By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, December 09, 2015
It isn’t even St. Patrick’s Day, but we are all Irish
now: In Connecticut, the boneheaded state government passed a law demanding the
registration of certain firearms, and the people of Connecticut, perhaps
communing for a moment with their independent-minded Yankee forebears, mainly
refused to comply. On the other side of the country in the heart of
California’s technology corridor, the city of Sunnyvale demanded that residents
hand over all firearms capable of accepting magazines holding more than ten
rounds — effectively, everything except revolvers and some single-shot rifles —
and the good men and women of Silicon Valley responded by turning in a grand
total of zero firearms. Similar initiatives in other jurisdictions have
produced similar results.
Political scientists call this “Irish democracy,” the
phenomenon by which the general members of a polity resist the mandates of
their would-be rulers by simply refusing to comply with them. It is a low-cost
form of civil disobedience, but one that can be very effective at times:
Mohandas K. Gandhi was entirely correct in his famous declaration to the
British powers that they would eventually be forced to simply pack up their
tiffin pails and go home, because 300,000 Englishman could not control 300
million (at the time) Indians if those Indians didn’t cooperate.
One way of considering the radical potential of simple
noncompliance is the “10 percent synchronous subversion factor,” the
proposition that if 10 percent of the U.S. population refused to (for instance)
pay taxes or answer jury-duty summonses, then the rules would have to change,
because they would be unenforceable: There aren’t enough tax agents,
constables, slots on court dockets, or jail cells to enforce the rules against
32 million Americans if they should decide to refuse to comply with a given
law.
The prospect of the local-yokel police in Sunnyvale,
Calif., going door to door, Fallujah-style, trying to collect nonconforming
firearms is humorous to contemplate; contemplating the same sort of development
in Texas or Wyoming is rather less amusing, because at that point the model of
resistance would stop being Irish democracy and almost certainly would mutate
into something a lot more like Lexington and Concord. No decent, patriotic
person wants to see that.
Nor does one relish the idea of police forces being
obliged to choose between attempting to enforce an illegal and unconstitutional
order and ceding the interpretation of constitutional law to mob-ocracy. Even
for those of us who understand why the Second Amendment exists and who endorse
the reasoning behind it, trusting in the prudence of large, armed crowds of
21st-century Americans requires an act of faith well in excess of the evidence.
The hallmark episode of Irish democracy in the American
setting is Prohibition, which is a cautionary tale — and not only for the
would-be modern prohibitionist. Prohibition demonstrated several things to the
American public, which took the lesson to heart: Politicians are entirely
capable of making stupid laws when in the grips of voguish thinking; the
American people are more than capable of ignoring and subverting those laws;
that subversion often is met with ruthlessness and brutality on the part of law
enforcement, but enforcement is by no means even-handed; hypocrisy, like
alcohol, is a useful social lubricant in moderation but debilitating in excess;
social tensions reveal who has political power and who doesn’t, casting a harsh
bright light on Lenin’s fundamental question — “Who? Whom?”; and law
enforcement is just as corruptible as any other institution. Prohibition did a
lot of damage by providing an enduring model of organized crime, but it also
undermined Americans’ faith in the rule of law as such: Favoritism in
enforcement, bribery, and institutional incapacity severely damaged the law’s
prestige. We have never really quite recovered.
Our new prohibitionists are a lot like the old ones. The
nice corduroy-clad liberals in places such as Georgetown and the Upper West
Side use guns as a stand-in for the sort of people who own guns in much the
same way as the old WASP prohibitionists used booze as a stand-in for the sort
of people who drank too much: Irish and other Catholics, especially immigrants,
and especially especially poor immigrants. The horror at “gun culture” is about
the culture — rural, conservative,
traditionalist, patriotic, self-reliant or at least aspiring to self-reliance —
much more than it is about the guns. It’s the same sort of dynamic that gets
people worked up about Confederate flags or poor white people with diabetes who
shop at Walmart.
A little dose of Irish democracy is an excellent thing in
response to that, especially when it is coming from California and Connecticut
rather than Oklahoma and Alabama. But winning the fight on gun rights while
losing the fight on the rule of law is the very definition of a Pyrrhic
victory. It is necessary that we also prevail politically and legally, which we
have been, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the NRA and affiliated
groups, as well as the increasingly sensible view of the American public that
what’s wrong with mass shooters has more to do with the mental-health system —
and that what’s wrong with Chicago has something to do with that, too, inasmuch
as the inmates are running that particular asylum.
The Supreme Court has been more than clear, on more than
one occasion, that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it
says. We also have a long legal and constitutional tradition that prohibits
stripping people of their civil rights — including their Second Amendment
rights — without due process, generally in the form of an indictment and a
trial and a conviction. If the Democrats want to do away with the Second
Amendment, let them begin the amendment process and see how far they get. We
should challenge them to do so at every opportunity.
In reality, the Democrats have declared war on the First
Amendment, voting in the Senate to repeal it; they have declared war on the
Second Amendment at every turn; they also have declared war on due process and,
in doing so, on the idea of the rule of law itself, beginning with the notion
of “innocent until proven guilty.” That isn’t liberalism — it’s
totalitarianism.
That’s a winnable fight, and we should welcome it.
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