The left’s obsession with gun control, including gun confiscation, remains central to its long-term plans, but it may be worth first asking about the larger context of its political modus operandi, which fundamentally organizes nearly all its causes in law, and pushes them into the courts.
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Whether abortion, birthright citizenship, gun control, immigration, race, sexuality, free speech, education, housing, health care, and more, the left frames the issue as a legal concept, a legal matter, and presented as a legal solution. The courts act not only as their preferred method of selective social control, but by creating legal cases, they create a self-perpetuating process of continuous legal precedents that they use for and against their social causes.
But is the left really concerned with civil society, or is it trying to create, legal case by legal case, its version of a preferred social system that is run by them, through courts?
Because our common law system works off of a concept called “precedent,” or the continuous reference to past cases as a source of legal authority, the political liberals are building, case by case, their version of a progressive ideological fortress in order to consolidate their view of an equitable and “just” society.
In that worldview, it is the ever-present, overhanging web of selective justice claims, and controlling laws, that is their replacement for a classically liberal constitutional order.
Such a constitutional order creates a profoundly important distinction about how a particular society is organized. It makes the society, and its individuals, superior and sovereign, and makes its government subordinate, and subject to public consent. A constitutional order does not police and control, but guards and protects against its abuse. In its idealism, and in its assumption of citizen maturity, the Constitution is a remarkable source of individual liberty, as a calling for mature individuals to manage themselves in a voluntary realm operating with certain rights, and responsibilities.
For the progressive left, that establishes a society that leaves them less powerful, less important, and less relevant.
In the progressive mind, independence and self-reliance undermine their political purpose. Progressivism is by definition, anti-constitutional, if you accept that the Constitution directs how the government presides over itself, and not over citizens. In the progressive worldview, there is nothing to limit government.
A big part of the progressive political worldview stems from a basic corruption of what our Constitution is.
As M.E. Bradford argued in “Original Intentions,” liberals see it as a “blank cheque for redesigning American society.” This has resulted in an oppressive web of ad hoc legal responses to issues that the Constitution never contemplated, or was never designed to address.
The progressive liberal view rests not only on a grandiose social welfare model where choices are made for you, but on an ultimate single authoritarian power to enforce them, whether you like it or not. And even if a massive web of cases, legal precedent, and laws don’t always do that job, they give progressives the ammunition to constantly harass, and constantly challenge, or limit, individual sovereignty.
That’s one fundamental purpose of “lawfare.” It turns law into an omnipresent policing force. It’s the progressive left’s view of law operationalized into a state security service, or their effective “Stasi” functioning as the “shield and sword” of progressive left ideology.
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Progressive constitutional corruption does two things: it elevates law and courts to a full-time social engineering role, and it casts the SCOTUS as the chief engineer.
This brings up the Second Amendment case before the SCOTUS this Fall. Not surprisingly, it already has the progressive left and its media in a frenzy because they are worried that the right to bear arms may be upheld. They blame a “conservative” Court, and the use of “originalism” that ignores their view of modern society.
That view stems from the larger context of law just discussed: a society submitting its social issues to continuous legal machinery. Formal law, ironically, often lets liberals turn their backs on the underlying, uncomfortable causes of social problems like crime: culture, and group behavior. Those underlying causes are at odds with their belief system of unconditional equity, so they turn instead to ways that make everyone equal: no guns. Whenever one group or class breaks the social contract by criminal behavior, then the entire social order must accommodate them by changing their behavior.
But in the case of gun control the liberal left engages in another disingenuous argument: semi-automatic guns are especially dangerous because the gun itself is thought capable of creating more dramatic damage and crime than a handgun.
Never mind the : even though most crime is not committed with guns, most gun crime is committed with handguns.Criminals prefer easily concealable, easily portable, and less complex weapons.
So what is it about the “AR-15” that has the progressive left in a deep state of psychological obsession — or is it opportunism? One of the reasons that the semi-automatic weapon is their object of legal cause is that it is an easier way to start the universal gun control process, versus attacking traditional hunting guns like shotguns or rifles, or handguns which are a major source of competitive and recreational shooting and personal self-defense.
Progressives have to sell fear first, and the “AR” sounds more fearful. If a legal precedent of one landmark case can be won involving the AR-15, then the legal argument will be broken down into isolated parts and exported into new cases, in order to attack other firearms.
This is precisely how “precedent” or stare decisis works: like cases should be decided alike. And the ambiguity of like cases is what drives legal mistakes, and legal opportunism, especially when most judges, who never held, let alone shot a gun, make rulings. The “semi-automatic” feature of the AR, common on many popular auto-loading handguns like the FNX, Beretta, or H&K USP, can be legally extended to them. So can the ammunition which shares a “high caliber” classification.
After that, the outlawing of AR firearms can be used to promote dubious assertions about “lower crime statistics” which will be presented as a step in universal crime prevention through universal gun control, progressive social justice, and a step toward an envisioned legal domain where the Constitution is explicitly tied to, or even effectively replaced with, a code of progressive laws hosted by a progressive judiciary.
Matthew G. Andersson is the author of the forthcoming book “Legally Blind” concerning ideology in law and policy. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin, and a gun rights advocate and marksman.
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