A Couple More Points on Guns

Ok, I said in a previous post that I had a last point on guns (here), but let me make two more points. The first is a minor correction based on a comment from Maverick Philosopher (here) that I should be talking about gun owners and not gun lovers. Ok, noted.

More important is that the anti-gun stance goes way against what much of the left in my lifetime has stood for. I’m not talking about the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and so on, but something more basic: rebelling. Both the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, and a lot more besides, were about rebelling against our society. Rebellion is almost the most basic value of leftists today, aside from egalitarianism. When we were young, we rebelled against almost everything that our parents wanted and liked. We rebelled against their music, their clothes, their hairstyles, their politics, and their lifestyles in suburbia. We rebelled against the stifling authoritarianism of our schools and changed them ( and made them worse, as far as many people are concerned). We rebelled against the draft; we burned our draft cards. We rebelled against drug laws; I assume most progressives of my generation used illegal drugs at some point in their lives. We rebelled against the idea that criminals were somehow worse than the rest of us. Some of us went awfully far in rebelling, such as the blowing up of a building on the University of Wisconsin campus in August of 1970 (an act that killed an innocent person who happened to be in the building). Then there was Bill Ayers’s attempt to blow up the Pentagon, or the kidnaping of Patty Hearst (using guns, of course).

But all this raises the question: if laws get passed that prohibit most guns, then wouldn’t getting such guns be an act of rebellion? If so, then that goes against what the anti-gun crowd is trying to do. And if not, then progressives are being inconsistent. Why are some forms of rebellion wonderful, but others not? The people who brought us the phrase “question authority” are hardly in a position to condemn anyone who rebels against the authority of such laws.

In fact, the left has never set any clear limits to rebelling, except in sexual matters, but beyond that, there just are no limits set. Piercings? Fine. Tattoos? Go for it. In fact, shooting up a school is bad ... well, why exactly? I’m not talking about why it’s bad from a conservative point of view, or a centrist point of view, or a conventional point of view. I just want to know why it’s bad from the rebellious left’s point of view. After all, wasn’t the guy who did the most recent one (Adam Lanza) rebelling against society, and don’t leftists think that that is a good thing? Society is to blame, we are always told, so shooting up a school should be the ultimate in rebelling. Those six-year-olds are innocent, looked at one way, and just as guilty as everyone else, looked at in another way. (If innocent Israeli children are legitimate targets, why not innocent American children, given that society is to blame?) Much of the black inner city is engaged in this sort of rebellion, even if it never gets quite as far as shooting up a school. But shooting up the neighborhood is perfectly fine as far as our progressives are concerned. Committing a crime is basically rebelling against our horrid society, which is why they love what the inner city has become. And when someone like Bill Cosby complains, he is thought of as an old fuddy-duddy.

Keep in mind that at every leftist protest, there is property damage, but leftists never care about that. In Greece in recent years, a protest led to a fire that killed some people, and while that cooled down the protests for a little while, they are back at it. Also keep in mind that the people who stopped the latest massacre, the police, are the very people we saw as among our bitterest enemies forty years ago; they were the people we called “pigs.” Given that leftists don’t want guns in schools, that means that massacres will be stopped by the police, since no one else will be allowed to. How ironic.

What is truly pathetic about all this is that, though we were rebelling against a decade, the Fifties, it was during the Fifties that we almost never had these shootings. Maybe there’s something to be said for a conservative conformity after all.