A recent article on the subject of Florida’s legislation authorizing teachers to carry guns in school (albeit with various restrictions and qualifications) prompted me to ponder, not for the first time, the left’s peculiar antipathy toward guns.
It’s often said that guns scare people. I suppose that must be true in some instances. Shoot, I grew up with a modest fear of spiders, something I only forced myself to overcome — through repeated and unpleasant exposure — when I had children and decided that I had to man up and deal with it. So I understand that phobias can be irrational and yet quite real and intense. But whereas I still find pictures of spiders unpleasant, I think few Americans are nonplussed by the appearance of a gun in a movie or television show. I don’t believe that there is a widespread fear of guns, in the sense we normally think of fear — not, at least, a fear sufficient to motivate the more strident anti-gun activists.
Guns don’t frighten liberals so much as they offend them.
One can argue whether it is the personal handgun or universal education that is “the great equalizer,” though chronological priority for the phrase probably goes to the latter (Horace Mann, 1848), but it is true that, purely in terms of physical security and autonomy, nothing levels the playing field like a gun in the hand of a competent user. In an era when endless lip service is paid to the idea of female empowerment, guns remain the only means by which most women can approach physical parity with most men. That would seem compelling, if women’s safety and independence were a high priority, and yet the left remains steadfastly opposed to empowering women in this critical regard.
The problem, I think, is that a gun is not merely the great equalizer, but the great individualizer. The left’s conception of equality is collective, the balancing of disparate identity groups each composed of essentially anonymous members sharing common interests and grievances. That is, after all, pretty much the definition of identitarian bigotry: the group to which you “belong” determines what you need, value, resent, and believe.
But guns are all about the individual. One individual holds the gun, aims the gun, decides whether or not to take on the awesome responsibility of actually using the gun — and, ultimately, pulls the trigger. The gun is the practical means by which one individual is given the power to make a life-or-death decision with neither the assistance nor the approval of anyone else. The gun is how a man or woman says, irrefutably, that he or she is equal and empowered without the collective — an identity group of one.
I think it is the individualism of gun ownership and use, more than anything, that keeps the left so passionately opposed to guns even in the face of compelling evidence that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are practical and beneficial.
(None of which explains the left’s affinity for abortion, which also grants a single individual the authority to determine the life or death of another human being without support or approval. I don’t know how to reconcile that with what I just wrote about guns: why is one kind of individualized ability-to-kill celebrated, and the other condemned?)