https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/freedom-liberty-hierarchy.html
The words freedom and liberty have been invoked
breathlessly in recent weeks to bolster the case for “reopening.”
Protesters of state public safety measures readily locate in the Bill of
Rights the varied and assorted freedom to not be masked, the freedom to
have your toenails soaked and buffed, the freedom to open-carry weapons
into the state capitol, the freedom to take your children to the polar
bear cage, the freedom to worship even if it imperils public safety, and
above all, the freedom to shoot the people who attempt to stop you from
exercising such unenumerated but essential rights. Beyond a profound
misunderstanding of the relationship between broad state police powers
and federal constitutional rights in the midst of a deadly pandemic,
this definition of freedom is perplexing, chiefly because it
seems to assume not simply that other people should die for your
individual liberties, but also that you have an affirmative right to
harm, threaten, and even kill anyone who stands in the way of your
exercising of the freedoms you demand. We tend to forget that even our
most prized freedoms have limits, with regard to speech, assembly, or
weaponry. Those constraints are not generally something one shoots one’s
way out of, even in a pandemic, and simply insisting that your own
rights are paramount because you super-duper want them doesn’t usually
make it so.
The very idea that it doesn’t matter what happens to the larger
community, so long as the individual has unfettered freedom to do as he
pleases, is not just a vestige of the slaveholder ethos. As Charlie Warzel points out this week,
this has been the core animating theory behind the American gun rights
movement: reduce the debate to an absolutist fight about freedom
that eventually narcotizes an entire population into believing that the
cost of true liberty is tens of thousands of avoidable gun deaths each
year. Any effort to regulate anything within the vast space between
“assault weapons for everyone on demand” and “reasonable gun safety” is
cast as a dire step toward tyranny. As Warzel puts it, this leads to
another version of freedom to, in this case, the freedom to either do mass harm or the freedom to insist that nothing be done about it: