Here, instead of taking “civilian” as a misdirection for “underclass citizen”, I am applying it in its sense of “not associated with war” and where I can, I also will try to distance it from police actions or even from certain specialized activities. That is, I am trying to apply it to ordinary, common people.
The point people try to claim is that guns have no legitimate civilian use, that hunting and so forth are not sufficient reasons, and therefore you should confiscate guns. There are specific civilian uses for guns even given those thresholds, but the question is applied in many other contexts: X has no civilian use and therefore we should restrict its possession/make more possession crimes.
The first question is: what do ordinary people have to deal with? The answer is historically/culturally etc. dependent. To narrow it to the most difficult case, I consider that there are well-functioning police forces (i.e. not gangland warfare every day which prevails in American cities and therefore the claim obviously is invalid) in an industrialized society with a complement of specialized production and experimentation facilities. That is, there are a bunch of “shoulds” and “best practices”.
Let’s start with guns: do the criminals stay confined to specialized areas, or do they roam the population at large? Sutherland Springs is one example where the criminal decided to go to church. Although the police certainly would try to respond, since that particular region of Texas was not at the time what we would consider to be a “police state”, their response time was not sufficient to stop the massacre. Moreover, stationing multiple professional security guards (even if you did not consider that a police state) is not economically feasible. So in this case, we have a very rare need to have multiple ordinary citizens packing heat to stop rampaging criminals. Depending on the specific situation, there may be an argument that the cost and collateral damage e.g. “family fire” outweighs the occasional benefit; however that is not a generally applicable statement, and in any event, there certainly is a civilian use for guns and a cost associated with taking that approach to the problem.
Let’s continue with COVID-19: is COVID confined only to the medical treatment and experimentation settings? Obviously not. Then the question becomes, what’s it useful for outside of those settings? Vaccination by live virus. That was the approach taken with smallpox and other diseases before we realized cowpox helped, sophisticated means of weakening live viruses, etc. If you are guaranteed to get COVID while unvaccinated (the case for at least a significant minority of the world’s population), would you rather get a very small dose you self-administer, or would you rather wait until a large amount is aerosolized in a meatpacking facility or train? COVID-19 has a civilian use.
Consider another case: exotic wildlife. Often these invasive species are introduced specifically to deal with a local pest. Moreover, people make pets out of everything. As wildlife, by definition neither they, nor the pests on which they feed, are confined to specialized areas or handled by specialized personnel.
The difference between “prescribing” a drug and over the counter is the level of approvals required. In either case, the vast majority of these drugs can be either self-administered or administered by a low-skilled nurse, neither of whom are specialized personnel. That, and we don’t understand all the effects or workings of the human body anyway, so it’s unclear that if someone self-prescribes, that they aren’t actually doing something useful.
Hence you see the principles in play:
- Threats are not confined to specialized settings.
- Wilderness and disorder, being the natural state of the world, presents itself to ordinary people.
- Mechanically, civilians with a small amount of training can perform most of the techniques of specialists.
What wouldn’t fall under these principles? Very specialized chemicals requiring large/expensive equipment to apply for constructive purposes, would be the main category. This would include most radioactive materials, but even in this case, you have isotopes used all the time outside nuclear reactors and processing facilities.
You also see the correct main line of reasoning to make these possession crimes is that there is a widely available better alternative. For example, if there’s an Ebola vaccine, what use does any civilian have with self-inoculation? This is the dependence on the specific situation – that (usually) government is going to do the right thing, and so letting people do something not as good has no upside, therefore any downside risk justifies criminalizing the possession. That’s also where the arguments are rejected due to the specific situation. When even the American Empire allows rioters to rage in their cities, now the civilians need guns. When the American Empire criminalizes drugs despite their therapeutic benefits, you would want to have an outlet for experimentation for those benefits, and due to the usual levels of maladministration, that doesn’t happen. Hence the correctness of these approaches to lawmaking reduces to “is my government competent and benevolent” and as that always varies, it’s usually not advisable to make these possession crimes.