Thursday, January 10, 2013
Controlling gun rights for "reasonable use" can grease a slippery slope on speech rights
The news is out that President Obama will soon issue
Executive Orders tightening weapons control as much as he can, with Biden’s
advice. And there doesn’t seem to be
much objection to enforcing existing laws, or tightening the background check
loopholes.
And, no, I don’t think that an America where every “good
guy” needs to be armed because society has broken down, or because there are
evil enemies impossible to control absolutely, is a place I could live.
But there is a slippery slope here. It is the idea that, for a citizen to
exercise a “fundamental right”, he or she needs a legitimate motive or purpose
or intent.
Agreed, very few citizens have a foreseeable need
for military style weapons in their homes (unless they live in the wild and
worry about grizzly bears). OK, is the
psychological need of a survivalist (or "doomsday prepper") to provide absolute protection to his family a
legitimate purpose? Is the preparedness
to fight off a future tyrannical government a century from now, as articulated
by Ben Shapiro (“Bullies”) on Piers Morgan tonight a valid motive?
You see, yes, it is starting to sound like different
strokes for different folks.
It’s clear that at some point the government can
exercise reasonable limitations on individual rights. We don’t have a right to possess plutonium
dust in our homes (even Lawrence Tribe has said this), but we could probably never acquire any (except maybe from
Iran or North Korea, through clandestine channels)l, so it's moot point. There’s no conceivably legitimate use. So that seems almost true of assault
weapons, which compared to plutonium particles, are readily available for the common man. It gets interesting when you
compare this to the government’s prohibition on possession of certain
controlled substances. PK, there is no
conceivably legitimate use for meth. But
there might be for marijuana. The slope
is starting to accumulate a little black ice.
One area where I get concerned is that the
government then starts to have the right to limit Internet speech, or at least
control its distribution, possibly by imposing new downstream liability
requirements on providers. It’s surely
going to be illegal to sell certain weapons (without background checks) on the
Internet. (Maybe even ammo, eventually –
because there is already a shortage for legitimate law enforcement.) But could providers be expected to police
sale of illegal things, to further protect the public more absolutely from
nutcases or extremists? Looking at the “purpose”
of content is a dangerous idea – it’s the “implicit content” problem I’ve
mentioned before. I’ve learned my own
lesson on this matter (as detailed – you guessed it – on July 27, 2007).
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