Needs, Rights, and the iPhone vs. the AR-15
If you have paid attention to gun control arguments for any length of time, you have run across this claim: “You don’t need an AR-15.” Since the “for” part is often omitted, we are left to assume that the lack of need is for the free exercise of second amendment rights, and by correlation, for self-defense. Often, this need proposition takes the form of comparing the AR-15 to 18th century muskets, for that is clearly the “arms” the writers of the Bill of Rights must have had in mind.
Let’s subtract one from the second amendment to see how well this logic works for the first, in particular with regards to free speech and a free press.
The above pasted meme pretty much says all that needs saying. But let us expand a bit nonetheless. First, what would happen if we dared tell today’s media outlets that all they need for free speech and a free press are paper, quill, ink, and, to be magnanimous, a printing press. Clearly that is all the writers of the Bill of Rights had in mind when they wrote the first amendment.
Stepping beyond misguided hermeneutics, we could focus on one fairly recent piece of technology (after the telegraph, and radio stations, and movie studios, and news studios with all their audiovisual gadgetry) that has transformed how we exercise free speech three centuries after the Bill of Rights came to be. If you hold a smartphone in your hand, you get near instantaneous access to an avalanche of content and expression roiling in a sea of free speech, whether in blogs, or social media, or through news outlets.
But as they say in infomercials, wait, there’s more. You yourself now wield a publishing platform in the palm of your hand. Text, audio, imagery, video. You can do it all. And you can disseminate it to a world-wide audience at the speed of light.
Endowed with that hand-held free speech power, consider now how you would react to someone who claimed you didn’t need it. After all revolutions — violent, bloody ones — have been started with smartphones. Smartphones are also instruments of cyber bullying, hate speech, and other harmful forms of public discourse, some of which have led vulnerable individuals to physical harm. More than one troubled teenager has committed suicide when others have unleashed this oppressive power through their smartphones. We must do something!
So, no, you don’t need all that power. Let us restrict it. Oh, we won’t ban smartphones altogether. Don’t worry. You can still have your smartphones.
But we’re going to make you register them. We are going to record and make traceable every bit of speech you pump through your smartphone, you know, not to restrict you per se. Just the bad guy who may engage in destructive speech.
For belts and suspenders, we will outlaw certain features of your smartphone. You will only be able to post on social media twice per day. We will filter certain content for you and from you. We will auto-block aberrant sites and media outlets. All for your protection, you understand. You can still have your smartphone. Just not the more powerful smartphone — the one that can be used in cyber warfare and cyber bullying.
Would you accept this need proposition? If not, why would you think it reasonable for the AR-15? Why would you treat one inanimate object as the paragon of democracy when it can also be used for the opposite, and another inanimate object as evil and unnecessary when the lion share of its use is both lawful and beneficial?
