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Why Liberals Talk about Guns
From Bill McGurn’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal, a truly brilliant insight:
Put simply, today’s liberalism cannot deal with the reality of evil. So liberals inveigh against the instruments the evil use rather than the evil that motivates them….
[T]he urge to blame the weapon has deep liberal roots. It was particularly pronounced in the latter years of the Cold War when Ronald Reagan was president.
Even as Reagan was applying the pressure that would ultimately bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989—from arming the Afghan resistance to supporting Poland’s Solidarity movement to rebuilding America’s defenses—liberals derided him as a warmonger. Two things especially irked them: He’d called the U.S.S.R. the Evil Empire, and he was skeptical about arms control for the sake of arms control.
So when the Gipper walked away from the 1986 Reykjavik summit because Mikhail Gorbachev insisted his price for a nukes deal was the end of missile defense, Reagan was derided as a dunce. But his decision proved one of his finest moments: Scarcely a year later the Soviets caved and Mr. Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Guns. They’re what liberals talk about so they don’t have to talk about evil.
Published in General
Instapundit. Thank you Ed Driscoll.
Liberals don’t like guns because Socialism requires submission. A person with a gun is not submissive.
Just remember, if it slows, delays, diverts, condemns, reverses, or otherwise doesn’t favorably enable socialism, it’s wrong and it must be removed.
The only thing I would add is liberals believe if we can only make government big enough, we can make man perfect. It is a fallacy, and that is why liberals want to remove the tools that allow individuals to be individual rather than become the perfect cogs in a massive government machine of regulated harmony. Gun, weapons of any sort, money, choice, impulse, property, inspiration, creativity, greed, willfulness, discipline, cowardice, envy, brilliance, responsibility, courage – the things that make us human, …these all stand between the project of perfecting man and man’s natural state of being a bit too flawed to perfect. Yet, the liberal delusion continues.
Could you expand on this, maybe a couple of examples? I’m not getting it at cocktail hour, here.
My liberal brother-in-law likes to say that there is no good and there is no evil — there’s only desirable and undesirable. Given that he doesn’t admit the existence of morality it is remarkable how often he displays what can only be called “moral outrage”.
Sure.
In academia people apply the available theories to real life situations. Often a model of the real life situation is constructed, and the theories are applied to that model. We abstract a mechanical system as masses and springs, we have equations for those, solve those equations with useful results. The overall incentive is generally more on finding applications of the theories than in actually solving the problem. You’ve solved it for the abstraction, not real life.
It is the engineer who has to selectively apply the academic theories to solve the problem in real life, to a degree acceptable in the marketplace.
Lefty politics is similar to academia in that they often construct an abstract model of a real life situation and apply an abstract centralized government program as the solution. There is never an examination of the appropriateness of the model, the effectiveness of the solution, or even if the solution makes the problem worse.
People are getting killed with gunfire, model guns as the cause, ban the guns, theoretically the problem is solved.
Everyone who has ever said there is no good or evil, then starts judging the hell out of everybody in an outraged way. (At least that is the entirety of my experience.)
To much of the Left, guns are totemic symbols of malice. They innately possess badness. It’s exactly why meat eating liberals hate hunting. Ranching involves just as much death but because hunting represents death it’s bad.