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.
Can one have freedom without being willing to defend it? Does one who will not do so deserve his freedom? After all, the only reason to delineate a “right” at all is because we need to remind people that they shouldn't/can't do “that” to another... Yet what this really means is that we will defend ourselves or others if “they” do “that” ("that" being some action that violates people’s rights).
The problem with modern liberalism is that people who claim the label “liberal” seem to, to an increasing and already large extent, believe that the government itself is responsible for defending the rights of the people. However, our government, as outlined in its defining documents, is clearly constructed under the assumption that the people are responsible for defending their rights. The entire Constitution is a set of rules, strictly, to prevent the government from infringing on our rights.
I’m not saying that the Constitution is the end-all be-all of what is under discussion here and generally among the people of the nation; I’m not saying that the 2nd amendment is written in stone and everyone should have an RPG and M-16.
Yet the Constitution does remind us of a very important fact of which the founding fathers were acutely aware—We can never trust another to guarantee or defend our rights. Power is power is power, whether power be realized through physical, capital, or psychological force. Power always seeks to expand itself, and will not relinquish what it has gained.
Modern liberalism seems intent on delegating the state the duties of the people, because the "progressive" view, shaped, purposefully, passively and acutely, now for oh-so-many years, somehow seeks to move toward a future in which duty is abstracted, collectivized, delegated and forgotten, similarly to modern views on food production, factory farming, waste removal... everything really. The holistic system of human Being has been compartmentalized, alienated from itself. Capital economy has split the very existence of man into disparate sectors... and the people divided thereby themselves are set against each other, as competition is the engine of life. Life itself has become mass production, each man set to turn himself into a lever, a button, a step in the process. And in this abstraction become life, duty is forgotten; the fact that freedom must be defended is forgotten. The fact that rights don’t exist unless we are willing to defend our own and those of others... this seems distant.
Now, many in the liberal camp are there by default, forced to one side or the other by our two party system and the great effect it has on every aspect of our lives and ideologies. I would not count many who are “on the left” as “liberals”, as even I find myself a “liberal” though I hate almost everything those whom “liberals” “select” to represent them do. This idea that there is a single monolithic "left" comprised of people who all want the same thing is absurd. This type of reductionism is typical of, e.g., Marxist. Marx, a young Hegelian as a young man, never moved very far from Hegel's conception of Spirit, in which things inevitably move toward a single building truth... In other words, Marx, lost in abstractions of human history and class and economy, forgot to take Nietzsche seriously. But I'm getting off topic, a little.
But I guess the point there is that “liberal”, in today's terms, covers progressives of all types: the socialist, the organic hippie, the environmental fanatic, the entrepreneur, the coffee shop yuppy who just thinks the world would be a better place if everyone on Earth had an iPhone 6 with retina display, the laid back English teacher who just wants to live and let live, the affluent politician who wants to make the world safe for Coca-Cola and Monsanto. Each of these, and more, have different ends in mind, some of which intersect, others which do not, yet they are all comprehended by the term “liberal”.
Certainly some of these can realistically be expected to oppose further gun control.
Yet the real question, I think, is whether someone can truly be liberal, or progressive for that matter, without condoning or sanctioning violence, by themselves or others. After all, it must be acknowledged that the realization of any end, whatsoever, must be accompanied by force, so all progressives require on some level violence or the threat of violence. Some would here object that protest and the application of simple will, e.g. the recent Egyptian revolution, are enough. And although here I would note that the Egyptian people haven't as yet realized “freedom”, I would also add that even though the reins of the state may peacefully change hands, and even if these new hands do the will of the people, the new power will invariably have to use force to sustain itself. Whether this force is directed to the benefit of the people or not is moot; it is nonetheless there.
The civil rights movement surely was peaceful; it surely succeeded. Yet here too the success was measured by how effective the state was in using force to protect the rights of minorities.
The labor movement... not so peaceful. Nonetheless it is considered a success because in the end its demands and goals were codified and enforced by the government. The force of workers' fists and clubs was transformed into the force of the state.
It is from here, it seems to me, that the trap into which liberalism has fallen springs.
The genesis of this nation saw people take their rights into their own hands and set themselves about crafting a state that would never be able to subvert their rights again. However, history since then has seen, in the practical development of the nation, that the surest way of ensuring rights is to cede the defense of these rights to the government. This makes sense, as most other routes tend toward anarchy, and historically this strategy has worked to ensure the rights of the people, kind of... if we ignore some of the more glaring exceptions.
Yet, there is something that must be acknowledged: This country has changed a lot in the past century; the world has changed a lot. A lot. More quickly than ever before in history, on so many levels.
We find ourselves saddled with two parties. These parties sometimes disagree about logistics and strategy, policy, yet they both have the same ends in mind. Neoconservatism and neoliberalism are two names for the same thing: capitalist hegemony, pure and simple. In thought, word, and deed.
Who among US, who has read this far, truly trusts this government, or any we will see in our lives, to defend our rights? I know I don't; in fact, I see my rights to health, life, liberty, a trial before my peers and habeas corpus, to know what is in my food, to happiness and to not being a part of murder and empire, much more than these, denied me at every turn. I see a president who literally does the opposite of almost everything he has ever said he would do, nearly. I also see a complete lack of accountability, and I see a vanishing portion of "liberals" really even saying anything about it, let alone doing anything about it.
It’s just so easy to say "I am liberal," "I stand for life," "I am for freedom," without ever considering the fact that at some point you may actually have to personally step up and do something. Not give money to someone so they can do something, but actually do something yourself. Not feel-good charity band-aids or impotent protestations without the backing of force, certainly not the base act of voting for puppet A over puppet B.
Most “liberals” today are far too comfortable working their particular niches, content and assured that “someone is doing ‘that’”. They are far too comfortable with the Machine and their respective places and functions therein. They are certainly far too comfortable, for example, letting factory farmers and biotechnology corps produce their “food”; they are certainly far too comfortable trusting that the FDA will protect them, and most don't even know who or what "Monsanto" is or that Obama appointed a Monsanto lobbyist to head the FDA... Yet they call themselves liberals.
How can one be liberal if one refuses to undertake the duties entailed by a commitment to freedom and rights? How can a person be progressive if he/she is unwilling to use force to achieve his/her end? It is not possible.
So, the next question is whether gun ownership is a necessary aspect of ensuring the rights of the people, the answer to which generally comes in two parts.
The first part is about personal defense, and I think here we can all agree that perhaps having a gun is sometimes the best way to defend against an acute infringement on your rights, say if someone rolled up to my house (set alone on 10 acres, with no real neighbors to speak of) right now (2:08AM Pacific) and tried to steal my property and perhaps kill my child and rape my fiancĂ©e. Surely a gun would then likely be my best avenue of defense. Still though, the concern arises as to the statistical probabilities of such eventualities relative to the probabilities of accidents, or even misuse. I get this. Yet, it is not justifiable to take away someone’s ability to defend himself from something like the above hypothetical home invasion simply because others may misuse the same tool. It is not “liberal” to make people wholly defenseless, with recourse only to the state for protection. Surely, this may be progressive, yet consider for a moment the future this progress attempts to realize.
Regardless, I don’t think those who want to ban guns outright form a very significant portion of the population, and most of us “liberals” acknowledge that people should be able to have certain types of guns for defense and hunting, etc.
It is mainly the second part that sparks controversy, and here we get into the explicit purpose of the 2nd Amendment, the defense of rights from infringement by the state itself. Here guns are held as the last defense and final recourse if the social contract is broken. This is a tough question, and is not clear-cut. For while assuredly the people need more than 9mm pistols and 12-gauge shotguns, hunting rifles, to effectively combat the sort of oppression here set forth, we must still draw a line somewhere, and the idea of people walking around with bazookas (RPGs) is not palatable to most.
Again: I consider myself a liberal, although I hold this apart from that which the common usage denotes, just as I consider myself a Christian even though I don’t attend church or pray to idols (metaphorical and real). I do not think an assault rifle ban is warranted or advised, as I know that once the right to own these things is ceded, once this aspect of self defense and force is relinquished and entrusted to the state on a long-term basis, it will never be given back to the people.
Then again, I don’t think everyone should be able to own an AR or RPG.
What I do think is that maybe we as a people need to get real about the future, and instead of disregarding the talk of “militias” in the 2nd Amendment actually consider what is there written. It is quite strange to me that, although we have the right to form militias, and although the standing Army of the Fed. government is proscribed, and although the militia function has become the national guard, we have guardsmen in the Middle East, fighting for the petrodollar along with the regular armed forces; we have very few domestic militias, and we have not only assented to standing armies but also to the unconstitutional use of executive force within the states themselves (e.g. federal criminalization of drugs, domestic surveillance, the use of regular army personal to infiltrate groups of political dissidents, CIA manipulation of information for the purposes of fabricating an excuse for war). This state of affairs is quite troubling to me, and I do not see any good coming from it as we progress into the new century.
Perhaps if I saw some sign of functioning democracy, even some sort of popular acknowledgment of certain recent actions by our government (and not partisan finger pointing, but real dissent within the respective bases), perhaps then I could have faith that defense against our own government will never be necessary. But what I see is a great deal of passive acceptance and blatant ignorance and myopia, and I do not trust a government that lets our water be poisoned, for money, that kills children overseas, for money, that approves the indefinite detention of citizens, that ignores pressing infrastructure concerns, that denies and ignores global warming, that talks about “clean coal” like it really exists, that sets arbitrary limits and helps facilitate arbitrary crises to excuse austerity and the consolidation of wealth and power, that sees no problem appointing people to regulate themselves (Wall Street, agribusiness, pharma, you name it), a government headed by people who straight-up lie, blatantly and obviously, and who see no consequences…. I do not trust what this govt will do, what our nation will be like, even when my daughter is my age (31), let alone when her children are Mr. Ryan’s age (66) [Mr. Ryan was involved in the discussion from which this post is lifted].
Social problems can be changed, ideologies affected. Our national alienation from ourselves can be fixed, and the brokenness of homes that even now comes to dominate our culture and the people who constitute it can be mended. This kid in Connecticut, or others like him… he did what he did for a reason, a reason sprung from his mind, effected by the world in which he was formed, by the relations he had therein. This can al be improved, made healthy, so that in the future no one will be so alone and fucked in the head that he feels he has to, for whatever reason, kill a bunch of little kids.
However, once we give up our ability to defend ourselves we will never get it back, not without an extremely high cost.
I always hear people say things like “What are you gonna do with your AR? The government has drones and tanks and…. etc”. But I must point out that 47% of Americans admit to owning a gun, nearly 150 million people (many of whom identify as “Democrat”). For perspective, The People’s Liberation Army (China), the largest standing army in the world, is not even 3 million strong. I am not saying that there’re are 150 million people in the US who intend to or who would use their weapons to fight their own government, no. However, that number nonetheless stands as a formidable deterrent against many outright and overt governmental abuses.
At any rate, it's late, and I feel now that I’m rambling a little.
I guess my main point is that, yes, you can be liberal and against gun control, as being liberal, actually liberal, entails a will to defend liberty and the rights of the people, to ensure the social contract and dissolve it if need be. Surely this defense generally does not take the form of lead and explosions, yet it has in the past, and one would have to be a fool to think that it will not again in the future. I fear for our nation if our weapons are truly taken away, and I can only hope that we can get our shit together, socially and ideologically, before “we” ask “our” government to do so, before this most basic of rights and duties, to literally, physically defend our rights to have rights themselves, is too ceded to the very “people” from whom our rights are in danger.
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