(Huffington Post) -- Nowhere is the defeatist liberal approach to American politics more evident than in the post-Newtown campaign for gun control. Liberals are rushing to repeat, like a devout incantation, hand on one's heart, that "we believe in the Second Amendment" -- in an "individual's right to own a gun." Half of the legal and moral battle is lost right there and then. Instead, liberals should emphasize that throughout the total American legal history until 2008, the Supreme Court -- which at times has been very conservative -- has always held that the right to own guns belongs not to the individual but, as the Second Amendment states, to a "well regulated militia." (For details on the cases involved, go here). That the right to own guns is a communitarian right, not an individualized one. True, the Roberts Court recently ruled otherwise, but liberals are still free to urge the court to reconsider this ruling and fashion arguments that will make it easier for the Court to fall back in line with all who preceded it. It would also help to recall that other civilized societies hold that the fewer guns there are out there, the fewer people will be murdered by guns.
Next, liberals have started their gun control campaign, as they sadly so often do, by conceding most of their ground before the give-and-take is even underway. Thus, when dealing with health care, they did not start with a true liberal position (a call for a single-payer system) because they assume that such a position will not play and hence -- being the reasonable people that they are -- they proposed an option close to the conservatives' preferred policy. Then the give-and-take ensues -- further watering down what was a very thin gruel to begin with.