As usual, for more details and footnotes, please read the whole draft.
I now turn to the last part of my analysis, focusing for this argument (as opposed to the right to bear arms and right to defend life arguments) only on those many contexts — discussed in the opening post of this thread — where stun guns, irritant sprays, or both are banned but firearms are allowed.
Some of the people who want to use nonlethal weapons rather than firearms may take that view for religious reasons. They might, for instance, follow the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder and the Pentecostalist theologian David K. Bernard, who reasoned that nonlethal defensive force is permitted though deadly force never is. Or they might follow the view of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that