This one made it into the book. I wrote it in 2017, after a conversation with a friend who couldn’t see why anyone would regulate her right to carry a gun wherever she wanted. I agreed with her more than I expected to. It aged uncomfortably well.
The conversation started with guns. It almost always does in America. But the gun was really just a way into the larger question: who gets to decide what freedom looks like, and who enforces the decision? My friend’s argument was not stupid. It was actually quite consistent. If you grant someone the power to regulate, you’ve created a new power center. That power center will, in the fullness of time, be captured by people with interests. Those interests will not be yours.
I tried arguing checks and balances at her. I tried representative government. I tried the protection of the weakest members of society. She had a counter to each. Her core point was that regulations designed to limit bad actors mostly limit people who were never going to be bad actors anyway, while creating an enforcer class that expands its own authority over time. That’s not a paranoid fringe position. That’s political science, observed across multiple continents and centuries.
What I found most interesting about the conversation wasn’t who was right. It was how clearly it exposed the underlying tension in American political thought — the tension between liberty and security, between individual freedom and collective protection. Every policy argument in this country eventually collapses back into this one. And neither side has a clean answer. The regulated society is safer in some ways and less free in others. The unregulated one is freer in some ways and far more dangerous in others.
The essay doesn’t resolve the tension. It maps it. Living outside America made it easier to see — this is a specifically American argument, born from a specifically American history, and it’s eating the country from the inside.
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*This piece was expanded and collected in [Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/) — essays about America observed from the outside, by someone who left and couldn’t quite believe what he found when he looked back. Available in Kindle and paperback.*
**[Get Not My America on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/)**
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**You might also like:** [News Update for Week of 8/16/2020](https://www.vagobond.com/9552-2/), [Weekly Update for Week ending August 9, 2020 – Pandemic and Politics](https://www.vagobond.com/weekly-update-for-week-ending-august-9-2020-pandemic-and-politics/), [The Internet Isn’t What We Thought It Would Be….](https://www.vagobond.com/the-internet-isnt-what-we-thought-it-would-be/)
*Browse the full CD Damitio catalog at [indignified.com/books](https://indignified.com/books)*
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My books don’t fit in any neat box — because they’re about people who feel something huge is missing… and actually go look for it. Some even find it.
Dive into the full catalog and see which story hits you hardest. CD Damitio on Amazon.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
