Having permissive gun laws doesn't signal that it's OK to shoot people willy nilly. They just give people the freedom to carry weapons and possibly use them if they think the should. If and when shooting someone is acceptable is and always has been up to the community.
If shooting a thief or in self-defense is generally shunned by the community, there is a high social cost for doing it. In a free society, gun owners may shoot someone when they think it's appropriate, but they have to be willing to pay whatever social cost there is.
What would the social cost be, exactly? What if your neighbors think you're a terrible, violent, gun happy person that unnecessarily shoots people? In a free society, banks may not make you loans, you might not get that job, shops might charge you more, and your children's parents may not let yours come over, life insurance costs might be higher, and so forth. Maybe you'd have to have some sort of public trial where you defend your actions to the community.
The real question here is: how do we best enforce behavior? Is it through the judgement of the remote, impersonal, centralized, bureaucratic state or the distributed disdain of local peers in the community.
Laws haven't always been legislation. Laws used to be simply generally agreed upon ways of behaving. Even judges to this day still render "opinions" of what our body of laws say.
If shooting a thief or in self-defense is generally shunned by the community, there is a high social cost for doing it. In a free society, gun owners may shoot someone when they think it's appropriate, but they have to be willing to pay whatever social cost there is.
What would the social cost be, exactly? What if your neighbors think you're a terrible, violent, gun happy person that unnecessarily shoots people? In a free society, banks may not make you loans, you might not get that job, shops might charge you more, and your children's parents may not let yours come over, life insurance costs might be higher, and so forth. Maybe you'd have to have some sort of public trial where you defend your actions to the community.
The real question here is: how do we best enforce behavior? Is it through the judgement of the remote, impersonal, centralized, bureaucratic state or the distributed disdain of local peers in the community.
Laws haven't always been legislation. Laws used to be simply generally agreed upon ways of behaving. Even judges to this day still render "opinions" of what our body of laws say.
