Our culture: rights-yes, but responsibilities-no

Not that long ago in Germany, any speed limit on the national road network was verboten. Mad as it sounds, drivers were allowed to drive as fast as they wanted with no interference on the open road from police. Speeds of 120, 130 mph and higher were common. Of course, there were thousands of fatalities and injuries and mangled BMWs, far out of proportion to the statistics of other countries pushy enough to enforce speed limits. But the typical German thinking was that, sensible as mandated maximums seemed, they would be a terrible infringement on the rights of drivers imposed by a nanny government. They felt that they did not need big government telling them to slow down. It was like a constitutional right with which the government could not meddle. Naturally other countries around them thought they were crazy. Their limits were posted at all road border crossings.
It’s not that way today. Reasonable limits are set, and accidents have plummeted. There is always some background muttering about offensive intrusion from government on high, but generally Germans have accommodated to the modern world and its need for some limits on personal freedom for the common good as well as for personal benefit, too. We Americans can remember the same mental process going on here when safety advocates were campaigning for mandatory seat belts. Who did the government think it was, telling us what to do in the privacy of our own cars? Car makers fought it with expensive lobbying and advertising efforts, and for a good while they won. When the sheer force of evidence finally dawned, after outrageous losses, we got belts, factory issue. Certainly libertarians (those who greatly value liberty) still leave their belts unbuckled, just as German law breakers still speed – and get ticketed.
It’s a mentality, a customary thought process at work in both cases. People had been thinking one way for so long it seemed like heresy to think the opposite. Sure the evidence was visible all along. But the preference for the usual way of doing things could not yield to evidence or science or common sense. The old way was the only way. So the carnage went on despite the drumbeat of complaints, appealing to values like safety even if it meant that values like power and control and muscle had to give way. Sounds kind of feminine/masculine, doesn’t it?
Handguns evoke their own kind of mad mentality in our country. Only Yemen is with us in allowing nearly universal access to handguns. Our neighbors regard us as cowboy gunslingers since most of the rest of the developed world has outlawed handguns. They for their part do not have 85 handgun deaths a day. They must know that a handgun in the house is 22 times likelier to harm a family member than an intruder. Perhaps they know that the most common kind of handgun death in America is suicide. The old way of thinking goes back to the writing of the Bill of Rights, when muskets were the firearm of choice, and arms-bearing militias were relied upon for community safety. Would gun advocates want to go back to other 18th-century truisms like bloodletting or slavery or male-only suffrage?
Courts are forums where conflicting rights are weighed through due process. I may have a right to swing my fist, but that yields to a higher right of your nose in my path. No one is denying me the right to swing my fist. But your right to be free of injury preempts my lower right in the hierarchy of rights. While I am sure it is a bit more complicated, the Supreme Court can and must step in and stop the misuse of a right given when technology was not as advanced, and of course when there was much more regard for the common good and so much less fixation on individualistic rights to personal gun-toting.
So it is both ironic and consistent that twin monomanias can coexist in this rights-yes-responsibilities-no culture: that an anti-life pretense right to choice trumps a child’s right to life while an anti-life pretense right to carry outweighs a right to an atmosphere free of flying lead. What is both ironic and tragic is that so many people cannot see the connection. Left and right are both wrong in what Nicolo of Cusa called the coincidence of opposites.
Because these things are so, the Second Amendment must be repealed.