Cognitive dissonance in the gun debate

[Quantum Windbag]

Interesting take on the entire debate.

Writing in The New Yorker roughly a year ago, Harvard’s Jill Lepore made a similar argument: “In the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun.” She explains this as part of a broader conservative political strategy: “Describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right gave conservatives a power at the polls that, at the time, the movement lacked.”
This “novel interpretation” of the Second Amendment, as it has been called, finally prevailed at the Supreme Court in 2008 in the Heller case, and again two years later in McDonald. Those rulings thoroughly outraged most liberals, which is remarkably strange — because they were precisely the sort of rulings liberals have long celebrated.
In cases from Griswold (privacy) to Miranda (criminal law) to Roe (abortion) to Lawrence (sexual liberty) to Hollingsworth and Windsor (today’s gay-marriage disputes), progressives consistently (and correctly) have advocated an expansive reading of the Constitution — one that recognizes new rights even where doing so might seem a bit of a stretch.
The Constitution does not explicitly mention a right to privacy, for instance. But in Griswold the Supreme Court discerned one in the “penumbras” and “emanations” of other constitutional rights. And liberals think that is splendid, since — they say — the Constitution is a living document that ought to grow and change with the times.
As Lepore notes in her New Yorker piece, “Gun-rights arguments have their origins . . . in twentieth-century liberalism” and the “rights revolution” of the 1960s. Yet generally speaking, liberals disdain the right to own firearms — despite the fact that it receives explicit mention in the Constitution. So they are now doing something unprecedented: advocating that a constitutional right be curtailed, and perhaps even revoked.

Hinkle: Cognitive dissonance on guns - Richmond Times Dispatch: Our Opinion

 

[The2ndAmendment]

This is a subject that also fascinates me, and is why I was a far-left Democrat for many years.

Personally, I support gay rights, emancipating the new American slaves (illegal immigrants), pro-choice (first trimester only), legalizing pot, etc.

And because of this, I was also pro-gun, recognizing it as the final barrier against tyranny.

Why should government even be involved in marriage at all?

Why is government controlling your body?

Why is government controlling my paycheck?

Why is government controlling my guns?

Why is government controlling what I can eat or drink?

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE