An Astute Political Observation

 
10:00 PM

On a Wednesday

It was a weekday evening, and I was watching television. This was nothing out of the ordinary. It was an enjoyable episode of the particular program I was viewing, but again, this was nothing new. In the middle of a scene, a sometimes-reoccurring character made an outlandish assertion about governmental regulation. It was absurd and mostly for laughs, yet simultaneously a microcosm of a played-out rallying cry we’ve heard on countless occasions this past year. It was also probably the most accurate political observation I’ve heard in that same time period. “The government of today has no right telling us how to live our lives,” the character said, “because the government of 200 years ago already did!” Yet this wasn’t CNN or MSNBC or even Fox News. It was the newly-minted FXX. And the show?

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The episode was “Gun Fever Too: Still Hot” and character was Charlie’s bumbling lawyer of an uncle, Jack Kelly. He and the always-scheming Frank were on the local news, slyly trying to drum up business for a nearby gun shop by scaring firearms owners and enthusiasts into believing an impending governmental shutdown on munitions sales was imminent. While this was simply to allow for a petty swindle in the context of the show, the phrase itself very much struck the core of the anti-regulation debate, one that reared its ugly head – with cries in the opposition as well – after the violent tragedies (plural) of last week. Clinging to the Second Amendment and its right to bear arms, this flimsy ‘argument’ is based on what could be essentially boiled down into a historical accident. The Bill of Rights emerged at a time when we had virtually no standing military and thus needed minutemen militias to literally emerge within, um, minutes, and were very much concerned with the possibility of an impending British invasion (not the Beatles, but the bad kind), which did eventually happen. Subsequent court decisions upholding these values have been well thought out and true to the precedents on which they were based; in this respect, it is pointless to try to find fault in them. Instead, think of it this way – if guns were invented today, would modern society as a whole really believe it would be wise to make them readily available to the general public? Of course not. But they were grandfathered in by a document created in part by slaveowners (needed thirteen amendments to abolish that travesty) whose contemporary doctors believed bloodletting was an effective means of medical treatment. So here we are.

This attitude has found its way into other hot topics of the last few months as well, namely gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana by Washington and Colorado. The argument against the former is based on bastardizations of archaic Bible verses and in direct contradiction of the teachings of the man who was the focal point of some pretty important parts of the Good Book. But “we paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago” (stole that one from Macklemore), and use it as a precent for a continued ban on anything that hasn’t previously been considered ‘traditional marriage’. The latter debate is even more of a product of randomness. I’m not going to spend time arguing the scientific, medical, or social consequences of marijuana use. In lieu of this, let’s use the same hypothetical “what if this was invented today?” scenario that we did in the previous paragraph. Let’s imagine a group of researchers performed a series of clinical trials on a substantial sample size of participants to test responses after use of the newly-discovered intoxicants ‘alcohol’ and ‘marijuana’.

Scientist 1: We’ve seen some interesting trends in the subjects’ responses.
Scientist 2: Such as what?
Scientist 1: Well, with the first group, we’ve had numerous cases of aggression, socially inappropriate behavior, verbal abuse, and an inability to safely operate any basic machinery.
Scientist 2: What about the second group of participants?
Scientist 1: They mostly eat Cheetos and play Grand Theft Auto.

This is, of course, an absurdist way of looking at things, exaggerated and unrealistic. But couldn’t the same be said for many of these based-on-precedent arguments? Perhaps these laws were appropriate at the time they were enacted, but as the old cliche goes, times change. The existence of a rule or cultural norm in one era or area doesn’t immediately make it universally applicable throughout the rest of time and space. We’ve been wrong before. The 18th Amendment was repealed less than fifteen years later by the 21st, ending Prohibition only after having had the secondary effect of serving as the catalyst to the rise of organized crime. We’ve had perspective in the past. We’ve reflected on and made amends to – see what I did there? – our mistakes. If Frank and the gang can even mildly appreciate the nonsensical nature of this inflammatory rhetoric, then surely an educated public can do the same.

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