Guns and Cars and Consent and Powers Not Delegated

From The End of the Affair by P.J. O’Rourke.

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

I am inclined to think that this observation is linked to the observation that "The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe" (Jean-François Revel). Perhaps it falls where it does because people in Europe (and elsewhere) have not been granted access to cars by the regulators to the degree we have in the US. And that hinges on one of the critical differences between exceptional America and the rest of the world. Elsewhere, power is exercised by some cabal of centralized authority and freedoms dispensed to the individual citizens as necessary or convenient. In America, and it is an orientation always under threat, the whole culture and system of government is predicated on the unique power and authority of the individual as articulated in the Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

and reaffirmed in the Constitution with an explicit acknowledgement (in the Tenth Amendment) that

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Second Amendment (right to bear arms) and the unanticipated automobile are powerful buttresses to the principle that government is at the service of the governed and only so empowered as the governed consent.

All decisions are trade-offs. Having lived much of my childhood in Europe, I was accustomed to the regulations and restrictions there. When I came back to America at the age of sixteen I was both puzzled by the fascination with guns and appalled by the costs in terms of lives of both cars (34,000 lives lost in accidents per year) and guns (11,000 lives lost through murder with a gun per year). But if that is the cost, what is being purchased? I suspect that this is one of those tactical and strategic equations. Tactical costs for strategic advantages. The European desire to reduce tactical costs may be partially behind their exposure to much greater strategic costs.

To set those costs in the balance of the sorts of totalitarianism (dark nights of fascism) which have so frequently engulfed Europe in the 20th century is the sort of Jesuitical calculation that can have no real answer. We know the costs of the Maos (40-70,000,000), the Stalins (15-20,000,000), the Hitlers (11,000,000), and the Japanese military Junta in WWII (3-10,000,000). And those are just the big numbers.

I do suspect that the freedom of movement and transportation as represented by the car and the autonomy represented by guns are in some ways real constraints on such perennial inclinations towards totalitarianism as is so much in evidence elsewhere.

Currently reading Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest which has some echoing themes.