Liberalism’s Gun Problem
6th December 2015
Ross Douthat in the New York Times uncovers a rock. (The Times is allowed one token ‘conservative’ columnist; David Brooks formally filled that slat until it got to where no one would believe his Clever Plastic Disguise any more, and so Ross was brought in.)
I DO NOT own guns, and the last time I discharged a firearm was on “Second Amendment Day” at a conservative journalism program many years ago. (Yes, dear reader, that’s how conservative journalism programs roll.) My political commitments are more communitarian than libertarian, I don’t think the constitution guarantees a right to bear every kind of gun or magazine, and I think of myself as modestly persuadable in the gun control debate.
So, as you can see, what is ‘conservative’ to the New York Times is not necessarily conservative to an actual conservative.
Does that make “getting to Australia” a compelling long-term goal for liberalism? Maybe, but liberals need to count the cost. Absent a total cultural revolution in America, a massive gun collection effort would face significant resistance even once legislative and judicial battles had been won. The best analogue is Prohibition, which did have major public health benefits … but which came at a steep cost in terms of police powers, black markets and trampled liberties.
Or, even closer to home, the ‘war on drugs’, which doesn’t seem to have reduced drug use very much (when did you ever hear of rock stars finding it impossible to get cocaine when they wanted it?), but which has enriched drug-running cartels to the point of undermining public order in Columbia and Mexico.
I suspect liberals imagine, at some level, that a Prohibition-style campaign against guns would mostly involve busting up gun shows and disarming Robert Dear-like trailer-park loners. But in practice it would probably look more like Michael Bloomberg’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, with a counterterrorism component that ended up heavily targeting Muslim Americans. In areas where gun ownership is high but crime rates low, like Bernie Sanders’ Vermont, authorities would mostly turn a blind eye to illegal guns, while poor and minority communities bore the brunt of raids and fines and jail terms.
What Ross dare not say is that such a result would actually work as intended, since most ‘gun violence’ occurs in poor and minority communities rather than in Bernie Sanders’ Vermont and such.