The Giant Loophole In Gun Advocates' Arguments The Left Is Too Self-Absorbed To Notice

I don't care much for American politics. I concluded a long time ago that American politics are two different brands of irrelevance and unreality, and most Americans are way too stupid and greedy to be able to look at their country objectively. I think most arguments in American politics are far divorced from the realities of the issues.

State sponsored birth control, for example, is treated as a cost/benefit or moral/freedom issue, when in reality, state-sponsored birth control is cheap, available and not an infringement on the freedom of taxpayers or recipients, but doesn't get used, because the inability of Americans to conceive a middle ground between, or alternatives to, "Uncle Suga" and "rely on charity or die in the street".

This false duality, driven by the deleterious impact American market values have on family and personal values - the American inclination to look at life as a fundamentally individual and economic affair - leads people to make irresponsible decisions irrespective of whether birth control is available or not. Thus, both sides of the political discourse have agreed to wage the debate on terms that have nothing to do with the issues at hand.

Anyway, gun rights. Gun advocates continue to insist that gun ownership is a Constitutionally guaranteed right. Most have never even heard of the Federalist Papers and have no idea how Alexander Hamilton's book clearly defines the bona fide truth of the issue (and also why American gun rights advocates who also support the military flatly don't understand this country or what it was founded on).

But that is not really here or there. The point is, though, that the argument that gun rights are Constitutionally guaranteed is flawed, but the Left is too lost in its own banality to grasp why.

Constitutional rights are by definition guaranteed and non-negotiable. This means, for example, that although the government can take your tax money, your house, your right to drive a car, or prevent you from doing things perceived contrary to national interest, the government cannot revoke, for example, your freedom of speech, your freedom of belief, your freedom of association or your freedom of non-incrimination. Even people who have committed the most serious crimes in our society continue to enjoy those freedoms (although they may be deprived of personal liberty due to being incarcerated).

That a murderer retains his freedom of speech or a mobster his freedom of non-incrimination may seem perverse, but the guaranteed nature of rights serves a very important role in our society. Were rights not guaranteed, but rather something that one can be deprived of "by due process of law", such as life, liberty and personal property (i.e., taxation, imprisonment and execution), constitutional rights would have no meaning; anyone could be made subject at any time to petty laws arbitrarily revoking those rights.

By extension, if the personal right to own whatever weapons one wishes was in fact Constitutionally guaranteed, then criminals would also have a right to be armed - since Constitutional rights are irrevocable. This flies in the face of the gun lobby argument that the goal should be to keep criminals away from guns, rather than remove guns as a force in American society. They are, in effect, contravening their own claim that gun rights are in fact Constitutionally guaranteed (they aren't).

This truth is simple and obvious once understood. But it is completely missed by adherents of both parties...because American politics ceased to be relevant a long, long time ago.

I believe that is so partly because of our obsolete winner-take-all political system, partly because of the depredations of the military and corporations, and partly because Americans are too greedy and dumb to understand the concept of a social contract - or how excessively limiting the power and mandate of government is self-defeating and is in fact the surest path to tyranny.

The proper role of government is to be the Great Equalizer, champion of the weak against the strong and the many against the few. The guaranteed nature of rights establishes a hedge on the government's mandate - to protect the few and the strong against the tyranny of the majority. When the government fails to fulfill this mandate, the result is social chaos and inevitably civil war and Communist insurgency. Most societies that fall into despotism, wind up there precisely because of a lack of strong authority to establish uniform terms for free interaction between individuals in society - and not the other way around. And, if you doubt this, go look at Iraq.

This truth also reveals something else about Americans - why I so easily see myself apart from my countrymen. Americans talk about freedom, but they do not understand it. Most Americans think that freedom means the freedom to get rich and ignore the problems of the world at large. My notion of freedom, on the other hand, is freedom of self-actualization - to live life on my own terms. Unlike most Americans, I am more than willing to forfeit my "right to get rich" if I believe that in return I am guaranteed the relatively low standard of living that is a necessary condition of my enjoyment of life.

http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Eudaimonic