I am glad I live in a country where people who want to live under rules like this are free to buy between 2,000 and 3,000 acres of private land, enclose 640 of those acres behind walls and towers, and pursue their heavily fortified version of happiness. Along with the rules related to guns, there would be mandatory participation in a militia for defensive purposes, biannual town defense drills, and a mandate that every household "remain stocked with sufficient food, water, and other preparedness essentials to sustain ... every member of the household for one year."

On the whole, I can't help but find these plans to be at odds with what I love about America. As the architects of the heavily armed community say themselves on their website (emphasis original):



Marxists, Socialists, Liberals, and Establishment Republicans may find that living within our Citadel Community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.



Do you know what I love about the United States?

This country is filled with people who happily live together in communities they value and enjoy, despite having different ideologies, political beliefs, and preferred lifestyles. Take the University of Virginia, an intentional community that Thomas Jefferson actually designed. Its architecture, ideals, and residential model of living and learning has accommodated happy Marxists, socialists, liberals, establishment Republicans, conservatives, gun-control proponents, and extreme gun enthusiasts in the century and scores of years it's operated.

That's impressive.

So is the fact that a place like Los Angeles County has happy residents from most nations on earth; people of most every ideology; mountain and desert and city and rural people; the religious and secular; and parents whose kids are different kinds of people than they are, but live close by because all kinds of people are happy here, except perhaps the types that feel impelled to order the lives of everyone around them to correspond to their own preferred lifestyles.

Tiny subcultures are free to wall themselves off in self-selecting enclaves, where everyone shares the same ideology and enthusiasms. They're free to enforce their preference that all their neighbors share their notion of how best to live, if those neighbors signed a binding contract stipulating those beliefs, and agreed to be expelled in the event that they changed their mind.

To me, it doesn't matter if the subculture is made up of extreme gun enthusiasts or hippies or Scientologists or Trappist monks. In forming their enclave, they're exercising one of their liberties; but their communities shouldn't be mistaken as being "dedicated to the principles of libertarianism," as a writer at Gawker characterized The Citadel. Nor should The Citadel be mistaken for the sort of place Jefferson would have seen as exemplifying model republican living.