Are guns covered in the public option?
Is violence the antithesis of democratic government–or at the heart of it?
Writing about the sudden presence of guns outside healthcare town halls, E.J. Dionne suggests there’s a deeper problem at stake:
There is a philosophical issue here that gets buried under the fear that so many politicians and media-types have of seeming to be out of touch with the so-called American heartland.
The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them.
Dionne’s portrayal of democratic governance is both right and wrong. It’s true that our freedoms “rest on a moral consensus,” but that consensus has an awful lot to do with violence.
Even democracy emerged as the dominant form of government, states held a monopoly on violence. In some ways, that’s the crudest definition of the state: the sole possessor of power over life and death.
The moral consensus behind democratic government is — in theory — that people willingly and collectively hand over the right of self-defense to the government. In that sense, free elections and open debate are indeed rooted in the threat violence–the threat of state violence against would-be aggressors.
While the moral consensus Dionne references gives birth to the rule of law, it also bears a twin: the populist argument for gun rights. If only the state can wield violence, the reasoning goes, our freedoms become precarious, subject to the whim of the state. We need to have weapons in case government begins to encroach on the domain of liberty so that we have the means to defend that liberty.
Dionne is right to suggest an inevitable tension. If the state protects our rights by controlling the tools of violence, then it would be difficult to preserve those rights if things ever went awry. At the same time, individuals or groups that bear arms directly threaten state’s primary role–to keep the peace.
–Sam
Related posts:
- The myth of a “national security” limitation on free speech
- Money and guns
- Who does the United Nations represent?
- The challenge of social science in constitutional interpretation and public policy
- Is politics the problem?
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