Commentary: Dear Libertarians – Myriad Freedoms Lost for Only One

By: Rep. Marvin R. Pendarvis Sr., Esq.
Special to Holy City Sinner

My friends, our opponents in the NRA with their libertarian leanings constantly rail against government overreach. To the surprise of many, we are in complete agreement. We’re civil libertarians and we don’t want security cameras in our schools, we don’t want no-knock warrants, we don’t want the police everywhere and to be the first option called in a minor dispute, we don’t want stop-and-frisk. Privacy is the privilege of a people who don’t live in fear of one another and can have normal, cordial, relationships with people they’ve just met. Gun deaths are, as common as they are, a relatively small if ever present danger to people’s daily lives. Yet, the price you will pay if you know no victim of gun violence is the freedom, privacy, and convenience of living without draconian and obtrusive security and surveillance measures.

The Deep State, insofar as it exists, exists because we need to be protected. The FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and the rest must be big and possess extensive powers because with weapons so lethal and easily acquired then the trade of privacy for security we will be forced to make will be far greater than if those weapons were rare and hard to come by. In gaining the single freedom of the right to own an assault rifle, you lose all of the other freedoms citizens are endowed with when society is safe enough to trust its own citizens. If we don’t want the government to stalk our every move then we best decline giving them a legitimate reason to.

For the record, most owners of assault rifles don’t actually use them outside of a commercial firing range. Those would still be legal with the business letting patrons borrow firearms while on the property. It is difficult to commit a homicide in a shooting range without immediate bystander intervention. Soft targets would, however, be impossible. That all being the case, losing the right to personally and privately possess an assault rifle would impart no more freedom to shoot it than is already being enjoyed by almost everyone who owns them. Suicide can be easily and assuredly committed by a low-power, garden variety, gun of any type. It usually takes a single shot. Therefore, criminalizing the private ownership of assault rifles would not, practically, do anything except make homicide more difficult. As a Black man, I am afraid of walking through streets with the police on every block as is the case in downtown Charleston. Every Black person is. Yet, I am also thankful and know that given the volume of firepower on the streets. I’m in more danger from homicide than from police brutality. Therefore, I must endure the latter to abate the former.

We don’t want to live in a society where people are afraid. Real freedom comes from us being able to trust complete strangers with it. A world where we can be friendly with one another and not anxious if the other person has a loaded gun. Nowadays, everyone is afraid and that is in no small part owing to the rise in mass shootings and the recent uptick in regular homicide. The security and surveillance apparatuses are too big for any civil libertarian to wish to tolerate and any civil libertarian would grasp at the chance to dismantle any intrusion into the private lives of citizens that ultimately restrict freedom. Guns are a major reason we are afraid of each other and must forfeit our freedoms and privacy for security. Setting aside the tragedies of corpses made as modern strange fruit every day. How many freedoms are we willing to sacrifice for a single freedom?

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