Those who oppose gun control claim that  the right to possess firearms is guaranteed by the Constitution’s Second Amendment. If there were no Second Amendment, or no Constitution at all, they would probably own guns, as well, in order to defend themselves in an ultimate libertarian paradise.

Those same libertarians, particularly if they are also Christian nationalists, typically also oppose the freedom of women to employ abortion, if not birth control medication, to control their personal reproductive systems. (They must consider using in vitro fertilization artificially to promote reproduction to be an acceptable interference with the natural consequences of sex because it is a willful act.)

Apparently, sexual abstinence is as unobjectionable a practice as self-defense.  In their view, sexual activity for mutual gratification is less desirable a human impulse than murdering others in anger and not in order to protect a person’s life or property.

Like it or not, society has succeeded in developing methods of controlling the unintended creation of babies more effectively than of suppressing sexual emotions. Likewise, unfortunately, our ability to produce and foment the use of dangerous weapons has outstripped the ability of some people to control themselves.

Nevertheless, a vocal and influential political faction in our government, including a majority of justices on the Supreme Court, seems not to recognize that science has liberated women from biological entrapment by a majur consequence of sex acts. Nor do they acknowledge that in the absence of a liberal democratic legal or medical method to suppress violent impulses the only effective way to limit homicidal gun violence is to reduce popular access to weapons of war.

Arbitrarily ending the lives of ambient minor and adult humans is incontrovertibly and scientifically antisocial behavior. Whether destroying or preventing the conception of a non-self-sustainable fetus harms the community’s general welfare is a matter for metaphysical debate. Its answer does not challenge the welfare of people in a liberal democratic state.  But the absence of effective gun control does.

The MAGA Republican coalition which backed former President Trump professed to be the heirs of the conservative Republican Party. However, that wing of opponents to the Democratic administrations of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden really only defined their platform as rejecting most if not all of the incumbents’ progressive policies.

As Groucho Marx sang it 90 years ago, their policy merely is “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” The MAGA Republican Party is not conservative; it is reactionary. Its members have no goal but to defeat any party whose objective is to adopt programs that have a more general purpose than their own personal welfare.  This is libertarian in the extreme.