In his address from the Oval Office regarding the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Joe Biden agreed with the points I made in my previous post about America’s gun problem.
He probably didn’t realize that. Or more precisely, the people who wrote the address for him to read didn’t realize that. But let’s look at some of the words they told him to speak, and think about what it would mean to take them seriously, beginning with this:
[T]here is no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence ever, period, no exceptions.
Really? What happens if you don’t pay your taxes, because you don’t believe you should have to fund interventions in other countries, or unwarranted surveillance of American citizens, or schools that undermine American values, or retirement checks for millionaires, and so on?
You’ll get warning letters, but if you ignore those, eventually, people with guns come to arrest you. And if you decline to let them do that, they will kill you.
Here’s Professor Stephen Carter of Yale Law School:
On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
This is true even for traffic laws.
If there are no exceptions, then there are no exceptions for government. Period. If there is really no place in America for violence, then there is really no reason for police officers and other government agents to be armed, is there?
Disagreement over the direction our country should take is inevitable in American democracy. It's part of human nature. But politics must never be a literal battlefield […] I believe politics ought to be an arena for peaceful debate to pursue justice, to make decisions guided by the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
What does the Declaration of Independence say? It says that governments are formed to protect rights — not to protect people, or to redistribute wealth, or to police the world, or to promote particular views on morality, and so on. Yet, those kinds of things make up at least 95 percent of government activity.
It also says that governments derive the just powers to act from the consent of the governed. But the whole point of elections, and of majority rule, is to allow some people to deprive others of consent.
(If you think that ‘majority rule’ and ‘consent’ are synonyms, check out Article V of the federal constitution, which makes it clear that they are more nearly opposites.)
What does our (written) Constitution say? It says that all legislative power is vested in Congress, which can exercise only a small, strictly enumerated set of powers. That’s the theory. In practice, most legislative power is exercised by the executive and judicial branches.
More importantly, it enumerates some rights, and reserves others, and prohibits all the branches from abridging or infringing any of those rights except under very specific, and very limited, conditions.
If we were actually being guided by the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, it would hardly be worth voting for political candidates, let alone shooting at them — because once elected, they wouldn’t be able to pose much of a threat to you.
One way to get there is to take away their ability, once in office, to use armed agents to force their agendas on the people they’re supposed to be representing, and not ruling.
[T]he higher the stakes, the more fervent and passionate they become. This places an added burden on each of us to ensure that no matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.
This is exactly what I was saying. And that’s why, no matter how strong our convictions, we must never give government the tools, incentives, or opportunities to use violence or the threat of violence to impose the convictions of some on the lives of others who disagree with them.
The Constitution already prohibits the exercise of all but a small, very specific set of enumerated powers — very few of which you find anyone fighting over.
And it already prohibits government from infringing on the rights of Americans, which are rooted in the right to be let alone, which Justice Brandeis identified as the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
But government ignores those prohibitions, and that is the whole problem in a nutshell. The stakes continue to increase because government continues to grow beyond its limits.
It can continue to grow because it can descend into violence to suppress any resistance to that growth.
It can descend into violence because its agents are armed.
That needs to change. We need a government that allows people to work together when they agree, and requires them to leave each other alone when they don’t.
Robert Heinlein famously said that ‘an armed society is a polite society’. But a disarmed government is a polite government — precisely because it has no other options.
In America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box. You know, that's how we do it - at the ballot box, not bullets.
This sounds nice. But the people who are elected at the ballot box are then given nearly plenary power to control the lives of everyone — precisely by being able to enforce their arbitrary and capricious desires by sending agents who are armed, not with ballots, but with bullets.
[O]ur founders […] gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force. That's where we must be.
That is where we must be.
But to get there, we must stop putting guns in the hands of the winners of the most recent election, to be pointed at the losers.
To get there, we must take guns away from government, so that the only option is to govern by consensus and cooperation, rather than by conquest and coercion.
To get there, we must take guns away from government, so that law can only be a means for cultivating and documenting consent, rather than a means of ignoring and eliminating it.
I was surprised to find myself agreeing with Joe Biden’s handlers on anything, but there it is: We agree that the key to the America that we say we want is to take away government’s ability to use violence to replace debate and discussion, something we can only do by disarming government.
