Using Mayor Bloomberg as a figurehead for "the self-consciously centrist liberalism of the Acela Corridor elite," Douthat emphasizes Bloomberg's provincialism, and "his bedrock assumption is that the liberal paternalism with which New York is governed can and should be a model for the nation as a whole."
Appropriately, Douthat suggests that popular liberal proposals, such as a renewed "assault weapons ban" and crackdowns on "illegal handguns," would come with a tremendous cost. In order to ensure effective enforcement, criminalizing harmless behavior (such as the mere possession of a weapon) requires the infringement of other Constitutional rights (in addition to the Second Amendment). Further, at a time when our nation's prisons are full of non-violent offenders, weapons bans will ultimately place even more non-violent people behind bars, destroying communities in the process. As Douthat writes, "cracking down hard on illegal handguns, for instance, would probably involve “stop and frisk” on a huge scale, and might throw more young men in prison at a time when our incarceration rates are already too high." Liberals, however, seem completely ignorant of this practical reality, and instead advocate increased criminalization of firearms without realizing that proper enforcement would necessitate an expansion of law enforcement practices that they find to be objectionable.
Douthat's summary of contemporary American liberalism is spot on. "The establishment view is interventionist, corporatist and culturally liberal," he writes. "It thinks that issues like health care and climate change and immigration are best worked out through comprehensive bills drawn up by enlightened officials working hand in glove with business interests. It regards sexual liberty as sacrosanct, and other liberties — from the freedoms of churches to the rights of gun owners — as negotiable at best. It thinks that the elite should pay slightly higher taxes, and everyone else should give up guns, SUVs and Big Gulps and live more like, well, Manhattanites. It allows the president an entirely free hand overseas, and takes the Bush-Obama continuities in foreign policy for granted."
On foreign policy, today's liberals are the direct descendants of the liberal imperialists who spurred America's involvement in Vietnam. The New York Times takes for granted that the United States should exert its military presence throughout the world, and only bothers to criticize the abuses of imperialist excess when a Republican occupies the White House. Domestically, liberals favor civilian disarmament, secularism, political correctness, and excessive government regulation of all human behavior save what goes on the bedroom. Ultimately, their faith in the power of the State to correct social problems is unwaverable (provided, of course, that the Democrats are in power).
What is perhaps most frustrating, however, is how liberals are incapable of accepting the fact that they might be wrong about something. They know that they are right and that their views should prevail over those of others because they are smarter than everyone else (having attended the best schools and the best universities).
Living in NYC, most of the people I interact with are die-hard liberals who follow the opinions of The New York Times and The Huffington Post to the letter. When they encounter someone (like me) who possesses different views, their reactions feature a combination of disbelief (how could anyone not agree with me?) and anger. They are remarkably quick to turn to insults because they are not used to conversing with people who are not liberals--as Charles Murray shows in Coming Apart, they spend their lives in carefully guarded enclaves surrounded by other members of the liberal elite. For them, I am insane for believing in the right to keep and bear arms, paranoid for not trusting my government, and anti-American for opposing U.S. imperialism.
As Radley Balko tweeted in a reaction to Douthat's piece, "I wonder if the angry commenters responding to Douthat's NYT column today realize that they're only proving his point."
In the posts that at least advanced some sort of argument, commenters parroted many of the anti-gun left's favorite cliches, arguing that no one "needs" an "assault weapon," that there is no reason for them "unless you are planning a massacre," and that any notion of resisting the almighty government through armed resistance is futile. Joel Frielander from Huntington Station, NY bemoans "the tiny little brains of many of the gun owners," who mistakenly believe that "if you take one gun away from them you are taking away all of their weapons." In her own column, Fellow Op-Ed contributor Maureen Dowd follows many liberals in misinterpreting the Second Amendment as applying only to hunters: "Hunters can have their guns without leaving Americans so vulnerable to being hunted by demented souls with assault rifles that can fire 45 rounds per minute."
Of course, the Second Amendment is not about hunting, but about self-defense and defending the nation from tyranny and foreign invaders. Urban liberals who are not gun owners would of course fail to realize that, in a rural setting where the police are far away and the territory is much larger than a suburban lot, an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine would be a much better self-defense weapon than a handgun. In that case, their provincialism can be forgiven. But their defeatism in suggesting that an armed populace would be powerless to resist domestic tyranny never ceases to shock me.
Unfortunately, liberals will never understand that the government is not infallible, and that a massive, armed guerilla uprising could bring the government to its knees. Although they see America as a force of good in the world, they nonetheless assume that the government would unleash the full force of the U.S. military on its own population (thereby destroying the very society and infrastructure that it wishes to govern over), and that all members of the military and law enforcement would just go on following orders in the face of armed resistance. The right to own semi-automatic rifles with thirty-round magazines is at the very core of the Second Amendment, in that a well-armed populace ups the ante for the government and makes it think twice before oppressing a disfavored minority or the population as a whole.
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