Fukshot

So, I wrote the following on a gun forum composed of liberal gun owners. I think some others might read it here who would appreciate it. It is written to other gun people, but I think those who read it here who may not be gun people might be able to insert themselves in to this bit of me thinking out loud too.

I think the popularity of anti-gun positions amongst liberals has its roots in the things that are most valuable about the ideas of the left.

The left is built on ideas of fairness and justice, specifically in defending the weak from the strong. Such ideas feature prominently in the founding documents of American government. We favor the voice of the people, while constraining tyranny by the majority through specific proscriptive components of the Constitution. We began with the intention to protect minority religious views and practices. Later, we added protection for racial minorities.

We attempted in the 1930s to install protections for the poorest among us and to bolster government’s ability to act in the interest of the people rather than to be bullied by the development of corporate powers so great that they outweighed the will of the people.

I suggest that the word bully is critical to the ethos of the left. I think that the ethos of the left is to oppose the power of bullies. When the perceived bully is government, we restrict the powers of government. When the perceived bully is a force that seems too strong to be addressed by other means, we turn to a statist approach; using government, the effort in which we come together for the common good, as a tool to restrict the power of that perceived bully.

I’ll state briefly that the argument to restrict government power for the sake of “freedom” has been adopted in recent decades by pseudo-libertarians seeking to regain the power that capital had over government before our efforts of the 1930s. The success of this approach has been disastrous for our society, but that’s a topic for another time. I’m not interested in discussing a marketing scheme as though it were an earnest ideology for good.

Back to bullies:
This notion of protecting the weak from the strong is, I think, the root of the anti-gun position held by many liberals in current US politics. To many, the gun is the symbol of the bully. The cop who deals injustice to the weak, the Klansman, the Nazi, the corner thug, the imperialist government acting on behalf of moneyed interests, all use the gun as a means to exert power over their victims. Counter-examples of the gun being used to defend the weak from the strong are comparatively rare in the personal experience of those living today. Arguably, the last personal experience of the gun being used to defeat bullying evil that was shared by many Americans was the second world war.

You may notice that people speak of gun owners as fetishizing guns. Guns are force and power and it is the bully who fetishizes force and power.

Those advocating most loudly for gun rights in contemporary American politics are also those who decry any effort to limit their ability to bully. They are “Christian” homophobes. They are racists. They are people who to a great extent confirm the suspicion that bullies are the ones who want guns.

That is the perception we are fighting. Our fellow liberals who fear and hate guns feel that way because of the values of fairness and justice that we share with them. That special fear and loathing and resentment that shuts down debate, I feel that way about bullies too; as much as I try not to slip in to that place of anger, I do, we all do.

Try to remember that when speaking to and about those who would curtail our rights of gun ownership. They are on our side too.