Kevin D. Williamson:
It isn’t even St. Patrick’s Day, but we are all Irish now: In Connecticut, the boneheaded state government passed a law demanding the registration of certain firearms, and the people of Connecticut, perhaps communing for a moment with their independent-minded Yankee forebears, mainly refused to comply. On the other side of the country in the heart of California’s technology corridor, the city of Sunnyvale demanded that residents hand over all firearms capable of accepting magazines holding more than ten rounds — effectively, everything except revolvers and some single-shot rifles — and the good men and women of Silicon Valley responded by turning in a grand total of zero firearms. Similar initiatives in other jurisdictions have produced similar results.
Political scientists call this “Irish democracy,” the phenomenon by which the general members of a polity resist the mandates of their would-be rulers by simply refusing to comply with them. It is a low-cost form of civil disobedience, but one that can be very effective at times: Mohandas K. Gandhi was entirely correct in his famous declaration to the British powers that they would eventually be forced to simply pack up their tiffin pails and go home, because 300,000 Englishman could not control 300 million (at the time) Indians if those Indians didn’t cooperate.
One way of considering the radical potential of simple noncompliance is the “10 percent synchronous subversion factor,” the proposition that if 10 percent of the U.S. population refused to (for instance) pay taxes or answer jury-duty summonses, then the rules would have to change, because they would be unenforceable: There aren’t enough tax agents, constables, slots on court dockets, or jail cells to enforce the rules against 32 million Americans if they should decide to refuse to comply with a given law.
The prospect of the local-yokel police in Sunnyvale, Calif., going door to door, Fallujah-style, trying to collect nonconforming firearms is humorous to contemplate; contemplating the same sort of development in Texas or Wyoming is rather less amusing, because at that point the model of resistance would stop being Irish democracy and almost certainly would mutate into something a lot more like Lexington and Concord. No decent, patriotic person wants to see that.
Nor does one relish the idea of police forces being obliged to choose between attempting to enforce an illegal and unconstitutional order and ceding the interpretation of constitutional law to mob-ocracy. Even for those of us who understand why the Second Amendment exists and who endorse the reasoning behind it, trusting in the prudence of large, armed crowds of 21st-century Americans requires an act of faith well in excess of the evidence.
The hallmark episode of Irish democracy in the American setting is Prohibition, which is a cautionary tale — and not only for the would-be modern prohibitionist. Prohibition demonstrated several things to the American public, which took the lesson to heart: Politicians are entirely capable of making stupid laws when in the grips of voguish thinking; the American people are more than capable of ignoring and subverting those laws; that subversion often is met with ruthlessness and brutality on the part of law enforcement, but enforcement is by no means even-handed; hypocrisy, like alcohol, is a useful social lubricant in moderation but debilitating in excess; social tensions reveal who has political power and who doesn’t, casting a harsh bright light on Lenin’s fundamental question — “Who? Whom?”; and law enforcement is just as corruptible as any other institution. Prohibition did a lot of damage by providing an enduring model of organized crime, but it also undermined Americans’ faith in the rule of law as such: Favoritism in enforcement, bribery, and institutional incapacity severely damaged the law’s prestige. We have never really quite recovered.
Except, perhaps a tyrant who wishes to use such “lawlessness” to justify a declaration of martial law, (with suspension of all elections) to ensure he remains in power.
The left has attacked more than the 1st and 2nd Amendments. Any of them are up for grabs except for when THEY want to use them. John Q. Public should have his gun rights revoked, but Michael Moore should still be able to pay for armed security. The same is true for the 1st Amendment.
However, try to impose some restrictions on abortion… woooo weeee, NOW you are into some serious infringing!! And, infringing a “right” of dubious origin at that. The left does them some screaming when THEIR rights (something they and only they place any value in) but YOUR rights are entirely disposable.