Why do proponents of guns oppose gun competency tests?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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?

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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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

There's 'safety', and then there's 'safety'. Reasons for ownership posed by gun ownership advocates are about the safety of the gun owner. Reasons for certification and licensing posed by gun control advocates are about the safety of the general public FROM the gun owner. Ownership advocates consider the former necessary, and consider the latter to be infringements on their constitutional rights.

Answer 5

Gun advocates generally oppose most restrictions, no matter how sensible they may seem to their proponents. I believe they mostly view any encroachment on what they view as an absolute right (due to the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution) as a slippery slope on the way to taking away their guns completely.

I'm not sure this actually reflects the attitude of most gun owners, but it's the kind of warning raised by spokespeople of the NRA and other gun rights organizations, and stokes fears of "they're coming for your guns" in the people who believe their propaganda. So even though polls often show that the vast majority of Americans favor common sense gun legislation in principle, when it actually comes time to propose such legislation, gun owners are conditioned to oppose it.

For examples of the kinds of laws that are typically encompassed in "common sense gun regulations", see Model Laws:

1) require background checks on all gun purchasers; 2) license firearm owners; 3) register all firearms; 4) regulate firearms dealers and ammunition sellers; 5) require the reporting of lost or stolen firearms; 6) impose a waiting period before the sale of a firearm; and 7) limit firearm purchases to one per person every 90 days.

Answer 6

For me personally, it's Federalism. I am opposed to a nation wide requirement to a gun safety course requirement, but I am not opposed to California having a state requirement to take the course before purchase (which technically it doesn't... every county government in California made it a law to have taken the course making the State requirement redundant work). It's not that I'm opposed to the principle of the law, but the authority that is making the law (i.e. Washington politicians as opposed to someone who is more local to myself).

There could be other valid reasons for some states not requiring it (again, as pointed out, Gun Rights supporters are nearly always very aware and supportive of safety. The NRA, for example, opperates a safety course that is accredited in states that require it and it's the same course in states where it's not and do advocate all first time buyers should take a course, even a competitor's regardless of requirements). Another reason is that it might already be culturally ingrained. States with a high number of hunters might have learned proper gun safety as children hunting with dad long before they ever get to the age to legally purchase a fire arm (A family friend's second grade daughter is excited as all get out to go deer hunting with her father this season (I wanna say fall) and I know her dad well enough to know she's gonna get a very though gun saftey lesson prior to that trip ever happening. No trophey kill is worth his daughter's life).

Most gun rights advocates are also big on personal responsibility especially with fire arms (especially the self-defense advocates) and would likely argue that it shouldn't be a requirement because you should be doing this education yourself before you ever consider getting a fire arm and not having any training is no excuse if you do use a gun in an unsafe manner. After all, states that have this as a requirement don't let you off for handling a gun in an unsafe manner results in you killing someone. (BTW, I do not want to own a gun at all. Doesn't mean I haven't learned how to be safe with handling a gun. Just to be safe. Most of the rules are pretty common sense. In fact, the first rule of gun safety is always treat a gun as if it was loaded and the second is never point the business end at anything you don't want to be held legally responsible for destroy and are prepared to destroy, like furniture, cans, people, your face).

Answer 7

I don't know how true this is but, according to folklore, where gun licenses require a training course, it has been customary in some places to hold such training only once every two years with very limited enrollment, and announce it publicly only after the roster is filled with friends of the sheriff.

“You want to take the safety qualification? Sure, just watch the newspaper for the next session. Oops, this year's session was last week. Well, there will be another one someday. No, we don't have a way for you to sign up to be notified, it's not in our budget.”

Even if this never really happened, it's widely enough believed to make pro-gun people suspicious of any comparable conditions on licensing.