The title is the giveaway: ‘Liberalism’s Gun Problem’
Allied to this is the notion that gun violence ‘drives liberals into a fury’: deliberate mis-characterization, not to speak of ideologically fueled and deliberate misapprehension, that puts the onus on ‘Liberals’ to come up with the solution for the problem of gun violence. Another as if: that the problem of gun violence is a problem for ‘Liberals’ to solve, rather than a persistent,vexing problem of our polity, our collective national life. First put the onus on ‘Liberals’, then demonstrate that the solutions, using the French and Australian models as not viable, but then to demonstrate his political desperation, Mr. Douthat adds the non sequitur of Bloomberg’s Stop and Frisk as bait, ‘a mix of Bloombergist police tactics’. The essay ends in a kind of nonplussed political nihilism, which simply reinforces the status quo as a political inevitability.

Political Reporter