Imagine that Kamala Harris is President, and swarms of ATF agents are trying to seize all the privately-owned firearms in Minnesota — even those that haven’t been used in crimes, and won’t ever be used in crimes, that are only being kept for self-defense and hunting and sporting purposes. Imagine that every day you see people resisting those efforts. Whose side would you be on?
Would you say, “Well, the law is the law, and if the government is just enforcing the law, then people should get out of the way and let them do that”? I wouldn’t.
Would you be upset that people are out there “putting their bodies on the line” to resist ATF? Would you be upset to find out that rich people (some of them in other countries) are funding the deployment of sophisticated technology to help those people organize their resistance efforts? I wouldn’t.
A lot of gun owners, when talking about gun control laws, raise the crucial distinction between behavior that is malum prohibitum (bad because it’s illegal) versus behavior that is malum in se (bad because it’s wrong).
The idea is that — at least where guns are concerned — laws against the former are illegitimate. They don’t have to be obeyed. And more to the point, they should be disobeyed, because the laws themselves are wrong. If they are being enforced, enforcement should be resisted.
A lot of opponents of the way the Trump administration is handling deportation are making exactly the same distinction — that coming into the country illegally but then living here peacefully and productively may be illegal (malum prohibitum), but it isn’t wrong (malum in se). And they’re making it for exactly the same reasons.
I’m not saying I agree with them. For one thing, my owning a gun doesn’t put any requirements on anyone else. It doesn’t raise anyone’s taxes, or force anyone to wait months for an appointment with a doctor, or deprive anyone of a job, or anything else. There are important differences between gun laws and immigration laws.
I’m just saying that I can see their point, and that abstractly, I agree with it. And saying that “the law is the law” isn’t really an argument against it. In fact, the only reason we have a country to defend in the first place is that, once upon a time, a group of colonists considered that argument and concluded that it was bullshit. So much so that our own state constitution states very plainly:
The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
People who oppose certain kinds of gun laws and people who oppose certain kinds of immigration laws have this in common: They’re both opposed to arbitrary power and oppression; and they both support resisting it, for the good and happiness of mankind. That’s a basis for having substantive, productive conversations about what how the laws should be changed, and what to do while that’s happening.
(Probably where we want to end up is somewhere like this: If you use your guns to harm someone else, we can take them away from you. Otherwise, we’ll leave you alone. Similarly, if your presence as a non-citizen harms other people — even if it’s just by making them pay more taxes to provide you with services — then you can be deported. Otherwise, we’ll leave you alone. But you can’t get medical care for free, can’t send your kids to school for free, can’t get food stamps or housing assistance, and so on. Note that this changes the focus from immigration, which is a symptom, to the welfare state, which is the underlying problem. And once we start asking questions like “Under what conditions should we punish people who haven’t harmed anyone else?” and “Under what conditions should we take money from some people in order to give it to other people?”, we might actually start getting somewhere.)
But to have those conversations, the first thing that has to happen is for everyone to recognize that sometimes the law, as Mr. Bumble said, “is a ass — a idiot”, and that “the law is the law” isn’t a useful argument to make on any side of any issue.
