The Right To Be Wrong
By Mitch Berg
I’ve said it in the past – I consider it the duty of every law-abiding American to own, and be proficient with, a firearm.
Would I require it, if I could? No. I think it’s a personal choice, and like many personal choices “real Americans” should make on key issues of the application of political philosophy, we all have free will to make the wrong one.
So I heard of this story – a Vermont legislator who is proposing to make gun ownership mandatory under Vermont State Constitutional grounds…:
Vermont ‘s constitution states explicitly that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the State” and those persons who are “conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms” shall be required to “pay such equivalent.” Clearly, says Maslack, Vermonters have a constitutional obligation to arm themselves, so that they are capable of responding to “any situation that may arise.”
Under the bill, adults who choose not to own a firearm would be required to register their name, address, Social Security Number, and driver’s license number with the state.
“There is a legitimate government interest in knowing who is not prepared to defend the state should they be asked to do so,” Maslack says
…and thought “Yaay!”. In the same way I go “yaaaay” when a “peace” activist gets convicted of assault, or when an atheist has to avoid admitting his beliefs are every bit as big a leap of faith as mine by skulking away in a profane tirade to cover his retreat.
And like that particular “Yaaay”, it’s only skin-deep. People have a right not to be forced to exercise their rights.
Think about it; we have the right to speak, worship, “publish” and assemble – indeed, at times each of those might be a fundamental duty to society. And yet we don’t punish people who hate speaking in public, or atheists, or non-bloggers, or agoraphobiacs.
More seriously – as Joel Rosenberg notes – punishing people for exercising fundamentally American, pr0-democratic, small-l-“liberal” rights, whether owning guns or exercising the perfectly legitimate right to abstain from it – is the kind of thing the orcs have been doing to gun owners for the past forty years.
Which isn’t to say I don’t support legislation like Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia enacted after the Morton Grove gun ban, which required all citizens to own firearms. It was symbolic, of course – there was no sanction for not owning firearms; it was a wry middle finger at the effete kumbaya affectations of the overeducated-idiot orcs of the gun-grabbing urban left (and, given the crime record in greater Chicago lately, very, very prescient).
But creating a class of criminals out of law-abiding citizens, just because we can, just to do an end-zone happy dance in retribution for forty years of orc persecuti0n, is a fairly frivolous abuse of power – the kind of thing we expect of the power-drunk left, and the kind of thing that conservative limited governent proponents need to chuckle at, and then walk away from.
I’m chuckling. And I’m walking away.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Vermont is a kooky state, and I mean that in the most affectionate way. My best friend from high school lives there, teaches in a high school, lives in the house he was raised in with his wife and his Dad, who is almost 100 if he’s still alive. My friend owns several guns and the last time I visited he took me shooting on public land with a single action .22 revolver. He goes deer hunting every fall of course and knows all the trails in the Green Mountains near his town. Vermont is also home to many far left types, some native and some imports, who have done their best to turn Vermont into a People’s Republic. Those are the ones who will have to register as non-gunowners, the same ones who tried to pass anti-Bush and Iraq war withdrawal resolutions at annual town meetings in the past. I guess I’ll join you in walking away, but I’m laughing out loud.