McArdle Wins Worst Newtown Reaction Award
Megan McArdle, a DC libertarian writer (and wife of reason magazine editor Peter Suderman) provides a target for leftover Jonathan Chait’s continuing jihad against all things libertarian. (Perhaps New York magazine should actually have disclosed that Chait is regularly sliced and diced in the pages of his subject’s husband’s magazine.)
There isn’t actually anything unlibertarian about gun control as long as the control is not the government disarming the citizens so it could more easily abuse them. Any libertarian will say that a shopping mall, or condo association, or homeowner, can tell you you can’t bring this or that weapon into her property.
The problem is that government owns the streets, parks, subyways, buses, schools, airports, etc. and does a lousy job of keeping armed lunatics, and for that matter, litter bugs, rapists, mosquitos and rats, mashers, flashers, gangs, marching Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church, from committing crimes or just being nuisances, on public property. The solution would be to have all these things owned and run privately whether by downtown business district associations, the Nature Conservancy, or for profit companies. They would implement policies that respond to consumer demand and hazard insurance risk assessments, and would control guns on their own property while not forbidding one to have one in one’s own home (or at least if so only by condo bylaws one would choose to buy into or not.)
The Insomniac Libertarian 