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
Liberals want to ban guns simply because gun ownership doesn’t fit their idea of what a proper, modern, progressive civilization should be. That’s “wild west” stuff, best left in the past, along with slavery, patriarchy, church, and women as stay at home moms. The New Progressive Man simply doesn’t do manhood anymore, and that includes firearms. You really don’t have to go all that deep to see their motives. Their utopia simply has no place for such things as guns. Evil? They believe in evil. They believe anyone that opposes “progress” is evil. You and I are evil. The NRA is evil. Your local preacher is evil. Guns are evil because they were created to do evil things. Liberals want all of our evils… which are to a great extent, traditional American freedoms… to go away.
That truly is brilliant. Â But I’d almost say they actually deny evil entirely.
And if there is no good or evil then governance consists of negotiating the items we want on the menu.
I think you pretty much just summed up Rousseau.
Those without God have no reference for good and evil – it is all relative to them, so blaming the instrument of violence is all they have.
My soundbite on this idea is that they owe their morality more to Das Kapital than to Leviticus.