An article published Wednesday in American Thinker, “Cries to ‘Ban the AR-15’ Based on Ignorance and Hysteria” by Michael Filozof, is representative of what is sadly the best of pro-gun activism in the wake of the Parkland, Florida massacre. Filozof may know quite a bit about hunting and semiautomatic rifles, but he doesn’t get the opposition. In fact, by the end of the third paragraph, you realize he’s not really talking about the opposition — he’s retailing long-standing right-wing stereotypes about gun-grabbing, Godless libruls. I say he represents the best because at least he had the good taste not to claim David Hogg is a “crisis actor” or to tweet that the deaths were the “worst news [for the survivors] since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”
Really? I remember a time, not so long ago, when conservative commentators were thoughtful, nuanced, and respectful of the opposition. Is this what American conservatism has been reduced to — conspiracy theories and social-media asshattery? At long last, has conservatism lost all sense of decency?
Do Facts Matter Anymore?
Here’s what I mean. Filozof writes:
The pure ignorance of the people bleating for a ban on America’s most popular rifle is appalling. With few exceptions, most of the calls to ban the AR-15 come from liberal, urban women and metrosexual men whose knowledge of firearms comes entirely from watching Rambo movies or playing “Call of Duty.”
Even some in professional law enforcement know not of what they speak. A local radio station interviewed a retired FBI agent who stated that he “could not understand” why people would want such a rifle.
Now, it’s been a while since I fired an M16A1 while training to serve my country, and I have neither owned nor felt a need to own a gun for decades. So in the course of researching the controversy, I may have made the odd error here and there. I do not claim to be an expert on firearms. I don’t need to be an expert on firearms. Why? Because it doesn’t matter anymore.
I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t think a semiautomatic weapons ban will make much of a dent in the school-shootings phenomenon. And I’m sorry responsible, safe, sane gun owners feel like they’re being punished. But whether the ban will “work” or not isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter anymore.
A Matter of Culture
It’s not a matter of principle so much as a matter of culture. We’re no longer a predominantly rural and agrarian society. We no longer regard the Founding Fathers as infallible founts of eternal wisdom. (In fact, Filozof’s quotation of James Madison from The Federalist expresses a sentiment remarkably similar to that of the Black Panther Party — an oppressed minority has to literally arm itself against a hostile majority.) Majority rule is fine, it seems, only so long as you’re part of the majority; when you’re in the minority, democracy becomes tyranny and demands armed resistance. We no longer uncritically buy into the myth of the citizen militia as the last bastion of freedom.
Put differently, we no longer regard gun ownership as an absolute, God-given right. The obsession many of our fellow citizens have with guns is as bizarre to us as it is to other nations. To assume that the we only includes “liberal, urban women and metrosexual men” (Why stop there? Why not say “dumb bimbos and pantywaists”? Can you say toxic masculinity, kids?) is not only wrong but oblivious and bigoted; it reads like a lifelong suburbanite’s pathetic attempt to pass himself off as a country boy. Wake up, Captain Caveman, and take a look outside your epistemic bubble; there’s a lot more variety in that we than you think.
For what it’s worth, I do agree with Filozof that the problem is at least in part cultural in nature. However, I believe that that part of it is rooted in classical liberalism, and is responsible not only for postmodern neo-paganism but also for libertarianism and Objectivism. Particularly, I’m thinking of the Hobbesian “counter-Genesis” in which Man in his natural state is an autonomous, entitled sociopath who forms social contracts out of sheer self-interest and has no natural obligations to anyone. That “counter-Genesis,” and not the Constitution, is the ultimate source of Louis D. Brandeis’ revisionist “most comprehensive of rights”: the “right to be left alone.” A more classical and Christian view is expressed by Cicero’s dictum, “The welfare of the people is the highest law.”
Promoting the General Welfare
The semiautomatic rifle has become a symbol of everything people — that’s people; not liberals, not libtards, not communists, not gun-grabbers — believe is wrong with the gun lobby, its origin myth of the Second Amendment, and its hammerlock on government. In fact, it’s become the symbol for everything people hate about lobbies and their power to act against the common good for the benefit of special interests. It’s also rapidly becoming a symbol of everything that they believe has gone wrong with the GOP in the last couple of decades: the obstructionism, the brutal insensitivity, the “Christianity” that’s really American jingoism with a thin overlay of piety, the anarcho-capitalist hatred of every tax dollar spent on anything except making the rich richer, the xenophobic fear-mongering.
“Dear gun lobby: Your facts about guns don’t matter anymore. Your statistics don’t matter anymore. Your quotes from the Founding Fathers don’t matter anymore. Your interpretation of American social and cultural history doesn’t matter anymore. No one is listening to you anymore but the people you pay to listen to you. STFU. Love, Your Fellow Citizens.”
Yes, it’s a statement born out of sheer emotion. That emotion is frustration, even anger, caused by a government that’s become frozen and unresponsive because the country it was originally designed to serve has outgrown it, both numerically and culturally. It no longer does what it was designed to do — among other things, “secure justice,” “ensure domestic tranquility,” and “promote the general welfare” — because different minority groups say those things must not be done at their expense lest their unalienable, civil, and/or human rights be trampled or even slightly discommoded.
Everything is Ephemeral
We have the Second Amendment because the Constitution includes an amendment process. The amendment process is there because the Convention recognized that the Constitution they wrote would not serve for all time, that the country would change and develop different needs. Everything is ephemeral. My point: While many of the Founders’ principles and intentions were noble, to suggest that the federal government remain the one they intended because they intended it that way is to confuse the American government with the Catholic Church. Governments exist to serve the common good, not to hold a country in a cultural stasis.
Again, I’m sorry responsible gun owners have to bear the brunt of the people’s anger. Life isn’t fair. But this conflict has been a long time coming. Just some food for thought, though: The last time one side of a controversy decided they weren’t going to take their turn at losing and decided to fight for what principles they thought the U.S. had been founded on, it turned into a horrible, costly civil war. And they still lost. Save us the money and the blood, and just give up your goddamn automatic rifles.
