I am hesitant to comment, but does this make sense?

[oursin]

I am deeply reluctant to make any generalisation about a nation as huge and diverse as the US of A. I am thus bothered by an article about Americans and guns by someone who appears to be USAian himself in today's Guardian
My nephew argues that not only is it every American's right to carry a firearm, but it is also their responsibility. "Each

Comments

[pigeonhed]

It is odd that people who would never dream of saying 'Women think X'or 'Blacks believe Y' will quite happily say talk about something very American as if all Americans were homogenous.

[cofax7]

Word, word, word. Even the American Dream is not monolithic, and its interpretation varies hugely from one individual or community to another. Also, it's often a question of prioritization: does the 2nd Amendment trump the 1st? Does Free Exercise trump Freedom of Speech? Everyone comes down differently on those, depending on their own desires/agenda.

[loligo]

I think the key thing is that it's only civil liberties of non-Americans which are being eroded.

But that's not true -- American citizens are being spied on by the government with alarming frequency and thoroughness, for example. And the Military Commissions Act doesn't exempt citizens from being declared "unlawful enemy combatants" and losing a whole suite of rights (including the right to a trial and the right not to be tortured).

My guess is that the difference lies in the distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to". The current abrogation of civil liberties is mostly taking place behind the scenes or in the abstract -- very few people are finding constraints on their freedom to do the things they want to do, and that's the kind of freedom that is most obvious to people, and is more mythologized in American culture.

[callunav]

Yah. Agreed. The loss of habeas corpus is not something I think of as primarily affecting illegal immigrants. Your to/from analysis is cogent.

[em_h]

Seems to me that what is the case is that distrust of government is part of a foundational American myth. That doesn't mean that everyone in America thinks that way; but probably everyone has to reckon with it on some level, the way we all have to reckon with our national myths. (Like Canada and the "two solitudes" maybe, or more recently our conception of our particular kind of multiculturalism).

And, like all national myths, it doesn't necessarily stop people from behaving in exactly opposite ways or accepting things that run absolutely counter to it.

[oursin]

It's a little odd though: Rebecca West in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has various passages about the effect of long centuries of tyranny by Turks, Austrians, Venetians, and other non-native rulers on attitudes of suspicion and distrust towards the state, even their own state, in 1930s Yugoslavia (though communal tensions presumably also played a part there). But I wouldn't have thought that the historical situation of the USA was really parallel to that.

[londonkds]

There is a general hypocrisy in the way that the people who are msot adamant on their Right To Bear Arms think that freedom of association, movement, and not-being-tortured are surrenders to terrorism.

[amaliedageek]

I am dismayingly delighted by the thought of presenting the author's nephew a paid voucher for airfare to LA and transportation to the krav maga studio where serenada teaches, along with an invitation to sit in on the gun defense classes -- or assigning both of them clean-up duties in an inner-city emergency room on a Saturday night.