Ive actually gotten a fair number of emails asking me this; they presuppose that the only valid position for a liberal is to be disarmed, and the only valid position for a gun owner is to be a conservative. Im neither. I own guns, and have spent a fair amount of time, energy and money becoming at least moderately competent with them. And let me state bluntly that while the politic thing for shooters to say in public is “I just shoot [trap and skeet] [a few targets] [to hunt birds].”, that I do all those things, and in addition have trained hard to become competent in defending myself by, if necessary, shooting people.
Im also a liberal, who believes that the government has the obligation, not just the right, to work to make our society, nation and world a better place. Which better place ought to be one in which fewer people are physically threatened seriously enough to need to resort to shooting people.
The intersection of those two beliefs which on their face seem to be incompatible, but which I believe are not defines a lot of what I believe about politics and the nature of good government.
Lets talk a little bit about the armed side of it. Why be armed in todays society?
Well, Ill suggest four reasons:
1) Its fun. Shooting is a pleasurable sport, things go bang!! loudly; well-hit clay pigeons gratifyingly disintegrate into a cloud of dust.
2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon dont start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.
When I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that an armed society is a polite society, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons.
I know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility the opposite of the armed brute image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman.
3) It is useful. The sad reality is that we live in an imperfect world, one in which some people prey on others. They may do it because it is a kind of crude redistribution (you have a BMW, he would like one); because they are desperate, or because they are deranged. They may have been damaged in some way by their genetic makeup or their upbringing. Or they may just be evil.
Bluntly, at the moment I am under threat, I dont care why they do it. My response is not very different from my response to my friends who said that America had it coming on 9/11. Maybe. So what? People who attack me or mine need to be stopped. If the only way I have to effectively stop them is to kill them, so be it. Once I am out of danger, I am happy to consider what it will take to improve education and job opportunities in the central cities, or to talk thoughtfully about helping the Palestinians figure out how to become a nation and a state.
There are bad people out there, folks. Some of them are tormented by what they do, some dont care, some may revel in it. Someday, you may be confronted by one. What will you do?
4) It is the politically correct thing to do. I say this with all appropriate irony, but I am also a believer that an armed citizenry does two important things to the American polity:
a) it fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the individual and the State. I am pretty dubious about the apocalyptic fantasies of those who believe that a cadre of deer hunters could stand up against the armed forces of the U.S. or some invading army. In reality, I think that the arms possessed by the citizens of the U.S. are primarily symbolic in value, much like the daggers carried by Sikhs. But, having lived in Europe, I think that the symbolic value carries a political and social weight;
b) it makes it clear that we as citizens have some measure of responsibility for ourselves. The tension I talk about above is one between self-reliance and mutual reliance. In England today, a subject (I am careful not to say citizen) faces increasing limitations on the right of self-defense; the State is moving toward an absolute monopoly on the use of force. It should not be hard to imagine that the character of both the relationship of the individual to the state and of the individuals relationship to society is vastly different under those circumstances. By being armed, I am taking responsibility literally, the responsibility of life and death on myself. When the state cannot entrust individuals to act with some significant responsibility, except as an adjunct of the state, we will have truly lost something that is a key part of what makes our politics work (note that I think that the same thing is happening in the EU today, with the same effect).
Theres more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.
Sometime soon: how to be a liberal in a society that values freedom, and why freedom is critical to building an effective and durable liberal society.
Dear Sir:
Having read your “WHY BE AN ARMED LIBERAL?” I have a question. Do you belong to any of the following pro-firearms owners groups?
NRA @ http://www.nra.org/
GOA @ http://www.gunowners.org/
SAF @ http://www.saf.org/
JPFO @ http://jpfo.org/fear.htm
If you do not … why not?
If you wish to preserve your right to defend your life you must also defend against those who would strip you of that right. That is a struggle all firearms owners, liberal, conservative or independent must embrace.
Thank you.
Generally, I abhor labelling , ie. Conservative, Liberal, Republican, Democrat, etc. concerning myself. But, I would have to claim more of a philosophical symbiosis with what is deemed Conservative than most others. I prefer to think of myself as an Individual. Having said all of that, I would like to say that having just read the article “Why Be An Armed Liberal” I am still “twitterpated” by the intelligence and profound logic the author has imparted. Of all the political hogwash and reasonably sound arguments I have allowed myself to be bombarded with over the last few years this has to be one of the best intentioned, smart, and correct assesments pertaining to this ongoing debate over Second Amendment rights I have ever read. As a free thinking Individual with Conservative leanings I applaud you sir for your blunt and simple eloquence of the logical truth required for this experiment in Democracy to carry on. I couldn’t agree with you more.
R. Buckner
I think many people, like me, are occasionally interested in guns, but abhor them. Their availability is one of the frightening things about modern life. The fact that any individual can wield such enormous destructive power without thinking much about it worries me. But, frankly, I’m much more troubled by automobiles. It seems like few people actually understand how much weight they are hurtling down the street in. Even those of us who occasionally contemplate this soon forget it somewhere on our next trip to school or work. I actually get pissed off when somebody brags about how fast they drive to work (you get this shit all the time in semi-rural Oklahoma, where I grew up before coming to college).
Anyway, I certainly think that many, possibly most gunowners are very aware of the destructive potential of handguns, and are exceedingly careful with them. Much more so than the average driver is careful in their car. Still, it’s an unfortunate world, politically: the right-wing has embraced the gunowners, and they’re hopelessly on the other side. They’re inextricably bound up together now. And so I despise Charleton Heston. And so I can never own a gun, which is kind of unfortunate, because I bet they’re cool as hell.
Your observations are generally correct, but permit me to add that personal values or codes have a great deal to do with the risks involved in maintaining the RKBA. Personally, I am a fairly accomplished shooter, having been a competitor in college and in clubs. Ironically. the only time I was not competing in the last 40 years was when I was on active duty in the Marine Corps. Let me just say that the so-called “DC snipers” were chumps and that a good shooter with good gear could have made those shots from triple the distances. Am I a danger to the community? No. Definitely not. Why? Because of my adherence to the laws of God and man. My personal codes require me to love my neighbor as myself, and I would never shoot anyone unnecessarily. This is not because I lack the means or the skill, but because I possess the values. How about it, Liberal? Are you accepting of the risk of armed citizens without these values?
Why is it that name, rank, pedigree and to-be-spammed email address must be posted everywhere one goes on the net these days?
And why in the world does that strike me as being similar to controls on the ownership of firearms? Is it because both are inane and really serve no purpose?
I recently resigned my Life Membership in the NRA. (I think. I emailed them from their website some time ago and only have a form letter email of the “hi there, we’ll get back to you type” but no reply.) Why is it tha “groups” attract so many nuts? They have theirs, propping up a poor old Hollywood actor with dementia, whilst the HCI crowd pushes poor old what’s-his-name around in his wheelchair.
“Groups” have their usefulness, but most often it seems to occur when they have a meeting of some sort, perhaps a nutrious dinner, and have ideas or objects of interest to display. These days the display of ideas seems quite rare and the objects unreal (do I really want to shoot a deer at 1800 yards?), whilst the food is of the common and heavily laden with sodium.
Liberal? Nah, I’m a -0-, ain’t no conservative either, someone with no name passing by and wondering what the fuss is all about. Disarming the (fill in the blank as to number) of Americans who own an estimated (fill in the number of trillion) firearms seems as much like a faery tale as I can imagine.
Let us again outlaw alcoholic beverages and see if we can get it right this time or perhaps enforce meaningless laws against drugs. If by some miracle we can pull this off, as neither item is really all that useful or necessary, then perhaps we can turn to debating the merits of disarming all members of the populace, the good women and the bad men, as being unnecessary, useless, or whatever, out of sheer boredom.
I personally don’t care. They’re going to get my Glock 17 with my six 19-shot magazines (pre-ban; 17-shot with Glock +2 extensions) away from me when they pry them from my cold dead fingers & etc. 🙂
It just ain’t gonna happen. Our marvelous political system makes the enactment of sensible laws difficult, let alone enforcement of same. I say we lock up all the nuts on both sides behind barbed wire, sort of like the camps for those of Japanese origin during WWII, out in the Nevada desert. Just pick the more vociferous 10% from each group and mix them up by housing them in small groups of 20. Feed them a sparse ratio so that their standard confused logic and lack of common sense becomes obvious even to themselves and then what will they have to say to each other? (no TVs or digital devices of any sort; let the Gideons supply the Bibles and get Bill Gates to fund subscriptions for all to People, Wired, and the Islamic Brotherhood magazine). Give them public lashings if any of the next 10% in either group makes a move to take their place.
Cheers.
In response to Lou Gots’ post:
If you were to find out that many of the nutty drivers also were gun owners- then what?
If people can’t understand and appreciate proper operation of an automobile, how could they understand a firearm?
I am both a gun owner (former Marine too) and automobile owner.
I just took a look at your blog and the statement about “Why be an Armed Liberal?”
All I can say is “HALLELUJAH!!! AMEN!!! TESTIFY BROTHER!!!
I’m a liberal gun-owner and damn proud of it. Unfortunately, the NRA likes to phrase everything in a Liberal vs. Conservative light, which is why I won’t join them.
That view has two bad effects. 1. It alienates liberals like me who believe in and support the 2nd Amendment, just as much as I support the rest of the Constitution.
2. It let’s anti-gun conservatives, like Al D’Amato, Pete Wilson, George Pataki, Rudolph Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly, George Will and William Weld, off the hook for their disdain of our Constitution.
I oppose our drug laws. I’m pro-choice on abortion. I say we need to get out of NAFTA, GATT and the WTO. I’m pro-union, pro-environment, anti-capital punishment and anti-draft. Let’s raise the minimum wage and repeal that draconian “Welfare Reform” which was passed by Clinton. If we need “Welfare Reform,” let’s start with the Corporate Welfare that’s bankrupting this country.
I’ll be the first to say that Bush and the Right stole the election in 2000.
I’m one of many liberals who voted for Nader to 2000 because I’m sick of the rightward drift of the Democratic party under the Clinton-Gore regime. And if the Democrats can’t give me anything better than fascist sell-outs like Leiberman or Kerry in 2004, I’ll vote Green again!
And I am a gunowner.
Thank you and God bless you, for creating a site and blog for people like me.
I just took a look at your blog and the statement about “Why be an Armed Liberal?”
All I can say is “HALLELUJAH!!! AMEN!!! TESTIFY BROTHER!!!
I’m a liberal gun-owner and damn proud of it. Unfortunately, the NRA likes to phrase everything in a Liberal vs. Conservative light, which is why I won’t join them.
That view has two bad effects. 1. It alienates liberals like me who believe in and support the 2nd Amendment, just as much as I support the rest of the Constitution.
2. It let’s anti-gun conservatives, like Al D’Amato, Pete Wilson, George Pataki, Rudolph Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly, George Will and William Weld, off the hook for their disdain of our Constitution.
I oppose our drug laws. I’m pro-choice on abortion. I say we need to get out of NAFTA, GATT and the WTO. I’m pro-union, pro-environment, anti-capital punishment and anti-draft. Let’s raise the minimum wage and repeal that draconian “Welfare Reform” which was passed by Clinton. If we need “Welfare Reform,” let’s start with the Corporate Welfare that’s bankrupting this country.
I’ll be the first to say that Bush and the Right stole the election in 2000.
I’m one of many liberals who voted for Nader to 2000 because I’m sick of the rightward drift of the Democratic party under the Clinton-Gore regime. And if the Democrats can’t give me anything better than fascist sell-outs like Leiberman or Kerry in 2004, I’ll vote Green again!
And I am a gunowner.
Thank you and God bless you, for creating a site and blog for people like me.
Wow, Good Stuff!
A friend of mine who owns multiple weapons says the same thing about responsibility while carrying a weapon. Just having one on you forces you to be more responsible (unless you’re a rapper). I think folks should be allowed to bear arms, within reason. The simpletruth of the matter is that the measures we would need to put in place to get everyone’s guns away from them would make America a terrible place to be. Honestly, I think people should be allowed to carry swords, bo sticks, whatever they want, in our free country. If the guy next to you has a gun, what’s the harm of having a sword?
It’s refreshing to hear of liberals who are sane about guns. I think Liberals have to strip away the mind set that says “Liberal= Anti-Gun”. Because when you think about what it truly means to be liberal, to desire the greatest amount of freedom possible along with making sure everyone has what they need, allowing people the option of protecting themselves in the means they deem necessary seems like the only position to have.
I would like to add my $0.02 to this discussion. First of all, I read the comment that someone has a disagreement with a certain policy of a group and therefore has either resigned the group or refuses to join them. I dont always agree with everything my wife says either but I dont find that grounds for divorce.
I am a member of certain groups because they are fighting for my fundamental rights. I consider my right to own a firearm as a given although there are forces at work who would be more than happy to strip me of this right and compel me to relinquish my property.
It pains me greatly that the democratic party which I would happily support, unfortunately, seems to regard me as an enemy of the state because of my ideals. Which brings me to one of the most troubling concepts in the political arena: the litmus test. Whether you like it or not, we all have a certain issue which is inviolate. When a political candidate or party decides against our viewpoint, we will refuse to cast our vote for them regardless of other shared concerns. You may consider yourself above this concept but in most cases, I believe this is simply a matter of denial.
Jesse Ventura seemed to be the ideal candidate for my tastes, describing himself as fiscally conservative, socially liberal and more enamored with the Libertarian point of view and the idea of personal responsibility. Since his apparent departure from any future political endeavors, I know of no other politician who shares this vision of the future. Instead, we are left with the same two unsatisfying choices.
Republicans is fine if youre a multimillionaire.
Democrats is fair if all you own is what you wear..
Frank Zappa Hot Plate Heaven at the Green Hotel
JP
Hey J.P.
I see where you’re at, that you can’t expect to agree with everyone on everything.
But have you actually read any of the NRA’s literature? Everything they say can be summed up with conservative=gun rights supporter and liberal=wants to take your gun away.
I listed my two reasons why that thinking is dead wrong.
And, for your information, I am a member of Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and the Second Amendment Foundation.
Lastly, I read a great editorial recently by a former NRA lobbyist (his name escapes me now) who made a great case that the NRA’s current leadership cares more about electing Republicans than with protecting the rights of gun owners. Given their rampant conservative vs. liberal rhetoric, I have to agree with him.
I’m a liberal gun-owner, and I’ll be one till I die.
Hey Mean Green,
Great post! As a martial artist, I like your reference to swords and bos as well.
(I wish I had $1 for every moron who said to me, “Hey, you know kerrotty, what do you need a gun for?” These idiots must have thought “The Matrix” was a documentary, and that knowing a martial art enables you to dodge bullets).
Anyway, I especially like that you wrote that being liberal means granting everyone the greatest amount of freedom.
The conservatives like to say that they want to get government off our backs. BULLSHIT!
Aren’t those conservative politicians always the ones trying to limit a woman’s access to legal abortion? Or to birth control?
Try having a sane discussion with a conservative about the merits of drug legalization. It can’t be done! All they’ll do is accuse you of being a druggie.
Come to think of it, they’re almost always the ones to try to get certain books banned from bookstores, libraries, schools, etc.
And while they claim to support individual rights, they were the first ones to call Bill Clinton a draft dodger and try to use that against him in two elections. Guess what! The 13th Amendment outlaws involuntary servitude and the 14th Amendment goes on to say that no citizen shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
In short, all those Vietnam-era draft dodgers, like Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and others didn’t do anything wrong by evading the draft. The lawbreakers were the U.S. congress and the president, for putting a draft into law.
True, there are some liberals who don’t have much respect for individual rights, but when you compare their records, liberals beat conservatives hands-down when it comes to protecting individual rights.
An armed liberal. THATS WHAT I ‘M TALKIN’about! aS WE STAND HERE WATCHING THE TRASFORMATION OF THIS COUNTRY INTO A crypto-facist state,I believe it is the duty of liberal Americans to arm themselves.The right wing survivalist,black helicopter spotting whackos were at least part right. They just had the wrong enemy.The real threat is an administration that will lie us into a war,keep us in a war out our own people for personal gain. You gotta vote and you’ve got to arm.
Hey Bill,
TESTIFY BROTHER!!! HALLELUJAH!!! AMEN!!!
You said what I’ve been saying since the Reagan Regime.
We live in a country where our “President” was chosen by the right-wing hacks on the supreme court. One who lost the popular vote.
In light of that fact, I’m glad to see many of my fellow liberals turn into former anti-gunners. This is one time, though, when I hate to be right.
I would just like to say that I greatly appreciate knowing that there are other liberals out there that are also gun enthusiasts. It’s quite difficult trying to find a suitable rifle association while the vast majority of them condemn liberals as “communists” and then proceed to bitch about the evils of being gay, living in a city, being an immigrant, not being a protestant, etc…
Hey JewMatt,
I just want to say a big AMEN to your last post.
What we need is to either create a gun rights organization for the progressives like us, or we need to start joining the NRA in big enough numbers to take them over, work to change their rhetoric and have them focus strictly on gun-owners rights.
I would join them in a minute if they would stop putting all the blame for gun control on progressives. I believe in gun owners rights because I believe in individual liberty, just as I support legal abortion, legalizing drugs and I oppose selective service and the draft. (There’s one coming if Bush is reelected).
I remember reading some NRA literature where they condemned philanthropist George Soros for his support for gun control. In the article, they slammed him for his support for drug legalization, probably to whip up their more conservative members.
But to me, the right to own a gun and the right to ingest whatever poison you want are both issues of individual freedom. It’s a shame Soros and the NRA can’t see how related those two issues are.
As far as I’m concerned, true liberalism recognizes that as long as a behavior does not harm the person or property of another, it should not be prohibited.
Just my 2 cents.