Liberalism never sleeps. Even as I write, its intellectual and operational functionaries are beavering away all over the world working out the implications of what now counts as the One True Belief:
- In Australia they’re taking the next step beyond gun control: banning swords. Lead pipes will presumably be next. The fact that gun control seems actually to have increased crime there is irrelevant, because liberal principle is clear on the point: force is evil and shouldn’t exist. Force in the hands of specialized state personnel isn’t really force because it’s fully controlled by the liberal state and so becomes a merely technical means for the defense of rights against aggression. When it’s in private hands, though, it becomes lawless force—ordinary citizens are just bundles of impulse and desire, since that’s the nature of man, so they can be presumed lawless—and its very existence becomes an act of violence. (It appears that the problem with swords, to the extent there is one, may in fact be a problem with certain immigrant groups. If so it would be yet another indication how multiculturalism, by destroying common habits and understanding, degrades both public order and public freedom.)
- Meanwhile, James Hitchcock points out that the academic hive is busily drawing out the obvious implications of liberal pluralism: the suppression of everything that isn’t liberal pluralism, including most of traditional religous belief and practice. His article is basically a list of instance, many involving big-name liberals. None of them are especially surprising if you’ve been following the situation, but they’re worth noting as confirmation of obvious features of the public philosophy now dominant that many people insist aren’t there. It’s an interesting instance, for example, that the academic superstar and noted perjuress Martha Nussbaum believes there can be no right to speak against the use of contraceptives.
You were closer to the truth
You were closer to the truth in the parentheses.
The “liberal principle” driving civilian disarmament isn’t the evil nature of force, but racial equality. No one seriously believes Anglo-Saxons can’t be trusted with firearms. Only when you throw other races into the mix does support for prohibition reach the critical mass to get laws enacted. That’s to say, perhaps no one seriously believes Africans— or, Down Under, aboriginals and Annamese— can be trusted with weapons.
As Jerry Rubin put it, in a rare instance of candor on the Left, “gun control is Negro control”.
The logic of equality makes us all Negroes.
It seems to me the demand
It seems to me the demand for gun control has to do with liberal theory rather than the particulars of who’s around and how worrisome they are. The United States has more worrisome minorities than the Northern European welfare states but also much looser restrictions on private ownership of firearms.
The case of arming airplane pilots is illuminating. You obviously can trust them with guns, but liberal theory says that doing so is bad because it would mean that deadly force is no longer a monopoly of specialized agencies of the liberal state but instead something that in concept ordinary civilians might be called on to use. That would be intolerable, not because of any immediate practical consequences but because it would admit in theory that force is part of human life.
“Liberal theory” doesn’t get
“Liberal theory” doesn’t get laws passed, public support does. And public support for tight gun laws goes up sharply the darker the population gets.
That the United States, New Zealand and South Africa have laxer laws than much whiter Britain, Canada and Australia doesn’t disprove this. Those laws were mostly passed in the last generation, when the latter countries got their first taste of “diversity”. We have had hundreds of years of experience with “the other” and know how to fine tune our own policies. (As for northern Europe, some gun magazines reported in the mid-’90s that machine guns were still legal in Denmark and Finland. And the borders are open from there to the Algarve.)
Pilots are sealed in the cockpit and thus their weapons would be useless. What’s fascinating about this debate is not that pseudoliberals oppose such a plan, but that their opponents are too chicken to suggest the obvious— arming stewards and passengers.
Seems like they’ve swallowed some of this “liberal theory” themselves!
I suppose additional
I suppose additional investigation of the history of gun control would be helpful. In Britain the first firearms restrictions were passed in 1920, and in 1953 people there were forbidden to carry any article for their protection, so I don’t think gun control is simply a consequence of diversity. My own view is that by itself the advanced liberal view of man and the state is enough to explain gun control extremism. The British tendency to make self-defense illegal is illuminating on the point. The timing and speed of adoption undoubtedly have something to do with diversity though.
“Liberal theory” by the way mostly refers to the beliefs and assumptions that dominate serious mainstream public discussion today and can be presumed without argument to be good, wise, well-informed, and so on. Those things have an enormous effect on legislation. What the public says it wants is greatly affected by how things are discussed on TV and by all the reputable authorities, and also by the information they’re presented with. And cases like immigration and affirmative action show that even strong and durable public sentiment doesn’t translate into legislation if it’s hard to square with the way influential and respectable people talk about things.
If guns would be of no use to airplane pilots, because they’re sealed away in the cockpit, it sounds like the problem of hijackings has been solved. That surprises me.
Governments’ tendency to
Governments’ tendency to distrust the people in all times and all places predates liberalism by millennia. (Lord Acton was wrong— power doesn’t corrupt so much as attract the corrupt.) So there’s a built-in bias toward disarming us. But there’s an equally built-in feeling among a critical mass of Anglo-Saxons that disarmament is contrary to nature, sodomitical if you will, and such laws are always met with vocal opposition and often principled disobedience. (With “people of color” there’s no opposition, and only unprincipled disobedience.)
David Kopel’s survey of gun control history shows that the wave of laws in the Anglosphere— including several cosmopolitan states here— just before and after the First World War was inspired, or at least sold, by the presence of Eastern European “anarchists”.
It’s much trickier to do this today with the pretense of equality, so we tend to see white crackpots like Thomas Hamilton and Dylan Klebold held up as examples. But the subtext of race is always there, as a few minutes’ conversation with any gun control advocate will always expose. If liberalism is the problem, Vermont and Iron Range Minnesota, rather than suburban New Jersey and Los Angeles, would be clamoring for gun laws.
You’re probably right that sealing cockpits would prevent suicide hijackings a la WTC, but the old-fashioned kind can still be done by taking cabin occupants hostage. And it’s business interests, not multiculturalists, that are retarding immigration reform. Just like last time around. Liberal chatter is just window dressing.
Reading Hitchcock here
Reading Hitchcock here recalls for me a review of Kenneth Craycraft’s “American Myth of Religious Freedom” (1999) that was posted last Feb. 2nd by Matthew Anger in “Seattle Catholic,” a review mentioning the opposition manifested by “First Things” editor Fr. R.J. Neuhaus, among others, to Craycraft’s thesis (which, itself, bears much resemblance to my own views).
The establishment of a liberal orthodoxy is indeed not an impulse stemming from the interior logic of liberal premises, but from a far more basic, yet extrinsic, consideration: self-preservation and perpetuation. The fact of the universe is that lies do not comfortably coexist with the truth, even though Original Sin ensures that the truth does not always blow away the lie in fair and open competition (as it ideally would). Wherefore, the proprietors of lies seek to rig the playing field entirely to their favor, and do not mind cooperating with each other to do so, as they all instinctively know that any lie is equal to all other lies!
Perhaps at some point I’ll blog myself more extensively on the intersection of Craycraft and Hitchcock I’m seeing here.
I don’t think race is the
I don’t think race is the basic explanation for gun control, although I’m sure it affects how big an issue it is for people who already hold the “client theory” of citizenship that lies behind it. If you hold that theory then if you think there are lots of dangerous people around you’ll think our custodians ought to tighten up on their custody so we’re all kept safe. If you reject the theory your response will be to want to carry a gun around yourself, and you’ll find it alarming when someone says he wants to disarm you and keep you from defending yourself against people who’ll have weapons and be willing to use them no matter what the law says.
I think liberalism is much more principled than Mr. de Nunzio does. In the end it isn’t, of course, because it’s fundamentally contradictory. For a very long while though I think it just works out the implications of falling into the Cartesian hole and consequently trying to construct a moral system out of immediate experience and formal logic.
I tend to share Mr de
I tend to share Mr de Nunzio’s Machiavellian cynicism, and assume all “liberals” to be liars and frauds until they prove their innocence. (Vis-a-vis firearms, Wayne LaPierre seems the liberal— not that he’s a liar or fraud!— and his opponents authoritarian goons.) We’re talking about people who knew full well that their policies would create a violent and feckless underclass, and went ahead and created it anyway. They preach integration, but refuse to live in it. Some call that hypocrisy; I call it a smoking gun.
The “client theory”— is that the same as the “servile state”?— is a product of the 20th century. Anglo-Saxons settled the gun issue for good in 1689, and every gun law since has some connection with a minority. Such laws first appeared in the slave states.
Isn’t it more likely that clientism was called into service to bolster what we already were doing? And to square the claim that the races were equal with the fear that they’re not?