How to tell if you are part of the favored ruling class? If it is easy for you, but not most others, to obtain a concealed carry permit in your gun-controlling state.
It’s extremely difficult to carry firearms for protection in states like Illinois, California, New Jersey and New York — except for certain Very Special Persons — rich enough or connected enough for special treatment.
Thankfully, the judicial system — which has the benefit of various guiding principles from a long-gone time when the rulers wore red coats — is disallowing some of the nonsense.
Still, it’s a struggle to “de-class-ify” Second Amendment rights — that is, take gun rights from being a class issue favoring the rich and famous and allowing all peaceful citizens legal access to firearms.
“Two weeks ago, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against many of the restrictions on public possession of guns that New York imposed after the Supreme Court upheld the right to bear arms last June,” writes Jacob Sullum in Reason. “Unfazed by that warning, New Jersey legislators this week advanced a strikingly similar bill that includes a subjective standard for issuing carry permits and sweeping, location-specific restrictions that make it legally perilous even for permit holders to leave home with guns.”
Politicians in these blue states remain resolute: they aim to unconstitutionally restrict access to guns. They strongly resist the current individualistic (as opposed to class-based) trend in judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Their idea seems to be: guns for us, but not for them.
And we’re the Them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
1 reply on “The Gun-Toting Ruling Class”
It is not just the politicians who are afforded special treatment, but also those with special ability to affect (or to effect!) popular culture. Thus well-known entertainers or some of their attendants are allowed to carry guns. They seldom imagine themselves as shills, but their opinions are informed by being treated as if in an elite, and certainly by having not been kept in positions of vulnerability.
But I think that the real issue is that now “They” have so much firepower while at the same time being resistant to a final push to dispense with a liberal order in favor of “progressive” technocracy.