Liberty and Public Health Crises

I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, and I’ve accumulated skills and experience in carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, masonry, cooking and similar manual arts over the span of my life. I’m also a bit of a tool nut, and have accrued a fairly extensive set of implements, over the past four decades. There are people who cater to folks like me by developing new and nifty tools that offer either improvements on what exists or new stuff that make us wonder how we ever got by without them.

“Tools” is also a metaphor for means by which people argue and pursue agendas, and many “tools” has been wielded time and again by our friends on the statist end of the political spectrum. These friends seem relentless in their desire to take away our liberties and to manage our lives and one tool in particular has been recently pulled from the toolbox out in the Left’s endless desire to disarm Americans. Anti-gun forces are now putting forth the notion that guns in America are a “public health crisis.”

People who don’t pay attention to politics might naively think that when someone says “public health crisis,” he’s referring to things like the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed over 20 million people, to communicable diseases like polio, measles, and tuberculosis, or to virus of the moment events like last year’s Ebola scare or the annual flu season.

But, just as “civil rights” has been expanded beyond its origins in racism against blacks to include every group that can claim a grievance, “public health” has been expanded not just to communicable diseases and matters of public sanitation, but to many things that statists, puritans, scolds, and social justice warriors dislike. Smoking has long been considered a public health crisis. A dozen years ago, obesity was declared a public health crisis. Nowadays, the “public health” label has been applied to motorcycles, large families, terrorism, racism, gang violence, college drinking, global warming, child labor, all-season tires, hoarding, pornography, and, yes, guns.

Why? Why stretch the phrase “public health crisis” to a point of generalization so large as to render it meaningless?

Control. Or, more specifically, getting the public to cede control. Most people will grant that the government should have the power to protect the public health, e.g. quarantining someone with a dangerous and highly communicable disease in order to protect others from being exposed. This is people’s default reaction to the phrase “public health.” If that phrase can be used as a tool to gain power over other aspects of people’s lives, those who seek power will pull it out of the toolbox. That the conflation of things like guns, pornography or racism with things like Ebola and influenza is false isn’t going to bother power-seekers. All’s fair in love, war and politics, after all.

When something is deemed a public health crisis, we tend to think that it’s reasonable to curtail individual liberties. After all, one’s liberty doesn’t permit one to harm another, and a communicable disease calls for, in the minds of many, pre-emptive action to protect others. Expanding “public health” to things that aren’t communicable diseases, though, takes some gyrating and pretzel logic.

In the case of obesity, for example, one argument is that an obese person imposes greater burdens on the health care system. This may very well be true (on the other hand, if he dies earlier, he’s less likely to get the expensive cancers that cost so much to treat), but it’s irrelevant. Even if society has decided that it will provide health care for someone, it doesn’t, in doing so, give itself the right to manage his life because his poor choices will cost society more. That sort of bootstrapping is, unfortunately, an all-too-common rationale for infringing on people’s liberties. This same argument, i.e. that one’s poor choices increases health care costs borne by society, is applied to things like seat belts and motorcycle helmets (though not to things like condom use, a digression for another day).

In the case of things like pornography and racism, the pretzel logic is that tolerating them leads to desensitizing and to skewed world views, which in turn lead to violence against other. Or, according to one puritanical scold:

Teen sexting. Tales of porn addiction. Campus sexual assaults. Divorce. Hypersexualized teens. Barely clothed pop stars. Sexual violence. All these problems can be tied back “young men [who] have been getting a regular diet of rampant pornography since their adolescence.”

It’s just another iteration of blaming the Beatles for degenerating morality, or blaming heavy metal and video games for violence. It’s a way of excusing the bad actions of bad actors and casting blame on “society” as a whole, rather than focusing attention and punishment on the individuals.

Why would people do this? Why don’t they simply recognize that some people do irresponsible things and should thus suffer the consequences? As I’ve already noted, it’s about desire for control. This desire is itself born out of a combination of a particular view of how things should be and a presumption that this view is so much more valid than that of others that with it comes an obligation to actualize it. By force, if necessary. As an added bonus, calling something a “public health crisis” is a good way to get visibility and health coverage. People are selfish and skittish, and if they think their health is at risk, they’re quick to notice and quick to respond.

Guns are merely the newest “public health” bogeyman. The pornography-as-public-health-crisis idea is also pretty new, but it’s not happening at a national level (yet, at least). Several recent high-profile mass shootings have rekindled the anti-gun crowd’s fervor, and they’ve found a new angle, a new tool, with which to work. The fact that it doesn’t pass the obvious test that real public health concerns like influenza do, i.e. communicability, doesn’t matter. I don’t suddenly become a murderer after being exposed to a murderer’s actions, nor do my guns suddenly become independently homicidal because some other guns were used to murder.

A corollary “public health crisis” that’s being advanced, both by the Left and the Right, is mental illness. This, too, fails to pass the communicability test, but it’s been offered up as a “reasonable” alternate remedy to the gun violence problem by some who seek to protect gun rights but seem less concerned with other matters of liberty.

This brings me to the final point in today’s dissection of this “public health crisis” concept. If we are to accept that behaviors and ideas that impose societal costs can be classified as public health matters and can therefore be regulated by the government in its role as protector of its citizens, why haven’t those who claim everything under the sun is a matter of “public health” applied that argument to Radical Islam? Even many who will assign all sorts of evils to Christianity won’t say a peep about the ideology that has spawned mass shootings in San Bernadino, Orlando and Fort Hood, a bombing in Boston, and of course the murder of thousands on 9/11? Why isn’t Radical Islam deemed a public health crisis?

Is it because “public health crisis” is, first and foremost, a dishonest means of convincing people to give up their liberties in order to impose certain pre-conceived policies on society?

Liberty lovers often cite the quote:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,

a statement that is in danger of losing its power through numbing over-repetition. Some statements, though, are eternal and cannot be said any better. There are a lot of people in the world who like liberty when it gives them what they want and the answers they like, but hate it when it gets in the way of what they want to do. These people aren’t ever going to give up trying to take liberty away from the rest of us, and they’re constantly looking for new tricks to use where old ones have failed. “Public health” is one of many. Don’t be fooled by it.