I’ve long argued that our gun rights were included in the Bill of Rights as an insurance policy, one meant to make absolutely certain we could fight back against tyranny if our free speech or freedom to worship as we choose were to be stripped from us.
And, to be fair, we do see more restrictions of freedom of speech and things of that sort in countries that have already eliminated people’s ability to arm themselves effectively.
Here in the US, our anti-gun crowd says they respect our right to keep and bear arms, they just want some “common sense” gun control.
That’s hard to believe when it’s clear they don’t even respect freedom of speech.
Two gun control groups on Wednesday came out in favor of moderating “hate speech” on social media in a brief filed with the Supreme Court in a pending First Amendment case, alleging that it poses “a real-world threat to our democracy.”
Giffords Law Center and Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed an amicus brief in a challenge brought by NetChoice against Texas and Florida laws intended to prevent viewpoint censorship online. The groups didn’t speak to the constitutionality of the laws but wrote to warn the justices that social media companies “have a role to play” in protecting individuals from “hate-motivated gun violence.”
“Across social media platforms, hate speech has been tolerated, fostered, and even promoted,” they wrote. “In a time of increasing political strife, online hate speech presents a real-world threat to our democracy and to the lives of every human being in America.”
The brief notes Americans report “disturbingly high levels of online harassment and hate speech targeting their race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability.”
The brief later argues that hate speech can “chill” free speech.
“Social media companies have resisted regulation or content moderation on the theory that such efforts would stifle the marketplace of ideas and infringe the free-speech rights of their users,” they wrote. “And yet, by fostering and promoting hate speech across their platforms, social media companies have in fact often chilled free speech and other protected First Amendment activities, both online and in the real world.”
The problem with this, of course, is that these groups routinely pretend that opposition to their gun control schemes is racist, thus making it entirely possible to argue that opposition to gun control is, in fact, a type of hate speech.
See, no one takes issue with social media companies taking action against threats of violence, even if their algorithm is completely unable to determine what’s an actual threat and what isn’t. Few are really taking issue with them clamping down on actual hate speech.
The problem is that social media companies have shown a profound bias regarding what kind of speech gets regulated on their platforms. Some of the most hateful comments I’ve ever seen were ignored by Facebook and Twitter, who said those comments didn’t violate their community guidelines, while more benign comments were hammered and the people who wrote them got temporary bans.
What these laws were meant to do is restrict these companies from picking sides in the ideological battles, something they’ve failed at.
Yet then we have the gun control crowd rolling in and saying it’s all about hate speech. It’s not. It’s about the fact that social media companies tend to be their allies in the assault on our rights and laws in a couple of states actually make it impossible for anti-gunners to just cry “hate speech” when they get their posteriors handed to them in an online debate.
They want to be able to manipulate public perception over the gun rights debate to make it seem as if we who support the Second Amendment are the minority, all in hopes that we’ll abandon our wicked ways. They don’t want people seeing both sides because, if that happens, they just might lose.
Either way, they’ve been the beneficiaries of the status quo, so they want to keep the status quo as they assault our rights on social media.
That’s what this is really about and don’t let them claim otherwise.
