The international human right to own weapons?

Glenn Reynolds is touting the right to keep and bear arms as the next universal human right. I'm less than impressed. It's a legalistic argument, which makes legal and superficial sense, especially for Americans, but everybody already has a natural right to self-defense. That isn't the problem. Most of them can't afford firearms and ammo and wouldn't know how to use them if they could. The problem is that most people don't have the Jacksonian ethos of standing up to tyranny, or even crime. They'll generally put up with a lot of oppression rather than fight for themselves, even as bad as Stalin, Hitler or Saddam.

It's not that I'm not sympathetic to his point. As a Mormon, I believe that God honors the right to defend one's rights. It's in the Book of Mormon to fight in defense of one's life, family, religion and freedoms.

I've been reading Born Fighting by James Webb, and if he's right, the Scots-Irish strain responsible for a lot of America's pugnacious populism, is part of the British-Scottish-Irish heritage we of the English speaking world have received. We have the imperial impulse of the British, but the weakness for lost causes of the Scots and Scots-Irish. Anyhow, people without that heritage have a difficult time understanding their rights the way we do. I hadn't realized before how unusual this characteristic is. Americans fight over their individual rights the way Russians fight for Mother Russia or Germans for the Fatherland, but neither of them have the kind of hatred for dictators that Americans do. You can't just tell them they have this right. Most Iraqis had guns in their homes, but what good are they without the will to use them in defense of individual rights. The terrorists are motivated by the idea of jihad and martyrdom, not establishing individual rights or freedom for Muslims.

There's also the problem of the arms race. When every Tom, Dick and Harry has an AK-47, those with more soldiers, ammo and RPGs still can oppress the rest and deny them their other rights. Too often guns give one a sense of power that can turn one into a bully, if one doesn't see them as a guarantee of one's individual safety, but rather as something to swing around.

Reynolds' peice is really most valuable as an argument for the futility of the fatuous liberal faith in international organizations like the U.N. and the E.U. courts to deal with genocide and war criminals. In the end, force must be met with force, not diplomacy and not with appeasement. Nobody is afraid to violate international laws, because they don't really fear that they will ever be enforced. It's only when other nations stand up to creeps like Milosevic and Saddam that they can be brought to justice. The U.N. just doesn't cut it, no matter how much lip service twits like John Kerry pay to it.