Is gun ownership a necessary guarantor against state tyranny? 1600807 According to Hobbes, a state is created by individuals giving up some of their rights to a central authority which exercises executive authority over all of them. One of the most significant rights given up in this regard is the right of violence. This right is wholly monopolised by the State. Coupled with this right of the state, is a fear of tyranny which may arise of too much power being accumulated into one central authority, the state. With this in mind, the solution to such a scenario is not the ownership of guns to act as a deterrence due to a number of conflicts that may arise because of guns. Governments are always presumed to be agents of the people. However, this mostly depends on the type of government and how the structures of the state are built, for example, the structures of democratic states and autocratic states. Nonetheless, what is similar to the nature of governments in both cases is that, once a government is given authority, that authority extends to the enactment and …show more content…
Which means that any armed conflict would not be ideal for the citizens as they would find themselves in a far weaker position to go for a confrontation and succeed. A significant example of this is the ongoing civil war in Syria. In 2014, a United Nations reported concluded that chemical weapons had been used in Damascus by the Syrian government. The weapons which the government possessed were technologically more advanced and deadly. The cost of rebelling against the government as seen by the case in Syria is a heavy cost due to the technological differences between them. Furthermore, the civil war in Syria has been going on for 7 years now, and yet an end seems unlikely. What is evident is that the Syrian government has had an edge to resist any armed rebellions by their technological