What “freedom” means to some, though not to all

Freedom in the fifty states

Not feeling free in Maryland, was a young, male acquaintance, this rainy Easter Sunday.

His personal pet peeves were taxes and gun laws, though there was critical mention of the state's restrictions regarding medical marijuana and faint praise for its recent acceptance (by plebiscite, I think) of gay marriage.

And of the two it was mostly about gun laws, for him.

As to the taxes, Maryland's are by no means the highest and the question what the state was doing with the money did not even arise.

As to gun rights, he is one of those for whom 2nd Amendment propaganda has turned a moderately dangerous and expensive hobby into a political near-obsession.

And because of that obsession our conversation threw into relief for me the drastic difference between the constitutional outlook of today's libertarians and that of old-style movement conservatives.

The latter are and have pretty consistently been states' rights enthusiasts given to incredulity regarding incorporation and relatively restrained interpretations of due process, equal protection, and privileges and immunities.

Brown was wrong, the entire train of liberal affirmative action decisions was wrong, Griswold was wrong, Roe was way, way wrong, a whole string of liberal decisions about pornography were wrong, and so on.

But the gun enthusiasts have pretty much taken over the libertarian movement, and that has strengthened a tendency already there among them to insist the rights guaranteed against the federal government by the Bill of Rights, very strongly read, as well as others guaranteed in the constitution, are also imposed by the constitution - never mind where or how - on the states and lesser locales.

These are not the guys to insist a reading of the First Amendment sweeping enough to protect the most abject and repulsive child porn and a doctrine of incorporation shameless enough to impose that on all lesser jurisdictions are both wrong.

Common ground between the two types of conservative is that they are all fans of the sort of reading of due process we haven't seen since Lochner, recently lamented by such luminaries as George Will.

But for the libertarians if it takes a strong constitutional right to privacy also imposed on the states to ensure sexual liberty then that's fine, too.

None of these eccentricities would be more than, well, eccentricities, were it not for the particular penchant of gun rights enthusiasts to seize upon the 2nd Amendment to turn a hobby into a political cause of such significance as to justify in their minds violent resistance to laws inconveniencing people who are, whatever they may think they are, at best mere hobbyists.

And that would be violence in defense of a very strong reading of the 2nd as guaranteeing an individual right to own at least semi-automatic weapons easily re-converted to their fully automatic counterparts, designed for military use.

These are people who personally resent the idea that the police or the military should be better armed than they are.

These are people who urge that there are only aesthetic differences between assault rifles and ordinary hunting rifles while bitterly opposing laws banning private possession of the former, insisting the 2nd Amendment guarantees them a right to own and carry weapons specifically designed and built for military use.

And their heroes have told them it is their obligation as free Americans to go down shooting, Charlton Heston style, if and when agents of the state show up at their door to confiscate, say, assault rifles.

They sincerely believe, or anyway claim to believe, Americans must be free to arm themselves in this way to resist tyranny, but they understand tyranny to comprise mostly just gun control, though also in lesser degree taxes at levels and for purposes Ayn Rand would disapprove.

Meanwhile, to the vast bulk of Americans who have not immersed themselves in this political quackery, the threat of crazed and well-armed mass murderers at the mall, at the schools, or at other public places is much more a worry than the threat of high taxes.

And as for gun control limiting personal armories to non-military firearms, far from seeing this as tyranny per se they mostly see it as a very sensible public safety measure with the regrettable side-effect of interfering with a hobby that has become too dangerous to indulge.

It is possible these libertarians are more dangerous to America than any left wing extremists now walking around on American soil, being both more likely to respond with significant violence to what they judge to be tyranny and more idiosyncratic in making that judgement.

I was and am genuinely frightened for my young friend, and hope I am just over-reacting to a casual conversation.