There is an infinity of articles out there about the right and wrong of gun rights and people tend to come down for or against the topic in a stance that is highly correlated to where you stand on in the political left/right dimension. [I’m well away that not everything falls into this dichotomy, but it’s a decent first principal component ]

It was hard to see what abortion or gay rights or tax cuts/hikes had to do with guns – were people taking positions just from tribalism?  It’s dawned on me, though, that the stance on guns is not incidental but central to leftist or right wing ideologies and where they stand on the role of the state and state power. Allow me the liberty to use broad-brush (and somewhat ridiculing) choice of language to describe what the groups want.

Liberals believe in the state being a major actor, making itself wealthy and powerful and cramming down “the right things” (high taxes, mask mandates etc) onto individuals who do not support whatever great social project that the right people have decided.  Individuality is not a desirable quality and individual rights stand in the way of achieving “the greater social good”.  Well, guns in every household is quite a hindrance for a government forcing people to do things.  So, to achieve leftist goals, it’s natural to not want easy availability of guns.

Now, think about a situation where everyone has a gun: Suddenly, your safety depends on what people all around you think of you.  You can’t behave wildly and have to observe certain social norms. The state is not able to effectively protect your rights to do what you please.  Suddenly, it’s like the old societies where everyone is involved in everyone’s affairs, people “give respect to get respect” and other such macho notions, women have to dress based not just on what is allowed under the law but based on what everyone in the neighborhood thinks, the beliefs of the majority prevail and minority values have a hard time. In other words, conservative values will rule the roost automatically by the mere fact that everyone has lethal power with them.

So, in a gun-carrying community,  the state can’t force anything on you, but it also can’t effectively protect you from your neighbors.