary of every other man. They affirm that guns in good law-abiding hands are in some sense a backup power source when government fails in its duty to sanction the bad law-breaking hands. These realities go way beyond the Second Amendment. The argument for ready gun availability has to depend on the willingness and capability of the law-abiding hands to employ them in self-defense when government fails to defend them against the law-breakers.
9:52 pm on April 2, 2020
