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David French dragged for schmucky column on gun rights

Oh great. True conservative™ David French is at it again, this time taking aim at the right to bear arms:

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In the piece, he wants to assure conservatives like us that he understands: ‘I also share [his story of self-defense] to tell my gun-owning friends that I get it. I understand. I’ve faced more threats in the last few years than they might experience in 10 lifetimes.’ But he also explains to us that Kyle Rittenhouse was bad, somehow, for putting his life in danger to protect others, and red flag laws are good, actually, and of course, conservatives are bad because they worship guns.

So, let the conservative dragging begin!

Brilliant.

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Harsh but true.

I don’t think he’s actually sorry.

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Good questions.

Mr. John links to a CNN article lamenting that mass shootings are driving more gun ownership—or, more likely, the fear of gun control is driving it. Every time there is a fear of more gun control, more people buy guns. It’s sort of like the Second Amendment equivalent of the First Amendment’s Streisand effect. Maybe we should call it the ‘Obama Effect.’

Returning to the dragging:

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He is referring to the fact that the Louisville bank gunman was apparently motivated by a desire to encourage gun control (as was Chris Dorner).

Typically, when a person slaughters innocents to advance an agenda, we don’t think it is an argument for giving the killer what he or she wants if only to avoid the bad incentives it creates.

Indeed, French’s entire discussion of Rittenhouse is the product of moral deformity:

Take Kyle Rittenhouse. At age 17, Rittenhouse took an AR-15-style weapon to a riot in Kenosha, Wis., to, he said, ‘protect’ a Kenosha business.

When you travel, armed, to a riot, you’re courting violent conflict, and he found it. He used his semiautomatic weapon to kill two people who attacked him at the protest, and a jury acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. But the jury’s narrow inquiry into the moment of the shooting doesn’t excuse the young man’s eagerness to deliberately place himself in a situation where he might have cause to use lethal violence.

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‘Sarcastic Cupcake’ makes another valid point in taking down this nonsense.

But more basically, French seems to believe that when people are rioting, that law-abiding people have a duty to cower in their homes and, at most, only intervene when their property or family are being attacked. That is moral inversion. Putting your life in danger to protect others and their property, like Rittenhouse did, is not a bad thing: it is actually heroic. If half the city of Kenosha had done that, the riots might have stopped immediately.

As for French’s support for ‘red flag’ laws, even the ACLU is troubled by such laws:

This is because any lawyer knows that as a practical matter, anti-gun judges will hand out red flag orders like candy, with only lip service paid to due process or the Second Amendment.

And as for French’s claim that he gets it about the right to bear arms, he does not actually get it. While he speaks endlessly about the right of self-defense, he doesn’t mention a word about the most important purpose of the Second Amendment: preventing tyranny. We will let this conservative, writing to defend the right to own an AR-15, explain it to Mr. French:

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Moreover, an assault-weapon ban (along with a ban on high-capacity magazines) would gut the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny. No credible person doubts that the combination of a reliable semiautomatic rifle and a large-capacity magazine is far more potent than a revolver, bolt-action rifle, or pump-action shotgun. A free citizen armed with an assault rifle is more formidable than a free citizen armed only with a pistol. A population armed with assault rifles is more formidable than a population armed with less lethal weapons.

The argument is not that a collection of random citizens should be able to go head-to-head with the Third Cavalry Regiment. That’s absurd. Nor is the argument that citizens should possess weapons ‘in common use’ in the military. Rather, for the Second Amendment to remain a meaningful check on state power, citizens must be able to possess the kinds and categories of weapons that can at least deter state overreach, that would make true authoritarianism too costly to attempt.

And who wrote this pretty full-throated defense of the Second Amendment? A guy named… (checks notes)… David French:

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So somehow in five years and after taking a job writing tsk-tsking columns criticizing conservatives for the New York Times, he forgot what the most essential purpose of the Second Amendment is.

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