By Marisa Jarquin

Self-defense and gun ownership are constantly being attacked in modern discourse and by the mainstream media, yet their legitimacy rests on principles far older than any constitution, preceding and transcending any political framework. The importance of self-defense lies in its role as a safeguard against both private and state aggression. Unlike modern states, which increasingly disarm their citizens and leave them defenseless, a private-law society would place no restrictions on the individual ownership of firearms or other weapons. In a genuinely free society, the preservation of liberty does not depend on armies or governments but on morally responsible individuals capable of self-reliance. Security must never be entrusted to the very institution that holds the monopoly on force; it must remain in the hands of the people themselves.

The School of Salamanca—a group of 16th-century theologians and jurists—developed a profound understanding of natural law, laying the groundwork for modern concepts of individual liberty and resistance to tyranny. Among them, Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez affirmed self-defense as an inalienable right, grounded in divine natural law and applicable to individuals and communities, including cases of resistance to oppressive authorities. It is fundamental to emphasize that the Salamanca scholastics did not create natural law, but rather understood and articulated it.

Natural law, being intrinsically linked to human nature, is not a historical invention or cultural construct, but rather a discovery of universal and timeless principles. According to these scholars, since human nature remains constant across time and cultures, natural law has always been valid and always will be. Although Hoppe, in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, distances himself from how the natural rights tradition “has come to be” in its contemporary formulation, noting that his approach “owes nothing to this tradition as it stands,” he himself admits that it is possible to interpret his argumentation ethics as belonging to a “rightly conceived” natural rights tradition. Argumentation ethics may well represent the most rigorous and philosophically defensible justification for property rights, this approach arrives at the same conclusions as the Salamanca scholastics through a different, arguably more........

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