October 24, 2005
Great Article, Bad Ending
I just got around to reading Glenn Reynolds The Next International Right and was highly impressed.
He's right to position self-defense as an international human right; he's right to suggest that it would cure genocides a lot better than U.N. brunches and petitions; and I'd even agree that he is right to ask the Bush administration to push this as an international right -- especially as our Secretary of State is a known believer in the importance of America's Second Amendment
It's a great article but he closes with a device that personally disturbs me:
I wonder if the Bush administration’s diplomatic corps will have the nerve and the integrity to push this argument at the U.N. and elsewhere, not merely as an argument in opposition to global gun control, which they have been making already, but an argument in favor of a positive right to be armed as part of international human rights law? Perhaps they will, if enough Americans encourage them to.
Sorry, perfesser, if the President of the United States does not drop what he is doing and push your personal agenda, it is because he lacks courage? That is the Bill O'Reilly argument leaders don't do what I say because they're chicken or corrupt, not because my idea of nuclear hair-trigger land mines on the border is imperfect.
A small nit in an important and well presented piece, but that's what you guys pay me for.