Part of what is at issue in dispute between advocates and opponents of is nature and status of right to bear arms. Opponents of tend to see right to bear arms as, in some sense, fundamental, whereas proponents tend to see right to bear arms as not fundamental. In what follows I consider Wheeler's and LaFollette's interpretations of notion of fundamental Against Wheeler and in support of LaFollette, I argue that right to bear arms is not fundamental. But first two clarificatory comments are called for. (1) Following LaFollette, I use gun control as an umbrella term to cover variety of regulations that dictate what types of guns can be owned by which citizens under what conditions. I take it that advocates of believe that only few types of guns (say, hunting rifles) may be owned by certain citizens (say, mentally competent adults who are not felons) under limited conditions (say, provided citizen has license, weapon is registered, and citizen is not permitted to conceal weapon or carry it in certain settings). Opponents of control, on other hand, oppose many or most of these regulations. (2) What is at stake in dispute concerning fundamental or nonfundamental status of right to bear arms is ease with which restrictions may be justified. Fundamental rights are less vulnerable to regulation than nonfundamental If one can establish that right is fundamental, one has thereby established that restrictions on that right can be justified only by very compelling reasons. Hence one particularly strong--though certainly not only--way to argue against restrictions on ownership is to show that right to own guns is fundamental. In his essay Arms as Insurance, Samuel Wheeler defends Charlton Heston's assertion that right to bear arms is not only but fundamental (1) On Wheeler's interpretation of Heston, what makes it fundamental is that right to own guns is a condition for existence of other rights. (2) By practical existence of right, I take it that Wheeler intends something like the ability in practice to exercise one's right. Assuming that what is at issue are moral rights, there is prima facie implausbility about this claim regarding status of right to bear arms. For instance, it seems quite unlikely that this right is necessary condition for existence of our moral right to not be deceived. The claim is more plausible if our constitutional rights are at issue: if constitutional right to bear arms is our only insurance against tyranny--a claim that Wheeler supports--then that right is necessary to prevent government from violating all of our other legal The constitutional right to bear arms, then, guarantees safety of our other legal rights by allowing citizens to resist government incursions upon those rights and by making it less likely that governments will attempt such incursions. In this respect, right to bear arms is what Wheeler calls meta-right. Yet many of our legal rights, especially our constitutional rights, are underwritten by moral The right to worship as one pleases, right to own property, and right to express oneself are all legal They are instituted so that citizens (in democratic regimes) may preserve their moral rights as persons. So, if right to bear arms is practically necessary for protection of citizens' legal rights, it is also practically necessary for protection of those moral rights that are preserved by means of legal It follows that right to bear arms must itself be moral for one is morally entitled to protect one's moral And indeed this is born out by Wheeler's defense of claim that right to bear arms is fundamental He claims that right to bear arms is a special, technology-dependent case of more general right to be able to resist unjust coercion by whatever means avail able. …