Whose Freedom Counts?

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: