Well I guess we can point out that the deontological perspective doesn’t even make sense.
Because firstly, rights do not entail unrestricted rights. All the other rights are already restricted in some senses. I have a right to free speech but I’ll still get sued if I release my Mickey Mouse vs Predator screenplay (ok, that’s civil court but was just a fun example. I could also have just talked about things like obscenity laws).
But secondly of course, even “arms” are restricted as you cannot own military weapons. I’ve heard so many gun advocates repeating this as if it makes sense “It’s fine for M-16s to be banned, as they are a military weapon. But AR-15s aren’t military weapons so should be legal”. They’re basically the same gun! Plus I thought the whole point was fighting government tyranny, so don’t we need military weapons?
It’s all just trying to avoid the cognitive dissonance of believing the right to bear arms should be an absolute right, but that letting any idiot buy rocket launchers and artillary might not end well.
I don’t think this is an accurate summary of the “anti gun control” side. I would allow for the abridgement of rights as punishment following conviction according to law. And there are many forms of gun control which do not, in my opinion, constitute an unethical infringement on any right to bear arms.
A right is a social thing. Alone in the Pecos Wilderness, you have no rights that the spruce trees, grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, rainbow trout, or mosquitos need to acknowledge or respect. Rights only come into play once others of our own species become involved, and they are all about demarking where your right to swing your fist ends and my chin begins, or vice versa. Or my obligations to you as a fellow human being in some situation. Or your prioritized right to do or refrain from doing something that outweighs any consideration of my conflicting rights, and so on.
We arrive at them by some communications process, not always as egalitarian as we might wish, but yielding a set of predictable and dependable structures that let us live our lives with each other without having to renegotiate all this stuff on a daily basis.