Top Gun

The Supreme Court decision on Second Amendment rights was greeted with dancing in the streets by conservatives, and with shock and horror by liberals -- all very predictable, since both sides had been waiting for this particular shoe to drop for decades. The majority decision was offered by Justice Scalia with his accustomed crystal-clear wisdom and discernment, and the minority dissent was typically mealy-mouthed and appealing only to the most self-pitying. Conservatives see a preservation and reaffirmation of rights simply considered plain common sense in less "enlightened" times. The liberals see a vision of armed gangs running amok in the streets of our inner cities, and... wait, that's already happening. So what _are_ they afraid of? Surely not of law-abiding citizens owing weapons for self defense. Or... and this is where it gets touchy... for purposes of discouraging abuse and the trampling of rights by various "law enforcement" bodies at various levels? This possibility is whispered at on occasion, although it was quite explicitly offered at the time the Constitution was drawn up -- just not actually incorporated into the document, which has been a source of all the confusion since. Could there ever come a time when the citizenry would have to defend itself against its own government? The founders fervently hoped not, but "just in case" -- let's say in case of a violent socialist revolution of the sort that has convulsed so many countries since then -- people would have some first-line defense against totalitarianism. But the heart of the matter seems to have been simple defense of life and property against assault and invasion by the lawless. This, of course, has always been the liberals' weak suit -- namely, the ability to acknowledge the rights of average citizens, vs. those of career victims or of the criminal class itself. The right to bear arms was seen as some sort of vague threat to any sort of revolutionay, or evolutionary, agenda, and it was also seen as a somewhat tacky way of asserting the value of the middle-class, AKA "bourgeois", lifestyle. Hopefully this decision will be a major setback for the agents of change, who do not lack a certain predilection for violence and coercion, where those conform to their agenda.

As to the actual risks involved, I don't think this decision will put one more weapon into the hands of criminals that would not have wound up there anyway. What it will do is _keep_ weapons in the hands of people on the other side of the cultural divide, i.e. between the law-abiding and the lawless, the producers and the takers. This also disturbs the liberal concept of "dialectic", but that concept richly deserves to be disturbed, as often as possible. And yes, criminal gangs will still "own the streets" in many of our inner cities, but perhaps this will serve as a kind of buffer to the expansion of their territories. It may also mean that people who live in those areas won't have to barricade themselves in every night, relying on alarm systems, dogs, and 911 lines that are frequently manned by donut-and-coffee-drugged personnel. In any case, it is a huge victory for law and genuine order, rather than the sort of resentment-fueled identity politics that infects so much of our society. Will there be shoot-em-ups at high noon on city streets, between the citizenry and the felon class? Highly unlikely. What there will be -- hopefully -- is a bit more hesitation on the part of the violent, and the criminal, to take their impulses out on whoever happens to be behind the next door.