Allies

Gun Nuts: The Next Generation is a live talk radio show that you listen to over Al Gore's Intarwebz. If you're interested in shooting, or the politics around Second Amendment issues, it's a must-listen. Every Tuesday at 9:00 PM Eastern Time (wednesdays at 02:00 UT) - all the cool kids are there, and you should be, too.

Last week was a very interesting show. There's quite a lot of frustration at the way Liberals seem willing to let a clear, enumerated constitutional right get crushed out of existence. A lot of frustration came out. Boiling down a 60 minute show, it seemed that it was all about where on earth are the Liberals?

The consensus: I'm tired of trying to convince liberals that we're not evil. You should click the link to listen to the archived show, as it's more nuanced than this. However, many people - people I like and respect - seemed to simply not see any allies on the left.

This was troubling, because my instinct is that this isn't the whole story. Certainly a bunch of liberals are stuck on guns - ick, but there's more to this story. I know, because I used to be liberal. This is fixin' to be an uber-post, so either scroll on by, or get some popcorn; we'll be here a while.

There are gun enthusiasts on the left. Even (some) the kids over at Daily Kos sound a lot like us when the Second Amendment comes up in discussion:

When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check at the door their ability to think rationally. In discussing the importance of any other portion of the Bill of Rights, liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies. They can talk about the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.

So why do liberals have such a problem with the Second Amendment? Why do they lump all gun owners in the category of "gun nuts"? Why do they complain about the "radical extremist agenda of the NRA"? Why do they argue for greater restrictions?

Why do they start performing mental gymnastics worthy of a position in Bush's Department of Justice to rationalize what they consider "reasonable" infringement of one of our most basic, fundamental, and revolutionary -- that's right, revolutionary -- civil liberties?

One prominent blogger proudly calls himself Armed Liberal. The problem is more complicated - and interesting - that it seems. How do you identify someone on the left that might be an ally? This is hard, partly because we're used to thinking in terms of "liberal" and "conservative":

This doesn't give us enough data. Nancy Pelosi is on the left, and she'll never be an ally. On the contrary. But the Kos diarist is also on the left, and he's passionate about an individual right to keep and bear arms.

We need to add more data. Adding another axis, and relabeling the first gives us a more subtle way to be wrong than before. The two axes now are a measure of:

• Should power be concentrated in the hands of the state, or with individuals?

• Should we guide our thinking based on tradition - what has been shown to give good results in the past, or based on an theory - an intellectual conception of what will give best results?

We get a grid like this. I've populated it with some statesmen from the past*.
Now while this is all great fun, there's a point here. The traditional "left" vs. "right" has no power to predict if someone will be a second amendment ally if we think in terms of "theory" and "tradition". But if we think in terms of how power is perceived - should the State monopolize it, or should the people reserve it to themselves - this seems a reliable indicator.

The further towards the bottom of the chart, the more likely a person will support an individual right to keep and bear arms. That's where our allies are.

This is (mostly) stating the obvious: the hard left will not want the people to be armed, except temporarily and until the the Revolution is complete. Then the people will be disarmed, for the good of the People. Some Democrats and more Republicans are comfortable with individual gun ownership. Nothing new here. Certainly nothing gets to last week's frustration.

Just because a person is disposed to support individual rights doesn't mean that they'll be passionate about the Second Amendment. Probably they don't have to be. What's been going on has been a steady, low key, slow motion assault from the gun banners. What we've started seeing over the last 15 years is push-back.

What's needed is the same sort of corrosive, drip-drip-drip subversion of the gun banner's arguments. A guerrilla war of our own, as it were. Shifting the balance of power, one un-passionate voter at a time, from un-passionate against us, to neutral, to non-passionate for us.

It's a necessary, but thankless job, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't want the frustration.

* "Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen." Attributed to Bob Edwards, but certainly in common usage.