Guns and No Butter

Harvey C. Jackson IV, for instance, argued that he had a constitutional right to carry a gun while selling drugs in a dangerous neighborhood in East St. Louis, Ill. The federal appeals court in Chicago was unimpressed.

'The Constitution does not give anyone the right to be armed while committing a felony,' Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote last month in Mr. Jackson's case."

--The New York Times, on the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller.

But seriously, if a situation ever existed in which gun-advocates' argument that firearms are necessary for self-defense were valid, then surely this would be it.  Given that gun control rarely works in high-crime neighborhoods, allowing drug dealers to carry firearms actually makes a lot of sense.  Without guns to deter their wildly irrational, doped-up customers (who carry guns no matter what), from killing them for drugs and money, drug-dealers would be rampantly attacked. We could end up with a greater level of violence than otherwise.

Unfortunately the NRA members who advocate for the second-amendment right to self-defense tend to come from suburbs and not the ghetto.  It's hard to make any reasonable case that guns in suburbs play any role in deterring violence or saving lives.  And ironically, the suburbs are probably the place where gun-control laws would have the highest compliance rate.