Mike Bloomberg, sometime Mayor of New York City, thinks we need to start interpreting the Constitution differently. Because we need reasonable gun laws and reasonable safety from terrorists. Because if we let the terrorists take away our ability to enjoy our freedoms, then they win, but we need to have less freedom in order to be able to beat them.
No, really, that’s what he said.
But okay, Mr. Mayor, let’s hear it. What do you propose? Do you have any specific language in mind? Maybe we need to make explicit the periodic need for quasi-official but also quasi-voluntary quasi-lockdowns of entire cities to apprehend quasi-terrorists? Because that whole shut-down-Boston thing still sits well off-center with me and yes I know that the Tsarnaev brothers, seemingly almost certainly guilty, were really dangerous dudes.
What Bloomberg articulates is not the sort of “centrism” I would embrace. I would embrace a centrism that presumes that we are rich and clever enough to have both liberty and safety, that not only don’t we need to choose, but we can and should insist on having both as we tackle the problems of the day.
- We ought to actually require warrants under non-emergency circumstances before the government reads a citizen’s e-mail, and have a procedure for an expedited warrant applications only during emergency situations.
- Reasonable background checks and safety class requirements for firearms owners to make sure people know what they’re doing with guns (and how to safely store them), without preventing a law-abiding citizen who wants a weapon from actually getting one, seems a reasonable balance in a freedom-and-safety loving society.
- Educate about healthy choices, sure, but you have to let people buy Big Gulps if that’s what they want to do. (Sorry, I know that’s a sore one for you, Mr. Mayor.)
- No torture. Ever.
And as far as I can tell, we can have all of that now, without amending the Constitution or even changing our interpretation of it particularly dramatically.
Perhaps the mayor simply didn’t express his thoughts well. That happens to all of us. But what he said bothers me, in large part because he seems to buy in to the idea that liberty and security are a zero-sum game and we’ve struck the wrong balance between the two. That seems to me to be a false choice.
How about background checks [1] and mandatory nutrition classes to purchase a Big Gulp?
1. Say, for family history of diabetes.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re making a joke, Mike.
You can take my Big Gulp when you pry if from my icy, pudgy hands.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with Raspberry Tootie-Frootie swirl.
When Raspberry Tootie-Frootie swirl is outlawed …
I still don’t quite get the more guns = more freedom argument. I’m close to understanding it, but I just can’t quite get there.
Not unlike my response to Mike’s comment above, I’m not sure if you’re asking for an assist with the concept, or more airing your frustrations about us gun-loving ‘Murrikins.
It’s more the latter than the former. If someone wants to delve into this, go ahead, but I’m really just making an off-hand comment.
And I do think this is a comment worth making. I know for many people (not necessarily you, Burt, but maybe you also), the importance of gun rights in a free society is just taken for granted. But there are some people – libertarians even! – who won’t accept it as a given. Sometimes it’s useful to question why others don’t share your* assumptions.
*Not you specifically, Burt, the general “you”.
“We ought to actually require warrants under non-emergency circumstances before the government reads a citizen’s e-mail, and have a procedure for an expedited warrant applications only during emergency situations.”
Cue ever evolving definition of “emergency”.
I’ll accept “guys who’ve already killed people with bombs once running around with more of them” as a reasonable example.
I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: there is no American politician I find more simultaneously despicable and dangerous than Mayor Bloomberg. There are politicians in both parties who are as despicable as him, but almost none of those politicians have any real power, much less the near-dictatorial power Bloomberg wields over the millions of residents of NYC (not to mention the hundreds of thousands/millions of commuters) and almost none have any influence on the national media outside of the fringes, much less the fawning adoration that Bloomberg receives.
Are there people who still say stuff like “we need a good Tsar”?
I look at Bloomberg and think “that’s what a ‘good Tsar’, in practice, looks like.”