Mere Rhetoric: Maybe Some Freedoms Aren't So Absolute After All

One of our favorite professors likes to say that the only rhetorical fact is that whatever can help you can also hurt you. It was interesting to watch this dynamic during the Katrina aftermath, which Mickey Kaus summed up perfectly:

Hurricane Parties: It's getting a bit confusing, what with the press revisionism and all. Let me make sure I've got the competing party lines down correctly-- Liberal position: Racist neglect caused poor New Orleans residents to suffer from the unspeakable things that only a racist would assume actually happened! Conservative position: A fatherless underclass culture caused poor New Orleans residents to do the unspeakable things the anti-Bush MSM falsely reported they did!

Now on a more contemporary note. Can someone explain to us in what way this argument, in the context of the 2nd Amendment, can possibly be wrong:

There are those who will insist, and many do, that what might have been true in the days of James Madison and Henry David Thoreau - and even in the days of Robert Williams - is no longer true in the days of neo-Nazis and Guantanamo Bay. But that questionable premise gives rise to an even more interesting question: If the Second Amendment is a dispensable anachronism in the era of school shootings, might not the First, Fourth, and Fifth amendments be dispensable anachronisms during a "war on terror"? Small wonder if some of those who readily make the first concession were equally ready to queue up behind the Republican right in ratifying the second.

The elegance of this argument is that it cuts both ways. Conservatives who insist on the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment need to explain why other rights are pliable in an age of terror. Liberals who insist that giving up a few nonessential freedoms means the terrorists have already won (a) are idiots because Islamists want to kill people and establish a global caliphate, not increase wiretapping (b) need to explain what distinguishes those rights from the rest of the living constitution, in which - to abuse the metaphor - the 2nd Amendment is an appendix.

The rest of the article is a tired, albeit measured, liberal fantasy of force and thuggery. It's elevated slightly above typical liberal fantasies by some well-written hand-wringing, but the symptomatic reference to Che gives away the game. For the record, we support reasonable gun control measures as well as reasonable infringements on traditional liberties.

Previously: State Department Rejects Israeli Katrina Aid Because It Would Upset Muslims, 9/11 Memories of Gaza, No, You Idiots, God Did Not Cause Katrina Because of Disengagement. You Idiots.