The New Yorker:

Two more thoughts about gun control: one practical and immediate, the other more abstract and academic, though with a practical fork in its tail. The practical comes from a recent discussion with my father, about, of all things, shooting raccoons. The Gopnik family seat, such as it is, is nowhere near Manhattan, Upper West or East Side, but rather a farm in remote rural Ontario, where my parents live surrounded by crops, animals, and pests—and indeed by farmers who need and use rifles. When I was talking to my father there last weekend, we discussed a recent raccoon infestation, and how he had called on a neighbor with a rifle to hightail it over to shoot the five unfortunate masked marauders beneath the back porch. (My dad buried them afterward, further proof that English professors can be eminently practical people.) My dad is actually a pretty good shot, and could have done it himself—but he had not finished the paperwork for his gun.

What onerous tasks are involved in getting a gun for the necessary work of rural life in Canada? Well, you have to do that paperwork, fill out an application for a license, take a gun-safety course, and then you have your raccoon-shootin’ rifle for the grim work of keeping off pests. (There are some other “controls”; if you have a longstanding dispute, for instance, your spouse is informed.) Does anything in this interfere with the liberty of the individual or the exigencies of rural life? No one disputes that there are sane reasons for ordinary people to need a rifle. But there is no imaginable, meaningful sense in which Canadians, or Australians, are “less free” when it comes to guns because they have to take a safety course before they use one. People who really need guns—and many, my folks among them, do—can get them and use them safely, while there are hedgerows, so to speak, against impulsive purchases or unsafe or frankly homicidal use.

What we can learn from Canada is how to legislate common sense without violating anyone’s liberty—unless you imagine that anyone’s liberty depends on having as many weapons as he wants whenever he wants them.

Why yes, Adam, and I don’t have to imagine it.  I should be able to have as many weapons as I want, whenever I want – and I should add, whatever kind I want.  It goes hand in hand with my liberty.  My liberty also includes things like not having the federal government collect my wages by the power of a badge and gun, not having to disperse my hard-earned wealth to those who don’t work, not bailing out fat cats and corrupt cities, not having my e-mails and phone coversations reviewed by government employees, and not having my medical care dictated to me by government bureaucrats.

Justice Stevens and I don’t see eye to eye.

Justice Stevens, in his eloquent, essential dissent in the Supreme Court’s “Heller” case, shows that the history of the Second Amendment “makes abundantly clear that the Amendment should not be interpreted as limiting the authority of Congress to regulate the use or possession of firearms for purely civilian purposes.”

Adam, you think this dissent is essential because you’re a totalitarian, and I’m not.  Progressives are totalitarians, each and every one of you.  You and he can twist words that read “shall not be infringed” and turn it into “may be infringed at any time and in any way because we want to.”  Stevens and you are liars, Adam.  At the root of things, you’ve just dishonest.  And that bit about “purely civilian purposes” is important.  In order to be consistent, Stevens would have to say that Congress does not in fact have the authority to regulate weapons not for civilian use.  There is no check on the executive under his schema.

Do you understand this essential point, Adam?