I recently watched a YouTube video that promised to show Ben Shapiro ‘destroying’ Piers Morgan in a discussion about gun control.
But a few minutes into it, I realized that Shapiro had already conceded the larger argument in order to score a few technical points. In particular, he said his answer to gun violence was to make sure that ‘the wrong kinds of people’ didn’t have access to guns.
As I’ve pointed out before, this is basically an invitation to people like Joe Biden to claim that ‘no rights are absolute’, and that ‘common sense’ trumps constitutional prohibitions on government power.
That is, what Shapiro is arguing is that you have a right to self-defense, and to own the tools required for self-defense, unless you’re the ‘wrong kind of person’, in which case you don’t.
Okay, this isn’t new. What’s new is that this is the same kind of reasoning that will ultimately be used to justify the federal government’s use of social media companies to censor ‘the wrong kinds of opinions’ put forth by ‘the wrong kinds of people’ — as currently being exposed in the ‘Twitter Files’.
If you support the argument that ‘the people’ in the Bill of Rights really means only certain kinds of people, then you necessarily support the argument that ‘arms’ really means only certain kinds of arms, and that ‘speech’ really means only certain kinds of speech.
And who will decide which kinds? Democracy itself!
So if you’re one of those people who thinks that it’s a legitimate function of government to limit who can own what kinds of guns, then you have no grounds to oppose those people who think that it’s a legitimate function of government to limit who can express what kinds of thoughts. They’re the same edge of the same sword.
