Professional Documents
Culture Documents
One landmark was the first law, passed in Florida in 1987, allowing ordinary
citizens to carry concealed weapons. Many, including me, thought that the result
would be frequent shootouts in the streets.
That hasn't happened. It turns out that almost all ordinary citizens handle guns
with appropriate restraint, as they do with the other potential deadly weapon
people encounter every day, the automobile.
Concealed-carry laws have spread to 40 states, with few ill effects. Politicians who
opposed them initially, like former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, have not
sought their repeal.
In contrast, voters have reacted negatively to gun control proposals, even after
horrific events like the Newtown massacre. That was apparent in the Senate's
rejection of the Toomey-Manchin gun registration bill.
What about the cultural issue that most pundits mention first, abortion?
Attitudes have remained roughly the same: Most Americans think abortion
should be, in Bill Clinton's phrase, safe, legal and rare.
Young Americans, contrary to their libertarian leaning on same-sex marriage, are
slightly less pro-abortion rights than their elders. They've seen sonograms, and
all of them by definition owe their existence to a decision not to abort.
And from the point of view of the unborn child, abortion is the opposite of
liberating.
Back in the conformist America of the 1950s -- a nation of greater income
equality and stronger labor unions, as liberals like to point out -- marijuana,
homosexual acts and abortion weren't political issues. They were crimes. And
opposition to gun control measures in the 1950s and 1960s was much less
widespread and vigorous than it is today.
Is this libertarian trend a good thing for the nation? Your answer will depend on
your values.
I'm inclined to look favorably on it. I think the large majority of Americans can
use marijuana and guns responsibly. Same-sex marriage can be seen as
liberating, but it also includes an element of restraint. Abortions in fact have
become more rare over a generation.
But I do see something to worry about. In his bestseller "Coming Apart," my
American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray shows that collegeeducated Americans have handled liberating trends of the 1970s like no-fault
divorce with self-restraint.
But at the bottom of the social scale we have seen an unraveling, with out-ofwedlock births, continuing joblessness, lack of social connectedness and civic
involvement.
In conformist America the old prohibitions provided these people with
guardrails, as The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger has written. In today's
more libertarian America, the guardrails may be gone.