Writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy has done the United States a service. (Actually, two – it seems she’s expatriated to Canada. Your grateful homeland salutes you, Ms. Bovy!)
Bovy has given free range to her progressive id with a screed in The New Republic (or what’s left of it), demanding a ban on guns – “Yes, all of them.” Hers is the latest in a trickle of admissions from the left about their real long-term goals on guns. Conservatives need to pay attention.
Writing what is clearly an exhortation to other lefties, Bovy doesn’t really bother forming anti-gun arguments. Instead she gets right to highchair-pounding, asserting that, “On the pro-gun-control side of things there’s far too much timidity.” Sure, if pouncing like ghouls after every tragedy can be called timid.
To Bovy, “banning guns urgently needs to become a rhetorical and conceptual possibility." (Emphasis in orginal.)
The national conversation needs to shift from one extreme – an acceptance, ranging from complacent to enthusiastic, of an individual right to own guns – to another, which requires people who are not politicians to speak their minds.
It’s “extreme” to respect the right of an individual to own guns? That Bovy goes on to call her alternative “extreme” does nothing to soften the fact that this view is pure progressive totalitarianism. She dislikes guns. Therefore, nobody should own one.
As she sees it, there are two obstacles to immediately ushering in the gun-free utopia. First, “It doesn’t take specialized expertise in constitutional law to understand that current U.S. gun law gets its parameters from Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment,” wrote Bovy, who presumably stayed at the Holliday Inn Express Toronto last night. “That the Second Amendment has been liberally interpreted doesn’t prevent any of us from saying it’s been misinterpreted, or that it should be repealed.”
Second, if enlightened liberals would stop worrying what the yokels think, we could really get things done.
If you grew up somewhere in America where gun culture wasn’t a thing (as is my situation; I’m an American living in Canada), or even just in a family that would have never considered gun ownership, you’ll probably be accused of looking down your nose at gun culture. As if gun ownership were simply a cultural tradition to be respected, and not, you know, about owning guns. Guns … I mean, must it really be spelled out what’s different? It’s absurd to reduce an anti-gun position to a snooty aesthetic preference.
What’s funny is that elsewhere in the piece Bovy tries to stiffen the spines of her more cautious and legal-minded fellow travelers by noting that “opponents of abortion aren’t wondering whether they should have a more nuanced view of abortion because of Roe v. Wade.” As if abortion were simply a legal question to be litigated and not, you know, about killing babies. I mean, must it really be spelled out what’s different?
But if lefties didn’t have contradictory positions, they’d have no positions at all. Poor Canada.
