My new piece at the Commentator explores the wilder shores of the UK's Health and Safety neurosis in the context of how we look at 'risk' - and asks rhetorically whether the way the Americans balance the risk of guns against the freedom to own them is really so unreasonable.
Liberal-minded US pundits keep ridiculing the argument that private gun ownership is some sort of defence against state-imposed tyranny. There is no evidence, they say, that the US state is aiming to impose tyranny.
But what exactly is tyranny anyway these days? If you look at it not as a crazed Soviet-style armed fist but rather an impossible labyrinth of petty controls, constant surveillance, an inefficient monopoly on violence that micro-manages a householder's right to self-defence, plus perhaps above all no serious sense of responsibility to control state spending over and beyond what the state takes by force through taxation, maybe we are a lot closer to Tyranny than we like to think.
Against that tsunami of subtle tyranny-lite measures that we here in the UK have to accept, mass private gun ownership perhaps indeed is no defence. But in the USA it surely both creates and reflects some sort of widespread steely popular determination to deny the state at least some measures of ultimate control. And it also stands as some sort of tough intellectual defence against the collectivist ideology we see in the UK and across Europe of 'learned helplessness', a subject on which Autonomous Mind has robust views.
