I’ve long had a (one-sided) bromance with Bishop Daniel Flores of Texas. He’s the intellectual heavyweight among the American bishops and I always feel a bit wistful that his politics are mostly left-wing. He seems too intellectually honest for that and feel it's sort of an opportunity lost. Of course his mission of saving souls is infinitely more important than his politics.
I more or less uncharitably/lazily attributed his pro-immigration stance to his Mexican heritage but of late he added his voice on gun control in the Pillar.
I think the nub of the issue is where the bishop says, “there is a legitimate right of the state to exercise a vigilant and reasonable stewardship and control over the access to weapons or things which could potentially cause great damage to the good of the whole.”
What if the state is (or becomes in the future) the threat to the good of the whole? What if the exercise of second amendment rights is not about the idolatry of individualism but taken in the context of militias mentioned in the Constitution? Violent defense against government state tyranny is either legitimate or not in the Catholic view — if it is not he should say so plainly. Ambiguity doesn’t work in this case because you can’t have it both ways.
The general snark, of course, is you can't defeat the mighty U.S. government with your little toy guns, even AK-47s.
True, you're not going to "defeat" the state any more than Jews armed in the 1930s Germany would've been able to "defeat" the Germans. But would it have been better had they not been disarmed? No one thinks there will be tyranny in their own state (see Germany in 1930s). It's always considered a conspiracy because people don't read history, let alone that it might become applicable to the present.
I think maybe the subtext is the Catholic debate on guns is between folks who think we have solved the problem of Catholicism and the state and those who know better. Catholicism has always wanted to see the unity of the Body of Christ lived out on the ground…i.e no nation states, hence the appeal of the Roman empire and later the Holy Roman one. The universal nature of Catholicism innately pictures a kingdom of Catholics irrespective of nationality, hence the reason the bishops across the world are so supportive of the EU & UN. ..and why Bishop Flores is on team State?
Origen said that the kingdom of Heaven should be mirrored on earth as well as possible. Catholics didn't even evangelize outside the Roman empire in the early centuries, equating Christendom with an earthly empire in which Christianity can be lived out more seamlessly, while the Arians evangelized "beyond the pale" to Germanic tribes and thus therein lies much of their success. Bottom line: nobody knows the proper relationship between Catholicism and state and to talk about gun control is to indirectly talk about the right to defend against the state, and that is to talk about Catholicism and state, which seems a dead end.
Bishop Flores also thinks the fact many are so against even discussing gun control is that guns are considered “sacral”.
But I think the shutting down by the right-wing of any discussion of gun control is because that path of that discussion is unfruitful. It’s unfruitful because for Catholics gun ownership is tied to that thorny problem of Catholicism and the state, unsolved now for 2000 years.
In other words, gun control has nothing to do with hunting animals and neither does the Second Amendment.
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The recent tragedy in Texas gives another reason to support the banning of banning guns. Apparently there was a long gap of time before the police finally shot the guy in Texas. So outsourcing our self-defense to the police seems a tad foolish.
From American Spectator:
“When the cops cannot control the criminals, then the idea of allowing the cop’s employer to control your access to firearms strikes as insane. The same people urging everyone to lay down their weapons just two years ago urged everyone to defund the police.”
I wonder how much the root issue is Thomas Sowell's "conflict of visions", whether we believe society will always get better with additional education and wealth, or whether human nature is unchanging and every society and government will eventually fall/become corrupt.
If every government will eventually become tyrannical then it’s not great to disarm citizenry in the long run. If we're all heading towards Utopia then definitely a stop along that route is disarming everyone.
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Our killer problem now is that journalism became credentialed with college degree and elite money.
The great journalists of the 1940s had no formal training and came from working class backgrounds.
I honestly think Trump wouldn't have won '16 if journalism represented non-elites as they had in the past because Trump's pet issues would not have been able to rise to the level they did with a healthy press corps.
Trump gave voice to the voiceless and the reason the Deplorables were voiceless is because journalism lost its way, lost its ability to speak truth to power. They got captured by the elite. Regulatory capture, ha. It's hard to see how politicians would’ve had free rein on trade and immigration the last two decades if working class journalists held them to account.
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