by When we argue about political rights, we are usually arguing about real or imagined negative externalities and the assignment of costs relating to those negative externalities.
A gun owner is a gun owner for a host reasons: family tradition, acquired or inherited identity, attraction to the abstraction of “freedom,” or a host of other reasons. An advocate for substantial restrictions on the ownership of firearms might be motivated by where their psychology aligns them on the care/harm spectrum, their own identity, or even a lack of care about “freedom,” as defined by the gun owner.
The conflict between the gun owner and the advocate for gun control might arise from multiple sources. Much of that conflict centers around real or perceived externalities. The gun-rights restrictionist will probably be concerned about the possibility of the gun falling into the wrong hands: a school shooter being the prime example of the prime fear. The possibility, even if remote, is a negative externality — both the shooter and the fear of the shooter. The ownership of a gun does not come without possible costs. After all, gun crime — either large or small in scale — does actually exist. The question though is to what degree this possible cost associated with widespread civilian gun ownership matters. For the restrictionist, it matters a lot. It matters so much that, in the mind of the restrictions, stronger controls are justified, even if freedoms are curtailed or eliminated. For the gun rights advocate, the cost does not exceed the benefits of suppressing their freedom or right to adhere to cultural or family traditions.
But this is not the only source of the conflict. The costs must be calculated and assigned. Although not all gun owners become mass murders, many mass murders are in fact gun owners. The restrictionist wishes to distribute this cost to all gun owners by restricting, across the board, the right to own certain sorts of firearms under certain conditions, or even all firearms in general. On the other hand, for the gun rights advocate, guns do not commit crimes, people do, and in an Anglo-Saxon system of jurisprudence, responsibility — and costs — should be assigned to the individual bad actor.
Conflicts regarding externalities and the assignment of their cost is not limited to gun ownership. It applied to a vast array of issues where conflict regarding rights can be found. I expect this conflict to extend to our current pandemic situation.
The freedom of association and freedom of movement are nearly sacrosanct rights in American culture. Much of the social conflict of the mid-20th century in the United States centered around the rights of all manner of classes and categories of people to enjoy freedom of movement and association in the personal and commercial sphere. Those rights were not constructed from nothing and, in fact, arose from British Common Law traditions relating to freedom of movement on the seas and within the British Empire. Despite having been severed from this political construct centuries before, the foundational concepts of what freedom means within our nation endures and, over time, is continually expanded. The right to freedom of movement and association has expanded to the point where a non-insignificant portion of the electorate sees little to no practical point to any restrictions at all on movement, to the extent that the moral and utilitarian value of political borders themselves are questioned.
The calculus of many things will need to be evaluated when considering the risks associated with a pandemic. Suddenly, very core issues are now at the center of our political discourse: the right to earn a living vs the right of society to control widespread disease and associated death; the right to travel unencumbered through our 50 state free-trade zone vs the need to track movements in order to possibly later perform contact tracing as a means of infections disease control; the right to assemble in bars and restaurants freely and with whom one pleases vs the need to eliminate high-risk commercial interactions which were a standard part of social life in America just six weeks. You get the idea — the list could probably be expanded endlessly.
As the initial panic phase subsides, and we work our way towards figuring out a new equilibrium that will still keep demand for medical services below system capacity — assuming there is actually an enduring consensus to do so — I would expect many more arguments regarding externalities and associated costs to arise. Given the importance of both sustainable economic security and public health, old socio-political cleavages will be enhanced and further polarized, and new ones may arise, as history and biology suggests the current public health care threat will most likely not disappear as quickly as it arose.
