Gun Control and the Paradox of Liberty

Perfection. Truth. Just plain awesome. Everything I have been saying for years.

January 8, 2013
By Christopher S. Brownwell

The hatred of people leads to gun control. I am talking about not the shooter's hatred, but the gun controller's hatred.

Liberals have a reputation for caring about people -- an undeserved reputation. They don't believe that people ought to live free and govern themselves. Liberals like Harry Belafonte, Woody Allen, and Bill Maher have openly advocated that President Obama take the authority of a dictator. Observe how liberal celebrities such as Sean Penn gush over foreign dictators like Hugo Chávez. How many of your liberal friends own a Che Guevara t-shirt or poster? Liberals hate people so much that they do not trust them to govern themselves.

The dirty little secret that everybody knows is that gun control is not about stopping the bloodshed. Even though an automobile does not have the specific purpose to kill, it has more killing power than a firearm. According to the Center for Disease Control, cars kill more people than firearms. Where is the support for an automobile ban? Liberals do not support one. You see, a ban of firearms is not about concern for murder victims.

Liberals are so irrationally attached to gun control because they love government more than they love people. They love government more than they love liberty. They seek government handouts, whether for themselves or for those they think deserve forced charity from the "rich." They adore government over-regulation of things they hate, like guns, logging, drilling for oil, and 20-oz. sodas. They love government regulation of people, like forcing us to purchase health insurance, pay for abortions, provide contraception, eat "healthy" foods.

Government is the sovereign god to liberals. They worship at its altar and support their priests every election despite their crimes and scandals. Liberals demand that their religious morality be forced on the rest of us. Carbon emission regulations, "sin" taxes, and public school lunches are just a few examples of the imposition of liberal morality.

Liberals do not see a need for the people to have firearms because they do not see a need to fear their government. They worship it. Banning automobiles is not on the table because automobiles do not threaten government authority like the firearm does. (But just you wait: when liberals continue to implement their utopian "fundamental transformation of America," the freedom to travel will be taken. Liberals then will support a ban on automobiles.)

The right to individually bear firearms is not about hunting or personal self-defense, although those are subsumed in the 2nd Amendment. The right to bear arms is about securing an arsenal in the hands of the sovereign people in order to strike fear in government officials of the possibility of violence by a well-regulated militia under the guidance and control of an accountable civil authority. We the people have a collective right in our state governments to put our federal government officials in fear of violence for their "long train of abuses and usurpations." This God-given, natural right is embodied in our nation's Declaration of Independence.

I am talking not about wanton, reckless individuals or unaccountable paramilitary groups. Violence has to be accountable to and restrained by a civil authority. But if we truly believe in the sovereignty of the people, if we are truly classical liberals, the fear of proper, organized, accountable violence is a necessity for a free republic. Thomas Jefferson affirmed that "[w]hen governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Liberty is a paradox. Unrestrained liberty is not freedom, but anarchy. The liberty to do anything you want to do destroys liberty. G.K. Chesterton stated of social and political liberty in his timeless work Orthodoxy, "The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the 'Odyssey.' He is free from national prejudices and outside of patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside 'Henry V.' ... For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out."

What satisfied Chesterton about the Christian paradox is that Christianity achieved the balancing of parallel passions. "[T]he more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." Therefore, liberty is not the freedom to do anything we want to do. Liberty is the freedom to do what we ought to do.

The paradox of liberty extends to its defense and preservation. If force can take away liberty, force is necessary to preserve it. It is the hatred of violence alongside the willingness to use violence that preserves liberty. In order for us to live as free men, we have to hate the violence that takes away liberty, yet at the same time, we must embrace the violence that preserves it. That is the paradox our founders appreciated and made work for over 200 years.

Modern liberals, however, do not fear the "long train of abuses and usurpations" because they do not believe in popular sovereignty. They worship tyrannical authority. Liberals show affection to and apologize for evil men like Hugo Chávez, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-Tung, Bill Ayers, the Muslim Brotherhood. They show disdain for patriots like John Adams, Patrick Henry, Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, and the Tea Party. Liberals fear their liberty-loving neighbors more than they do their power-hungry politicians. Liberals would rather shackle their neighbors than let them live in liberty.

In a fiery speech on August 1, 1776, Samuel Adams bellowed, "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom -- go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!"

Liberals prefer shackles to the wild adventure of liberty. Because they prefer shackles, they cannot bear others having liberty. In their bleeding hearts is not love for people, but a will to dominate them and to be dominated. Our Founders knew that taking away firearms from the citizen was essentially to turn him into a subject, a slave. Congressman Allen West affirmed this sentiment when he said, "An armed man is a citizen. A disarmed man is a subject."

Turning men into slaves is not love. But that is what gun control is all about: turning men into slaves. Love for mankind is not in taking care of him, but in letting him be free to take care of himself. With gun control, liberals want to take away the means for men to preserve their liberty.

Liberals say they want gun control because they want to end the bloodshed. But beware. What is at the heart of support for gun control is not love of men, but hatred for them.