The Second Amendment vs Leviathan

From Kevin Williamson's Coyotes in the State of Nature :

Here’s a two-Americas story for you: Westchester County, in the suburbs of New York City, was home to Hillary Clinton when she pretended to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, and its voters gave Barack Obama 63 percent of their ballots in 2008.
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But Westchester County has a prob­lem more often seen in rural, Republican-leaning jurisdictions: coyotes. These ca­nine predators are a real menace, a fact that was dramatically illustrated in late June by the case of young Emily Hod­u­­lik, age six, who was attacked by a pair of coyotes on a leafy suburban street in the quaint town of Rye. The coyotes’ offensive proceeded along classically predatory lines as the canines ignored the other children in the group and targeted the smallest, weakest child. Miss Hodulik suffered serious bite wounds but escaped without life-threatening injuries. She’s undergoing a series of rabies shots, doesn’t like to sleep alone, and is afraid that there are coyotes in the basement of the family home. Local officials have warned Westchester residents to keep an eye out for the beasts, especially if they have small children.

Coyotes like to attack the little ones, human or otherwise. That was the case for one unfortunate coyote that attacked a puppy out for a jog with his master in Travis County, Texas, in the suburbs of Austin, where coyotes have it a little rougher than they do in suburban New York. That particular coyote had the bad luck to set his gaze on a puppy owned by Gov. Rick Perry, who produced a laser-sighted .380-caliber automatic pistol, loaded with hollowpoints, and sent it to the Happy Hunting Grounds.
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Why do the coyotes hate us? Never mind that coyotes have turned up in Central Park, or that one recent deadly coyote attack — ending the life of a young Canadian folk singer — happened on a hiking trail in a national park. Evolution bred coyotes to be predators. They are what they are, and sometimes they have to be shot.

People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu­ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun­dation of progressivism.

This, and not the threat of uncontrollable crime, is really at the heart of the subur­ban progressives’ abomination of firearms. Coyotes may be an occasional menace, but the predators most commonly stalking Central Park, Westchester County, or the Austin suburbs go on two legs, not four.
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To use lethal force in self-defense is the ultimate declaration of independence, a kind of momentary secession from the authority of the government whose laws and prisons and police officers have, in that moment, failed the citizen. To acknowledge the right to self-defense — and the concomitant right to be forearmed against aggressors — is to acknowledge that some things are outside the state and its authority, or at least that some moments are outside the state and its authority.

Our Founders knew that all that stands between us and Hobbes' Leviathan is the Second Amendment. Guns ensure our independence.

Thomas Hobbes: without big government life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

Jeffrey Collins:

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes is now a good deal more popular than he once was. When his "Leviathan" appeared in 1651 it was denounced everywhere. England's King's Charles II, a believer in the divine right of kings, disliked its coolly rational account of sovereignty. The Church of England loathed its attacks on Christian orthodoxy. Hobbes later claimed that agents of the king tried to assassinate him and bishops of the church to burn him alive. If they tried, they failed, but during his lifetime "Leviathan" was banned in England and across Europe. Upon his passing in 1679, Hobbes was known (after his birthplace) as the "Monster of Malmesbury."

But today "Leviathan" is considered one of the greatest works of political theory ever written. It is a standard text in college courses, mercifully replacing the slumping Marx. The very title of Hobbes's masterpiece has become a byword for the modern state.
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Contemporary to both Galileo and Newton, Hobbes boasted that he had applied the iron logic of the Scientific Revolution to the hitherto soft subject of human politics. He scorned the "traditions" of Western thought and dismissed predecessors such as Aristotle and Aquinas as insipid moralists.
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"Leviathan" is an ingenious account of the modern state and its intellectual foundations. Hobbes composed the book during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century, when armies clashed over the limits of monarchical power, the prerogatives of Parliament and the rights of subjects. Most debate during this ruinous age was conducted in a historical idiom, as an effort to commandeer the traditions of English law (or the Bible) for rival points of view.

Hobbes would have none of this. He "scientifically" attacked Aristotle's venerable claim that men are naturally sociable. He rejected all presumed natural hierarchies, which ranked humans according to nobility, sex, race or religion. Instead, he portrayed men as equal rivals in a state of nature, which he characterized as a "war of all against all."

Hobbes's contemporaries understood politics as something descended from the ages or the heavens, but Hobbes built politics from the ground up. Self-interested individuals, craving protection for their lives, contracted to create sovereign states. Sovereigns (preferably monarchs) provided this service, but the price was unfettered power and unqualified obedience. Once sheltered under sovereignty, subjects enjoyed only the right to life. They could neither demand the return of their surrendered rights nor expect to share in the exercise of power. Hobbes thus acknowledged equality, rights and individual interest but sacrificed all of these on the altar of political order. To Hobbes, men live either in an anarchic hell of equal misery or in a society unified by a single, absolute will. There was no third way.

Much of this is well-known. The question is why Hobbes's account has enjoyed such popularity in recent decades. The likes of John Locke and James Madison long ago demonstrated the limits of Hobbes's raw statism. But many thinkers and political actors, lately, seem to prefer Hobbes's vision of society to theirs. Why should this be so?

One might point to several reasons. Hobbes's snide irreligion, once the main complaint against him, may now commend him to those who perpetually fear the supposed return of theocracy. His tendency to portray humans as appetitive beasts flatters our present eagerness to explain every aspect of human conduct in biological terms. Hobbes was also acutely suspicious of democracy. He considered it a breeder of faction.

All I can say is: Thank God that our Founders had read Hobbes and dismissed his cynical pessimistic view of life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” unless controlled by a strong central government. And thank God that our Founders instead preferred John Locke's political philosophy of government based on freely given consent, personal liberty and private property rights which inspired Thomas Jefferson and those who drafted the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Sadly Leftists are Hobbesians not Lockeans.