I wrote this a while ago – maybe even two years – and the world has moved on, but I think there’s enough in it still worth reading to keep it on file.

The State of Nature Strikes Back (Leviathan, be very afraid)

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

This is Thomas Hobbes’ summation of the state of nature. We all know the last phrase but the whole thing is necessary to understand it.

Anyway, for Hobbes, the state of nature is the war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes). Anything is better than this. And actually, something much better than this can be contrived provided that everyone gets together and agrees on it. What they must agree to is the setting up of a power so great – Leviathan – that it can overawe any person or group of persons. Leviathan’s purpose, as following from the desperate necessity from which it came, is to secure the people, each and every one of them, in life and property. So, although Hobbes’ argument is, in form, for absolute monarchy, its content is enough to drive any true divine right monarchist to apoplexy – as it did drive several: it is a social contract argument. Leviathan creates an absolute divide between public and private, the public as one, the private as the sum of private citizens, each looking only to his (we’re in the 17th century) own welfare and security. Nonetheless, the purpose of the public, the one, Leviathan, is the security of the private citizens, and nothing else.

However negative, the state is necessary, it is necessary for its coercive power, therefore, it must necessarily have a monopoly on the legitimate means of coercion. Is this a good idea of the state? That’s another question. It’s the idea enshrined in modern conservative and liberal thought: in the second half of the 20th century it can be seen especially clearly in the work of the liberal philosopher, Isaiah Berlin; and the Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek, who, although he rejected the term “conservative” for himself, is one of the profoundest influences on late 20th-century conservative thought. The liberal–conservative consensus is derived from what both call the classical liberal tradition – (Hobbes), Locke, Smith, Constant, Tocqueville, Mill, etc. If you’re going to go for it, then you must either simply accept the coercive concept of the state, or find something within it to modify that view. And let’s be clear, the boys have a lot going for them (Mill’s my favorite though Tocqueville comes close).

Ok, this is a huge over-simplification, but I think that, on the whole, the liberal side of the tradition has gone for a somewhat more positive notion of the state combined with a recognition that individual freedom and happiness do actually depend on relations of one kind or another with other individuals. The conservative side has, by contrast, “doubled-down” – a term that I learned from my news-feed, but which I dislike – on the isolated nature of the individual, and, therefore, on the necessarily coercive character of the state. The liberal side seems rather sensible; the conservative seems contradictory.

But both are stuck with Hobbes, because freedom for their isolated individual can only be negative freedom (Berlin’s term), freedom from any outside constraint, defined by Hobbes as matter in motion: some piece of matter is only limited in its freedom of movement by other pieces of matter obstructing it. So freedom for human beings, who are matter in motion just like everything else, depends on clearing the field of obstructions for each and every one (of us) as much as possible.

Who is able to clear the field in this way? Leviathan, the state, so powerful that it can over-awe every individual, and all together. The state, Leviathan, may well abuse its power, Hobbes says, but no state could be as bad as the state of nature, nothing is worse than it. Rebellion against the state returns all to the state of nature, the worst state. Rebellion is not a good idea.

When you’re in the midst of reading Hobbes, you kind of go along with him, he is very compelling. But if you can get away from the spell, then other considerations arise. So: here we all are, joining together in conclave, in order to escape the state of nature. How do we do it? We create Leviathan! Fine, but it’s all very well to take the name from a vast biblical sea-monster, where on earth is our Leviathan, our sea-monster, going to come from? “I can call spirits from the vasty deep!” “Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?” As Harry said to Glendower.

Hobbes’ image of this vast, all-powerful creature is so vivid, we forget that it doesn’t come from somewhere else, it is made of human beings, of all in the Commonwealth (all of us): as is depicted in the frontispiece, body politic made of bodies:

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) Frontispiece

Hobbes himself seems sometimes to forget this, envisaging Leviathan as a vast being that is somehow already there – the State in itself. But who is going to run this State, forget about being it? Because it’s going to need a whole hell of a lot of people to do the job it’s taken on: over-awing all the people, many of whom will have to be doing pretty rough work. The trouble is, and this comes out more clearly in the 20th-century writers, notably Hayek and Berlin, that Leviathan offers very little positive incentive for individuals to apply for jobs in the public sector: Leviathan’s purpose is to allow us all to pursue our purely private interests securely, Hobbes provides no necessary connection between the individual and the project of the state.

Yes, I want the state to protect me and my interests, but, when we were sitting around the campfire, mulling it all over, no one said anything about me having to be a part of the state apparatus. And how can I efficiently pursue my interests if I have to do some dumb-ass job looking after the interests of others? Rigid division of public (Leviathan) and private (individual citizens) is a necessity for the Hobbesian state.

So: Leviathan may well be a non-starter because everyone wants its effect, but no one wants to be the cause of that effect. We summon a great monster from the vasty deep, but it does not answer to our call. What then? Well there is another possibility short of collapse back into the state of nature. What if some one, or few, see it as in their own interest to organize the state for their own purposes, their own power and glory: instead of no state, a bad state ruled in the interest of the ruler(s). Rousseau, in his brilliant riff on Hobbes and Locke in the Discourse on Inequality suggests something like this, though his whole point is that it is not the state of nature.

Rousseau aside, though, such a state falls well within Hobbes’ “nothing worse than” proviso, but do modern followers – Hayek, Berlin, for example – really want to go with him here?

Well, they probably don’t want to, but the logic of Hobbesian freedom is inexorable – inexorability is Hobbes’ stock in trade – across the centuries. Freedom is given from the outside, the absence of obstacles to movement. That’s all that freedom is, so, above all it cannot have any positive content: freedom has absolutely nothing to do with what individuals want freedom for. Freedom is only the ability of this bit of matter in motion to do as it wishes because no external obstacle stands in its way. Freedom depends on a force that keeps external obstacles out of the way, to the extent that that is possible. So:

Hobbesian-liberal-conservative negative freedom has these two peculiarities: one, it has no necessary content; nothing in the world can either be a necessary part of freedom, or a necessary part of unfreedom. Two, all an individual’s freedom needs is a force that removes obstructions to the freedom of this individual’s movement, to the extent that this is possible without infringing on the freedom of others. As long as it does its job, it doesn’t matter what this force is, and it doesn’t matter where it comes from: both Berlin and Hayek say that freedom does not depend on a particular form of government, and, especially, does not depend on representative or democratic government.

What freedom does require is coercion, indeed, the only truly necessary function of the state is to preserve freedom through its monopoly on the legitimate means of coercion. Freedom, that is, for the liberal-conservative tradition going back to Hobbes – there are other possibilities. But it is important to recognize that the people who make the biggest deal about individual freedom, can only think of the state as an instrument of coercion. Much more to say about this, but not now.

The state must be coercive, but how coercive? For Hobbes its power for coercion must be absolute, without limit, or else it cannot protect society – all individuals – from collapse back into the worst of all, the state of nature. I don’t see how any view, including the liberal-conservative, can escape this conclusion if it begins from the individualist, isolated individual view of the individual. Liberals, going back to Mill, have a little bit more leeway here – Mill has a lot because he’d read Humboldt, but that’s another thing for another time. But they still need to work out much more clearly that individuals such as themselves simply are not, and obviously are not, self-contained entities isolated in their own subjective self-consciousness.

If individuals are self-contained and isolated in this way, then it’s either bad Leviathan or reversion to the State of Nature. Are individuals self-contained and isolated? Well that’s another, enormous question. But the individualist view of the individual, in which individuals are just that, is the default position not only for adherents, but for their opponents as well. This issue is a huge deal for … a decent respect … , but we can’t deal with everything at once.

Today, bad Leviathan or State of Nature doesn’t seem like much of a choice because of all that we have seen since Hobbes’ time that he could not. Is a war of all against all with stones and clubs really worse than modern trench warfare, to say nothing of the carpet bombing of cities, or the ultimate destruction, nuclear war, the destruction of all? Maybe we need to get beyond the liberal-conservative view of society and individual.

In the meantime, though, a third possible Hobbesian order, beyond either bad Leviathan or reversion, is emerging. And, spoiler alert, this is not a good thing. Unlike the other two, it has no basis in theory, it comes out of practice. I doubt if its proponents and enactors would even recognize the name Thomas Hobbes, nonetheless, poor man, he is the one to look to in order to understand it.

Bad Leviathan or State of Nature seemed to be the only possibilities within the Hobbesian framework, and that is already a strong reason to try to get beyond it. But what if there’s a third possibility worse than either of the others? We seemed to be getting to the end of Hobbes’ long spell over at least liberal thought; now, suddenly, it has a new lease on life, though one that would appall Hobbes.

Hobbes inaugurates the conservative principle of the state as sole possessor of the legitimate means of coercion. In the U.S. today, however, a movement has arisen under the banner of conservatism that entirely overthrows this principle. It does this through a blatantly fraudulent interpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but there’s no point in getting tied up with that (still, see 2nd Amendment: Heller).

Rather, the point is that a movement, powered above all by gun manufacturers, but aided and abetted by “conservative” politicians, and members of the judiciary, are creating a nightmare coalescence of Hobbes’ state of nature with his political society.

For Hobbes, the only way to stop the war of all against war was to remove all weapons of war from the hands of individuals, and place them in the hands of the state, Leviathan. And, to repeat, however bad Leviathan was, it was better than the war of all against all.

Now, however, significant elements in the Republican party (supposedly the “conservative” party) have … well, have they put it on its head, laid it on its back, thrown it arse over tip (as the English put it in their colourful way)? I don’t know. But the security of individuals in their property and freedom now rests upon the fire-power they have with which to defend these. The legitimate means of coercion are spread out among all (well, all with the GOP seal of approval) the citizens of the Commonwealth, and a sort of free market of gun fights will determine who is to survive.

Each individual gun-owning citizen, insofar as they embody the correct and approved Christian Nationalist values – oh dear, inadvertently, I think I have grossly insulted said citizens, since I used the pronoun “they” to refer to an individual one, and, of course, God-fearing, Christian Nationalist, MAGA Republicans would rather die than use a singular pronoun other than “he” or “she”, in fact, many of them, including candidates for and elected members of the Legislature, condemn pronouns all together, simple people like I have no idea what they’re talking about, but there it is, anyway, my sincerest apologies for any pain that I have caused – what was I saying? Oh yes, start again from “the correct and approved Christian Nationalist values”, those with them can pretty much do what they like with their guns: they are the state, or, at least, its only true representatives.

The Republican Party still claims to be the party of law and order, but in line with throwing deputies’ badges to every right-thinking citizen gun-owner, many of its members are seeking to “defund”, that is, eliminate, core law enforcement agencies, above all the FBI. They have a very odd reason to do this: the FBI dared to issue a search warrant for a former (twice impeached) president because there was probable cause (in spades) to believe that he had intentionally violated the laws on classified documents, and had obstructed all attempts to

recover the classified documents wrongfully in his possession. The cult of personality lives! But now in the farce stage.

What is so extraordinary here is that they make no attempt at all to attach their demands to eliminate what are usually regarded as fundamental police institutions to some kind

of theory, or principle, or at least, program, of law and order. They will eliminate the FBI because, in performing its normal duties of law enforcement, it searched one of their pals, well, not that, actually, the one they regard as the lord of all, though the rest of us see him as – and astonishingly, one of his sons agrees – a large orange blimp: the self-abasement is embarrassing to see. And it is astonishing, also terrifying, to see such a complete nonentity so extravagantly idealized. (I find the claims for international affairs especially infuriating: Trump was a joke among world leaders, always palling with dictators far smarter than him, against the usual allies of the West – Putin had to explain simple facts of European geo-politics to him, well, he tried to explain them.) The entire political and public life of the US has been poisoned and for what? For a corrupt, incompetent slum landlord son of a slum landlord father.

John Kelly, former Marine Corps general, became Trump’s Chief of Staff on the assumption that the problems at the White House came from the incompetence of the staff. As soon as

he got there, he discovered that not the staff, but Trump himself was the problem, and that Trump was “far dumber and immoral and ignorant and lazy than he ever thought he was”:

Dumber More Immoral More Ignorant More Lazy

does just about sum it up – les mots justes, as Flaubert would say. It is, of course, very trying for a guy like I to have to start thinking good thoughts about the FBI, or former Marine Corps generals; though something similar happened with the Bush Jr. gang – suddenly the military, including the Marine Corps, were the good guys.

Yes, yes, yes. But to return to poor Hobbes (rolling in his grave, but also saying, Dudes, I did warn you!). Political society becomes the state of nature. Leviathan, atomized, recreates the war of all against all within itself. Instead of a monopoly of the means of coercion by the state, the state distributes the means of coercion among all citizens, and directs them to fight it out amongst themselves: maintain your lives and property as best you can, and good luck to you all, we’re out of here … but where can the functionaries of Leviathan go (tell me, because that’s where I’m heading)?

Of course, the distribution of arms among the populous will be highly unequal; those better equipped will aim to overawe all the rest, so they will attempt to recreate Leviathan for themselves, bad Leviathan again, though their own incorporation of the state of nature into political society will fatally undermine this. So the war of all against all will be an endless cycle of rise and fall by one group after another, attempting to become (bad) Leviathan. In the meantime, the life of man, that is, of all of us, will indeed be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I was writing about this – the drive towards everyone owning a firearm, or more than one – and fearing that you would think it an exaggeration, and then … then, the Representative for Colorado’s 3rd District, Lauren Boebert, rose to address the House. She made a number of

interesting remarks, but for us, here and now, the most important was her declaration of dismay that, according to reliable data, the people of the US, 4% of the world’s population, own only 46% of the world’s guns: “I think we need to get our numbers up, boys and girls.” (Google “lauren boebert 46%” for the full story). She spoke these words on the House floor, in Congress assembled, on Wednesday, February 1, 2023. On Saturday, January 28, 2023, three people were shot dead in a mass shooting in LA, making up 31 mass shooting deaths in California alone, since January 16.

And then, as if just trying to prove that any time we say the GOP cannot sink any lower, there they go, proving us wrong: in the last few days (today, as I write, is the day after Groundhog Day, two days after Representative Boebert’s speech, and six more weeks of winter I’m afraid), a number of MAGA members of Congress have been seen sporting AR-15 lapel pins, including George Santos (R-NY), and Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL): ??????????? 6 mass shootings in Florida in January 2023. 31 dead in California, I haven’t been able to bring myself to figure out how many were killed by assault weapons, it was hard enough

just counting up the total, but? What is happening in these people’s heads, their hearts, even, though I haven’t said any such thing for decades, their souls? Ok, what’s the point of asking? So: Where did the lapel pins come from? From Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA). Why did he hand them out? “I give [them] out to remind people of the Second Amendment of the Constitution and how important it is in preserving our liberties.” A public servant doing a public service. Oh, not that it matters, Clyde is the owner of Clyde Armory, in Athens, GA, the fourth largest gun store in Georgia. Clyde also, again, not that it matters, ran terrified

from the “tourists” who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, seeking, as tourists will, to find and hang various members of the US government, notably Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, and, I almost forgot, also to overthrow the duly elected government. Yes, Clyde later described them as tourists – from the picture below, I would say, Andy, old chum, never go anywhere near where tourists may show up. Clyde certainly can’t match the Josh Hawley speed record, but he is certainly in the running for the best expression of terror: Hollywood, you should talk to this guy.

Maybe that’s enough heavy-handed sarcasm, but look at the photos.

Andrew Clyde (left),  January 6, 2021

Andrew Clyde, February 2, 2023

The hell with their souls, they may be making a clear-headed ??? (what adjective? this has nothing to do with politics in any significant sense, not even with “party”, it is purely for personal aggrandizement and monetary gain) decision. The outrage will die down, but the “base” will see that those “brave” enough to wear these lapel pins in the face of liberal, extreme left attacks, continue to be faithful to the doctrine of death, and its watchword, “Viva la Muerte”, motto of the Spanish Legion and of its leader, José Millán-Astray – one of the most vicious and brutal units of the Nationalist/Falangist army – during the Spanish Civil War.

Not in any way to ennoble Millán-Astray and the Spanish Legion, but let’s say that what’s going on with the lapel pins is a bit more mundane.

But Clyde chose to hand the pins out during National Gun Violence Survivors’ Week, saying with a smirk, “apparently I’ve been triggering some of my Democrat colleagues.”

It is impossible to have any meaningful discussion, even a knock-down drag-out fight, with these people. So where does that leave us?

The third Hobbesian scenario, call it atomized Leviathan, is more dangerous than either of the others, because it is far more likely to become real … to become the world. Is this true?

If the world has never seen a good Leviathan, it has seen plenty of bad ones. On the whole though, rebellions and revolutions have not thrown society back into the state of nature, however often they have merely replaced one bad Leviathan with another.

With all the bad Leviathans, why is atomized Leviathan worse? I’m not sure, but I think that it may be because of its basic pre-condition, everyone is armed. How can you escape from that? How can you make 400 million, 600 million, 800 million guns disappear? No distinction between public and private, or between state of nature and political society exists anymore.

I hope that some solution emerges, I don’t know what it is. Already today, more even than a couple of years ago, I experience the thought, walking down the street, that any one I meet is quite likely to be carrying a gun. Do you have that feeling?

Why are so many people carrying guns today (overwhelmingly hand-guns, you still have to be one of the Proud Boys to go marching around with a bloody great AR-15, but just you wait)? Why?

Beyond anything, today, carrying guns is pre-emptive, as Hobbes told us long ago. and the pre-emptive response extends to more and more people, more and more to people who had never thought of owning a gun.

But the pre-emptive motive itself comes from “2nd Amendment” laws on gun ownership and carrying. They are the driving force behind the flood of new guns into society, both from “2nd Amendment” enthusiasts – let’s get out and buy those guns that defend our freedom – and from those desperate to protect themselves from the former.

Concealed carry laws are perhaps the worst of the “2nd Amendment” laws, the ones that most serve both to force people to pre-emptive gun violence, and to push those who never thought of owning a gun to buying one.

So, back to the 2nd Amendment. How can the words of the 2nd Amendment

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

possibly justify concealed carry without permits by private individuals owning guns for private purposes?

The 2nd Amendment aims to ensure a well-regulated militia that, amongst other things, will suppress Insurrections – including, presumably, those by private owners of arms for private purposes who have somehow, by a mental process known neither to formal logic, nor rational choice theory, persuaded themselves that they are the sole defenders of American liberty, especially against a tyrannical (i.e., when the president is a Democrat) government. (See not only the 2nd Amendment itself, but also Article 1, Section 8 of the main text, enumerating the powers of Congress.)

The only way to justify the reactionary interpretation – that it gives a constitutional right to the ownership of arms by private individuals for private purposes – is to pretend that the second phrase, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”, is the entire Amendment. And this is, in effect, what Antonin Scalia did in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court decision that, for the first time, ruled that the 2nd Amendment does indeed confer such a constitutional right. (Though even this pruning doesn’t support the reactionary interpretation, since the second phrase does not specify purpose; and “to keep and bear arms” does not, of itself, confer a right to the private ownership of arms. But let’s put that aside for now.)

Heller was a bad and corrupt decision (see 2ndAmendment: Heller for more). But it has one

somewhat redeeming feature: it is a very narrow decision, and Scalia meant it to be (for which he was harshly attacked by conservatives):

“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008).

Heller also recognizes the holding in United States v. Miller (1939) prohibiting especially lethal weapons. That is to say, all these limits (and we may take this to be only a partial list of salient examples) are presumptively legal under the Heller decision, and, therefore, are in accordance even with the reactionary interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.

All of the gun control measures proposed in the last year or so by the Biden White House and by Congressional Democrats fit on this list, and so they too are presumptively legal under Heller. So you might think that even if Republicans opposed them, they would recognize them as legitimate proposals. Think again.

It is true that later Supreme Court decisions (        ) have given the lie to Scalia’s claims for what is presumptively legal under Heller – we may take it for granted that he was being disingenuous?, lying through his teeth? in these. But he did make them, and they are reasonable inferences from the decision itself.

You wouldn’t know that from the Republican responses to the Democrats’ proposals, which have been positively apocalyptic – check them out if you’re feeling masochistic, googling 2nd Amendment plus some depressingly familiar names – Cruz, Hawley, Boebert, Greene, Gaetz, etc. – should do it. But what are they actually saying? Yes, you’re saying what on earth is the point of trying to answer this question? And you are right, except that there is maybe something to clear up here:

So: the 2nd Amendment defends our most fundamental freedoms; any restriction on private gun ownership and use, directly assaults the very fabric of American life and freedom. Ok. But could you say just a little about what these freedoms are, and how the 2nd Amendment defends them? Or, poll to the people of the US, everyone one of us, We, the People: how many times has your freedom depended on the private ownership of firearms by private individuals for private purposes? Yes, I know, that’s not what the 2nd Amendment guarantees, but the Supreme Court says it does.

Let’s be more specific: (a) how many times has your freedom depended on the private ownership of a concealed handgun by a private individual or individuals (including yourself) for private purposes? (b) how many times has your freedom depended on the private ownership of an assault rifle by a private individual or individuals (including yourself) for private purposes?

(a) is clearly the significant one. No matter how many times Republican Congresspersons parade around with their AR-15s, pose with them on Christmas Cards, propose to make them the official gun, etc., we all know: they are the guns of mass shooters, they have nothing whatsoever to do with freedom.

So what about concealed weapons: concealed weapons, and the need to guess whether or not a potential adversary has one automatically creates Hobbes’ pre-emptive violence. But this is not Hobbes’ state of nature, it goes down on the street, or in the parking-lot after a high-school prom, in civilized society. The empirical evidence is clear: the more guns, the more gun violence, the more guns + concealed carry, even more gun violence.

BUT:

Sometimes, in the face of an armed attack, a person with a gun, and let’s say a concealed one, can prevent other deaths by shooting, and often killing, the attacker. This happens. Statistically, it happens rarely – the great majority of gun use is not in self-defense. Nonetheless, it does happen, a life, or lives, are saved, though often, another is lost.

Two related problems arise in confronting such events: first, the “conservative” position always concentrates on single instances – this is derived from conservative economic and political theory: everything begins from the single individual – but that’s something to take up another time. Second, the concrete immediacy of this specific event, the pain inflicted, is used to invalidate any broader consideration.

So, first, the overall social conditions cannot be understood through single instances alone: it is true, I think, that statistical data require individual instances to ground them; but a single instance by itself defies analysis or understanding. This is a methodological problem, but it underlies: second, the focus on individual pain and suffering – real individual pain and suffering – is used to obscure the broader social structure within which this suffering occurs, and also the causes of the suffering, pain, and death.

The first thing that must be said about any situation of gun violence, including that in which a potentially armed assailant is stopped – wounded or killed – by another arm-bearing person, is that the likelihood of any such situation varies positively with the number of firearms in circulation (see above). And here we face the vast obstacle built by the gun lobby, their falsification of the 2nd Amendment, and their running dogs in Congress, and in State legislatures. (When I was very young, and possibly more foolish than I am now, anti-Maoist communists such as I rather delighted in weird Maoist slogans, including, maybe my favorite, “running dogs of imperialist lackeys”: three levels, the running dogs, the imperialist lackeys, and then the imperialists themselves. But it seems to me that we are close to this, although who the imperialists themselves are remains unclear: maybe Capital itself.)

The obstacle is legislative: the various reactionary Supreme Court decisions beginning with Heller have led to successive lower level judicial decisions overturning existing gun control legislation – the most devastating being the overturning of New York’s great Sullivan Act. The legislative onslaught, automatically, and as everyone knew it would, has resulted in a renewed flood of firearms, hastening the transformation of society into the state of nature.

The more firearms, the more firearm deaths. So what liberty does the 2nd Amendment, wrongly interpreted as the right of private persons to own arms for private purposes, defend?

It does not defend the right of free speech, of free assembly, of freedom of conscience (including religious belief), freedom against unlawful searches and seizures, cruel and unusual punishment, etc., etc., etc., … No, all it defends – according to the false interpretation – is the private right to own weapons for private purposes. It is a tautology: Somehow owning guns will stop them from coming to take our guns. That is what this “fundamental freedom” is. It doesn’t do anything else.

Is defending this – rather odd – right really worth the number of Americans killed every day to preserve it?

The stupid but demonic brilliance of the “2nd Amendment” fanatics has made that question almost irrelevant. Against the overwhelming mass of guns in the US, what use is it to say, absolutely correctly, that gun violence/deaths are directly correlated with the number of guns in circulation?

How are we even to slow the inundation with a Supreme Court super-majority of corrupt, reactionary justices over-ruling all of the already limited, but nonetheless valuable, state regulations? Forget the maniacs, how are we to persuade those now buying guns from fear that they are wrong? Are they? And remember: a powerful minority is calling actively for this dystopia.

Against all his warnings, Hobbes’ vision might come true: life in the state of nature, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but in the future not the past.