More guns and gay marriage: Column

USATODAY

In the past, I've summed up my political philosophy this way: "Personally, I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons." It looks like we're getting closer to being that kind of country -- and political activists of all stripes would do well to think about why.

Social-conservatives have fought a long rearguard action against gay marriage, but the thing about rearguard actions is, you mount them when you're retreating. Even Rush Limbaugh has pronounced the battle against gay marriage "lost."

Limbaugh thinks the war was lost because of liberals' mastery of language. There may be something to that. However, I think the war was lost because when Americans aren't sure what to do about something, they give the tie to freedom, letting individuals make up their own minds instead of being forced to live a particular way.

Advocates of traditional marriage say that opening up the possibility of gay marriage might lead to all sorts of social problems -- even polygamy -- but most of those concerns seem far-fetched to the average American. Next to those worries, the immediate impact on gay couples seemed unfair and limiting. Sure, gay people didn't used to be able to marry, but, then, not much more than 40 years ago gay bars were being raided by police, just because they were gay bars.

That changed. Americans would never support that kind of thing now. And the Supreme Court struck down laws banning gay sex in 2003.

The anti-gun cause hasn't done any better. An assault-weapons ban passed narrowly in the 1990s, but it expired in 2004 and, as we saw last week, there aren't nearly enough votes to pass such a law today. (Americans' attitudes have become more generally pro-gun, with an ABC News/Washington Post poll reporting that a majority think guns in the home make them safer, up from just 35% in 2000. Even in Illinois, where Democrats hold a super-majority, a gun-control bill went down last week.)

Lots of people don't like guns, but crime rates have fallen even as guns have become far more plentiful. And with even gun-ban champion Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., admitting that her assault-weapon ban wouldn't have prevented the Newtown shootings, the ostensible justification for passing new gun control, the opposition to private gun ownership looks more and more like traditional anti-gay sentiment: not a reason-based policy, but something growing out of prejudice.

As with gay marriage, that didn't fly. And, in fact, the anti-gun sentiment that the nation is outgrowing seems a lot like the anti-gay sentiment that we've largely outgrown. Even during the repressive decades of the past, of course, people knew that gays were around, and having sex -- but still supported laws that repressed them because they wanted to stigmatize gays and their lifestyle as unacceptable.

Likewise, many anti-gun activists realize, and sometimes even admit, that gun laws won't keep guns out of the hands of criminals. (Even Britain, an island nation with super-repressive gun laws, hasn't been able to do that). But they sometimes admit that they're really more interested in attacking the "gun culture" than in preventing crime. It's a species of prudery, only aimed at firearms.

But prudery plays badly in America. People talk about whether the country is moving to the left or to the right, but the common thread in the big social movements that have succeeded over the past half-century, from civil rights, to gay rights, to gun rights, is that they have all been seen as pro-freedom. Political types might want to keep that in mind.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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