Patterico has staked out his position as a lone voice in the wilderness against the online petition urging the FedEC to carve out a blogger exception to the McCain-Feingold monstrosity. His view is largely summed up in this post, where he famously pronouced that:

They’ll have to pry this keyboard from my cold dead hands before I am going to “register” with the government for permission to state my personal views without fear of prosecution.

He subsequently elaborated on his über-NRA-ish position, which he later explained thusly:

I don’t think citizens should ever ask their government for permission to engage in political speech.

I can’t say that I disagree, of course. Nevertheless, I am a bit reluctant to join his no-holds-barred crusade encouraging bloggers to speak out illegally if there is a legal way to accomplish the same. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, but that I’ve sparred on more than a few occasions with absolutists like Publicola on that very issue. Part of my objection has been practical in nature – why subject yourself to a risk of criminal prosecution when you can take a class, pay a fee, and make that issue go away? Part of it, however, has been based on the view that we have a moral duty to obey all laws that are at least arguably constitutional, and to the extent that obtaining a permit in a gun-friendly state imposes only a light burden on the right to bear arms, one ought to comply with that law rather than attempt to set oneself up as a martyr. We have enough of those in the GFW states already, and let’s face it – an otherwise law-abiding citizen from California or New York who can’t get a permit to carry makes a much more sympathetic plaintiff than someone from a pro-gun state other than Vermont or Alaska who simply doesn’t want to. That basically leaves me with three options and three options only:

1. Tell Patterico that he’s full of crap.
2. Tell Publicola that I’m full of crap.
3. Come up with some non-convoluted theory as to why it’s OK for government to license the rights secured by Amendment Two but not Amendment One.

The first option can be discarded rather easily. Patterico is not full of crap. He may be wrong or he may be right, but his argument is certainly not of bounds.

The second option is a bit trickier. Now the U.S. Supreme “Court” has judicially nullified the First Amendment while all but inviting lower courts to do the same to the Second, advocates of both amendments are in a similar position. If you have a legal way to get the freedom that you ought to be getting automatically under the Constitution, what do you do? Take the legal option and make the issue go away, or stand up and say “Phuket, I don’t need permission for this!” And if the latter, does this apply only to explicit constitutional rights, or to implict ones or others you believe individuals are morally entitled to no matter what the law says? I personally believe citizens have a moral right, if not a legal one, to drive a car or even, heaven forbid, an S.U.V. Should I ask the DMV to cancel my license, or do I accept the safety arguments in favor of driver licensing, while reserving the moral right to drive without a license if California ever starts issuing licenses the way it issues CCW? What if I think my state taxes me too much in relation to the benefits it provides, with the difference being an unconstitutional taking of private property without just compensation? Or what if I think my tax level is fine, but fear that a portion of it will go toward a Congressman’s unconstitutional mid-term pay increase? Once we start down this slippery slope, where do we stop if not anarchy?

The third option, which I tentatively believe to be the correct one, is speech is special. I don’t think the right to speak freely is necessarily more important than the right to bear arms, but I do see the need for society to rein in the excesses of one more than the other. If 98% of the population had guns and the other 2%, consisting of felons, loonies, Michael Moore fans and other assorted nuts, any forthcoming police state would be every bit as deterred as it would be if 100% of the population were armed. But those 2% can cause quite a bit of damage on their own. When Michael Moore shoots off his mouth irresponsibly, it certainly causes harm, but the societal harm caused by his bad speech can almost always be neutralized with more speech. If he shot off his gun that way, Terry Ratzman did with his own gun yesterday and Brian Nichols allegedly with someone else’s, he would cause a permanent harm that could not be undone with more speech, more bullets, or anything else. So perhaps that is the answer: slight regulation of gun ownership, when properly balanced against protecting the individual right to bear arms, may be a necessary evil while similar restrictions on speech are just evil. I don’t know.

As Americans, free political speech is our house. Blogs may be our favorite room, but others will have their own favorite rooms. The government has no right to be in the house, period.

True, but then again, it has no right to regulate my right to own a firearm, either. My favorite room is a Ruger Mini-14, which is functionally indistingushable from an “assault” weapon but which is not consdered one under either California law or the now defunct federal one. If some schmuck Democrat in the California Legislature (but I repeat myself) proposes a bill to add my gun to the Ugly Gun List, should I oppose it, or bow out of the debate because the government really shouldn’t be in an AK-47, AR-15 or Steyr AUG owner’s room, either?

This entry originated as a rebuttal to one of Patterico’s threads, but as you can see, the end result was more questions than answers.