{"id":5823,"date":"2009-11-02T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T17:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5823"},"modified":"2009-11-01T12:58:40","modified_gmt":"2009-11-01T17:58:40","slug":"the-right-to-be-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5823","title":{"rendered":"The Right To Be Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve said it in the past – I consider it the duty <\/em>of every law-abiding American to own, and be proficient with, a firearm.<\/p>\n

Would I require it, if I could?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

So I heard of this story<\/a> – a Vermont legislator who is proposing to make gun ownership mandatory under Vermont State Constitutional grounds…:<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and thought “Yaay!”.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And like that particular “Yaaay”, it’s only skin-deep.\u00a0\u00a0 People\u00a0have a right not to be forced to exercise their rights.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 And yet we don’t punish people who hate speaking in public, or atheists, or non-bloggers, or agoraphobiacs.<\/p>\n

More seriously – as Joel Rosenberg notes\u00a0 <\/a>– punishing people for exercising fundamentally American, pr0-democratic, small-l-“liberal” rights, whether owning guns or\u00a0exercising the perfectly legitimate right to abstain from it – \u00a0is the kind of thing the orcs have been doing to gun owners for the past forty years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 It was symbolic, of course – there was no sanction for not <\/em>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<\/a>, very, very prescient).<\/p>\n

But creating a class of criminals out of law-abiding citizens, just because we can<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

I’m chuckling.\u00a0 And I’m walking away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 I think it’s a personal choice, and like many personal choices “real Americans” should make on key issues of the application of political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5823"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5830,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5823\/revisions\/5830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}