Everyone's favourite former Libertarian should be Will Wilkinson, who has a great column in the
New York Times noting how the Right wing response to a mere proposal of an assault weapon buy back by a guy wildly unlikely to become President (to threaten violence against the police and civil war against the State) is the illiberal and undemocratic scream of an ageing minority fearful of losing control because of democracy:
Nearly every Republican policy priority lacks majority support. New restrictions on abortion are
unpopular.
Slashing legal immigration levels is unpopular. The president’s single
major legislative achievement, tax cuts for corporations and high
earners, is unpopular.
Public support for enhanced background checks stands at
an astonishing 90 percent, and
60 percent (
and more)
support a ban on assault weapon sales. Yet Republican legislatures
block modest, popular gun control measures at every turn. The security
of the minority’s self-ascribed right to make the rules has become their
platform’s major plank, because unpopular rules don’t stand a chance
without it. Float a rule that threatens their grip on power, no matter
how popular, and it’s “my AR is waiting for you, Robert Francis.”
They’ll tell you their thinly veiled threats are
really
about defending their constitutional rights. Don’t believe it. The
conservative Supreme Court majority’s 2008 decision in District of
Columbia v. Heller
found an individual right to own guns for self-protection, but no civilian needs a weapon
capable of shooting 26 people in 32 seconds to ward off burglars. The Second Amendment
doesn’t grant the right to own one any more than it grants the right to own a surface-to-air missile.
They’ll tell you their foreboding “predictions” of lethal resistance are
really
about preserving the means to protect the republic against an
overweening, rights-stomping state. Don’t believe that, either. It’s
really
about the imagined peril of a multicultural majority running the show.
Many countries that do more to protect their citizens against gun
violence are more, not less, free than we are.
According to the libertarian Cato Institute,
16 countries enjoy a higher level of overall freedom than the United
States, and most of them ban or severely restrict ownership of assault
weapons. The freedom to have your head blown off in an Applebee’s, to
flee in terror from the bang of a backfiring engine, might not be
freedom at all.
I’m not too proud to admit that in my
misspent libertarian youth, I embraced the idea that a well-armed
populace is a bulwark against tyranny. I imagined us a vast Switzerland,
hived with rifles to defend our inviolable rights against … Michael
Dukakis? What I slowly came to see is that freedom is inseparable from
political disagreement and that holding to a trove of weapons as your
last line of defense in a losing debate makes normal ideological
opposition look like nascent tyranny and readies you to suppress it.
So
it’s no surprise that the most authoritarian American president in
living memory, elected by a paltry minority, is not threatened in the
least by citizen militias bristling with military firepower. He knows
they’re on his side.
Democrats don’t
want to grind the rights of Republicans underfoot. They want to feel
safe and think it should be harder for unhinged lunatics to turn
Walmarts into abattoirs. But when minority-rule radicals hear determined
talk of mandatory assault rifle buybacks, they start to feel
surrounded. They hear the hammers clicking back, imagine themselves in
the majority’s cross hairs.
That’s
why they’re unmoved by the mounting heap of slaughtered innocents, by
schoolkids missing recess to rehearse being hunted. It’s a sacrifice
they’re willing to let other Americans make, because they think
democracy’s coming for their power, and they’re right.
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