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Many people on the right who are in favor of the right to own guns do so based on reasons such as safety. For example, in the wake of pretty much any mass shooting, you will have people come out and say that the solution is to equip even more people with guns so that they can intervene and take out the shooter in such situations. Other examples include simple home security against robbers and what not.

But these same people also tend to oppose gun control policies such as competency tests and strict licensing prior to the acquiral of a gun. How is the co-existence of these two sentiments justified?

One would think that if the usage of guns is purely a matter of safety, then competency in using those guns would be a high priority. After all, if we want to equip people with guns to protect us from robbers or deranged shooters, we would want to ensure that they are as competent in using those guns as possible. And if a person can't pass a competency or licensing requirement, then perhaps they shouldn't own one.

So, what arguments are offered by these people to justify opposing gun competency tests?

Note that I am well aware that many people oppose competency tests because safety is not their primary concern. Rather, they just really like guns, and competency tests is a possible barrier that could prevent them from getting more of them, so they oppose it. My question is not about these people, I am speaking solely of people that concede that safety is their primary concern yet they still oppose competency tests. What arguments do they use to justify such a position?

Bregalad
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abudl
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    It would help if you can cite (link to) some of these arguments so that we can evaluate whether safety truly is the primary factor in those arguments, as opposed to a secondary argument. – cjs Aug 06 '19 at 02:51
  • Comments deleted. Please note that comments should be used to discuss the question itself and how it could be improved. They should not be used to debate its subject matter. For more information on what comments should and should not be used for, please review the help article on the commenting privilege. – Philipp Aug 08 '19 at 10:33

7 Answers7

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In America gun ownership is a right with enshrined protections from government infringement established in the constitution. Now pause for a moment and consider how you might feel if something you consider to be a right was going to have competency requirements e.g. the vote or water.

Going beyond the mindset and considering more practical matters

An amount of competency required to ensure the a person could use a gun safely to protect themselves or others (and not put others in more danger) would be hard for most people to achieve. This would require discipline and skill. Thus, tests would likely be hard for most to pass meaning them losing the right.

Competency requirement require someone to set out rules determining who is 'competent' and someone to assess people against those rules. In other words someone to assess if you are fit to be entitled to something that is supposed to be a right. These people have control over who can and can't own/bear arms. There has been a history of such assessors using questionable criteria to exclude particular people.

Tests require administration from the state/government. The right to bear arms is partly to protect personal liberty from the government/state.

Given the above it is highly possible that such requirements would pave the way for strict gun controls and even the banning of bearing/owning arms. Compulsory licencing would make this much easier to implement. The UK went down a similar path of licencing arms then removing a large amount of them.

Drunk Cynic
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Steve Smith
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    "An amount of competency (...) to achieve." - Why do you think so? Using a gun safely is easier than driving a car safely. (Shooting effectively is a different thing though.) I googled for some data and found (on a pro-gun website unfortunately) that in 33 events where an armed citizen tried to stop an active shooter, there were 0 cases of armed citizens making things worse. Link: https://www.concealedcarry.com/news/armed-citizens-are-successful-95-of-the-time-at-active-shooter-events-fbi/ – user31389 Aug 08 '19 at 11:29
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    @user31389 just reading through that article, I can immediately tell you that there are quite a few flaws with the methodology, and realistically the data is not available to determine whether this is correct or not. – DreamConspiracy Aug 08 '19 at 15:13
  • @DreamConspiracy They claim they will email you the data but then I'm not willing to put in my email just to try it. :P In theory you could also extract the data from the sources linked at the bottom but I'm even less willing to do that. Anyway, safe gun handling is not a superhuman skill. – user31389 Aug 08 '19 at 16:05
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    Not enshrined in the constitution - in an amendment. This means that someone thought that the political and social circumstances of the time required a change to the constitution. When the political and social circumstances of our time require it, we "the people" can decide to change the constitution again, or one of its amendments. An new amendment could require competency tests for the right to bear arms. To say that, because something is in the constitution, it cannot be changed is a poor argument, in my opinion, especially when there is such overwhelming evidence in support of change. – cdonner Aug 08 '19 at 20:19
  • For comparison: if we say that a person has the "right to vote", then why would proponents of democracy oppose voting competency tests? What about a literacy test to make sure they can actually read the ballot? (For the record: passing any sort of test in order to vote is illegal due to Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was passed because such tests were disenfranchising African Americans and other minorities, therefore denying them the right to vote). – Thunderforge Aug 08 '19 at 21:01
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    This answer seems reasonable, but is there any evidence that this is actually what the people mentioned in the question think? – indigochild Aug 08 '19 at 21:54
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    Water is not a right. – Chloe Aug 08 '19 at 22:09
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    @Thunderforge: Aren't convicted criminals forbidden to vote at least in some states? Following the same reasoning, and if the right to vote is in the constitution same as right to bear guns, then everyone should be able to vote. Furthermore, unless the constitution explicitly states a minimum age to vote or own a gun, we could follow the same reasoning that 'it's in the constitution' to say a 10-year-old could both vote and own a rifle. By placing age restrictions on who can own a gun or vote then following the reasoning of the answer it is already in violation of the constitution. – Daniel Aug 11 '19 at 12:06
  • @Daniel: I am perplexed by the dancing around voting restrictions in the Constitution rather than just up and saying "everybody with these short list of qualifications is eligible to vote". The result is gun ownership is better protected in the constitution than voting rights. – Joshua Aug 08 '23 at 18:06
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Whenever there is a test, there is someone who will administer the test. And there is a long history of abuse of such tests, e.g. literacy tests to restrict the franchise. How do you stop Jim Crow from saying "you failed" because he doesn't like your skin color?

Follow-Up: As one might have guessed, the topic caused plenty of comments. Some have already been deleted ...

  • A gun safety test is not the same as a government record of gun ownership, but proposals for both may go hand in hand. (Many people have a driver's license, but no car.)
  • A meaningful test should include hands-on weapons handling by the candidate. Multiple choice on an anonymous website provides only administrative overhead, no added safety.
  • If a test is also supposed to spot people with mental problems, then subjective impressions by the examiner must enter into it.
  • The mere possibility of uneven enforcement is no reason to stop a law. But a historical precedent of uneven enforcement of similar tests would be a reason to reconsider. Interestingly, those ethnic groups who seem most vocal in their complaints were least likely to be affected by Jim Crow.
o.m.
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    Comments deleted. This website is not a discussion forum and thus not an appropriate place to discuss gun control. Comments should only be used to discuss how the answer itself could be improved. – Philipp Aug 06 '19 at 08:02
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    Please support this claim with quotes or evidence of people opposing competency tests for this reason. – CramerTV Aug 06 '19 at 16:21
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    @CramerTV Here's an example of the NRA using it. Of course, this isn't just a theoretical argument. Jim Crow laws very frequently imposed various licensing and other restrictions on firearms for the specific purpose of disarming black people after the Civil War (just like they tried to do with voting and other such rights.) – reirab Aug 06 '19 at 16:32
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    At o.m. - that was true in the past - but today, with randomized questions on a web-based portal circumstances are different. – Mayo Aug 06 '19 at 20:31
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    @Mayo Was that satire? Yes, in an ideal universe with nothing but benevolent overlords that are in charge of everything, you could have perfectly fair, randomized questions on an unhackable web-based portal. Anything short of that, and there is doubt: are foreign agents hacking the site, are domestic agents hacking the site, who made up the questions, are they actually random, are they actually fair, do they actually allow someone to demonstrate firearm competency, does the test actually stop bad people intending to do harm, or does it just stop people who can't figure out how to use Google? – John Doe Aug 06 '19 at 23:25
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    And yet no one has satisfactorily explained why these flaws are enough to oppose gun licensure yet are surmountable or at least not a deal-breaker for motor vehicles and a dozen other things, such as occupational licensing. – Obie 2.0 Aug 07 '19 at 03:20
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    I am sure this is a reason that some black gun rights advocates have given, particularly historically. The question is, whatever they may say, is this really why the more numerous, primarily white and racially conservative NRA and their ilk oppose it? – Obie 2.0 Aug 07 '19 at 03:41
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    @Obie2.0 The critical difference when these flaws are critical to gun licensing and not occupational licensing is that there are no organized groups out there trying to ban general construction contractors. There is little risk of a person getting into power at the DMV and denying everybody's driver's license in an attempt to remove all cars from society. – krb Aug 07 '19 at 04:18
  • @Mayo, I believe the German gun competency test is a two-day course including the safe handling of a variety of firearms, as well as a lecture on self-defense laws and firearms regulations. That's much more than a few multiple-choice questions on a website. – o.m. Aug 07 '19 at 05:21
  • @o.m. - I would have little problem with such things. And, I would say, most gun owners agree with it in concept. But, of course, these things would do NOTHING about mass murderers and it would do nothing about criminals. – Mayo Aug 07 '19 at 12:52
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    I don't see how possible unequal enforcement of a law is an argument against having that law in the first place. I mean, violent crime laws don't seem to be enforced equally or fairly either. Does that mean we shouldn't have those laws? – Bridgeburners Aug 07 '19 at 13:47
  • This answer seems like a reasonable concern, but is there any evidence that this is actually what the people mentioned in the question think? – indigochild Aug 08 '19 at 21:54
  • @indigochild, check the link mentioned by reirab. – o.m. Aug 09 '19 at 04:54
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It's one of three situations, from most to least likely:

  1. Despite safety ostensibly being the primary concern, it's not.
  2. They're not well justified arguments.
  3. They're arguments based on particular forms of manditory competency training or certification that are ineffective.

For the first, even when not explicitly stated, many arguments about using particular techniques to help improve firearm safety implicitly rest on constraints from other assumptions about the regulation of ownership. In the U.S., most freqently this is that owning firearms is a right that cannot be greatly restricted. (Whether you believe this is a greater good or merely a situation that cannot easily be changed is irrelevant to this particular argument.) Thus any gun control policies (involving training requirements or otherwise) that would be seen to overly restrict this right cannot be implemented. Note the proponents of such argument may be very much in favour of training, and object only to it being mandatory for gun ownership.

It would help if you could provide examples of the arguments you're talking about, so we could indeed verify that these arguments don't "oppose competency tests because safety is not their primary concern."

For the second, while it would seem clear that better trained and more competent firearm owners would increase safety, there has been resistance to studying this in the U.S.. This could be used to argue that we don't have good data about the effectiveness of training (or many other things), and thus shouldn't make it a requirement until we do. This doesn't appear to me to be justified given the studies that have been done, inside and outside the U.S., however.

Third, there are plenty of what even firearms advocates agree are very poor mandatory training courses for concealed carry. There's an argument to be made that these are really no more useful than no training at all and thus are not worth the burden they place on the applicant.

cjs
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  • …forms of mandatory competency training or certification that are discriminatory. 5. Arguments that are an overreaction against people who appear to think the Constitution should be as easily changed/ignored as any other law.
    • – WGroleau Aug 07 '19 at 15:01
  • Did I miss something? While talking about evidence whether competency tests actually work, you just linked evidence that some random, unrelated gun control measures that worked? (link 3) – Shadow1024 Aug 11 '19 at 05:02
  • @Shadow1024 As the start of the paragraph points out, we seem to be lacking in studies that do a good job of disambiguating competency tests from other firearms control measures. Given that, I can only point to tests that at least touch on that as a component of such measures and extrapolate (with obviously more limited validity) from there. If you know of studies that do better in this area, you should certainly write an answer linking to and explaining them! – cjs Aug 11 '19 at 05:50
  • The problem for me is that you make some bold sentences, which if anyone bothered to follow link start to look overstretch. "Resistance to studying this" means: "after fierce bickering a tiny part of fed funds were moved from studying gun deaths to brain injury". // Good study? Sorry, publication bias. From researcher perspective picking a project where the result is likely to be "no statistically significant difference" is a waste of time, while prestigious journals have more juicy articles to publish. – Shadow1024 Aug 11 '19 at 06:47
  • @Shadow1024 "[N]one of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control," especially when that's interpreted as "you can't do any study where a possible result might be an argument for restricting gun ownership in any way," is a long way from "a tiny part of the funds were moved." But as I said, you should post a detailed answer. Also mention it in a comment here; if it truly shows that we have good evidence in this area, I'll link to it from mine. – cjs Aug 11 '19 at 06:53