The following question arose the other day in a discussion, and it seems right to me to begin this Blog here.
Is it possible for a liberal to oppose gun control?
As far as I know the word was first used in a political sense to denote what is now known as classical liberalism, a political and social ideology sprung from Enlightenment ideals of natural rights, social contracts... the newly developing freedom of the day. On this level, in terms of guns/violence, liberals are rational proponents of the use of force to defend the dignity and freedom of men. That these men believed in social contract entailed that they also believed that citizens should take action to defend their rights if the contract were broken. Of course, the classical liberals who founded our nation were pretty big into their weapons, as they saw themselves establishing and defending a place of freedom, in which people's natural rights would be respected and the social contract would be observed, and so they chose to amend the document limiting the powers of their new government, specifically specifying that citizens of the new republic would never have their rights to self defense infringed upon.
That is what “liberal” meant 200 years ago.
This movement, although positively based on principles of freedom and rights, was nonetheless even then negatively opposed to the monarchical, despotic governments of the past. And somehow over the intervening years between then and now “liberal” has lost much of its original meaning and instead has acquired the relative determination we use today, whereby it is used to denote progressivism, as opposed to reactionaryism, this latter which has taken the name of “conservative”.
Progress, however, is a meaningless term in itself, as there are of course always innumerable places to which to progress.
To me, being liberal is an implicit and explicit acceptance that people have (on some level of conceptualization) natural rights, that the government exists through a contract with its people, solely, and that if this contract is broken the people have the duty to rectify the situation. The thing with having rights, “natural” or not, is that for every right there is a duty without which the right will not only quickly cease to exist but will be empty and without worth as well.
