Michelle Malkin: Blurring the line between selfharm and social harm

by Michelle Malkin Seattle Times editorial columnist

WHAT could gun owners and drug medicalization advocates possibly have in
common?

It's something precious, yet mocked and usurped regularly in the name of
children and safety: individual liberty.

The cause of freedom can sometimes make for strange bedfellows. Although
they may not yet realize it, those reviled as "gun nuts" and "potheads" in
Washington state will need each other's support in November to secure their
rights to exercise unpopular choices.

Both groups are scorned minorities. Both face uphill initiative battles. By
voting no on Initiative 676 (which would mandate new registration and
training requirements on all handgun owners) and yes on Initiative 685
(which would allow doctors to recommend marijuana and other illegal drugs
to seriously ill patients), an enlightened electorate can help forestall
the monstrous encroachment of government upon private life.

It should be no one's business but one's own how a legally owned handgun is
stored in a private home. How many hours of safety training one undergoes,
and from whom, are questions not for farremoved state bureaucrats, but for
gun owners themselves.

Nor should it be anyone's business but that of a legally practicing doctor
and fully informed patient how that patient's private pain or illness is
treated. It is not for law enforcement and lieutenant governors to dictate
what a grownup in full possession of his faculties should or should not
ingest in his hospital room or on his deathbed.

As John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1859 treatise "On Liberty":

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to
others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient
warrant."

This is one of the greatest and most familiar axioms of classical
liberalism. It is also one of the most endangered in a democracy prone to
the tyranny of a majority.

Those who support limitations on the liberty of handgun owners and on
doctors and patients seeking cures from forbidden drugs share an expansive
view of what constitutes "harm to others." While Mill and his adherents
understood "harm" in narrow, concrete terms (your right to swing your fist
ends at the tip of my nose), the modern and illiberal tendency is to
construe social harm in as wide and abstract a manner as possible.

Thus, I685 opponents argue that allowing doctors to recommend drugs like
marijuana to their seriously ill patients is harmful because it will make
those drugs more easily accessible to people without illnesses. Never mind
that the initiative requires physicians to document medical research before
making their recommendation. Never mind that the initiative requires the
concurring opinion of a second physician. And never mind the personal
relief an individual suffering from glaucoma, AIDS or cancer might receive
from smoking a joint in the privacy of their own home.

Proponents of I676 argue that mandating trigger locks and safety classes
will prevent harm to society by reducing accidental shootings of children.
But the law fails to distinguish between matters in which society has a
legitimate interest (punishing people who act negligently) and those in
which it does not (the manner in which firearms are stored in a private
home; the type of safety training one takes). If, for example, a child
shoots himself with a gun that has been stored unsafely, then the person
responsible for that gun deserves to be punished; but the punishment should
be for the shooting, not for the careless storage of the gun that led to it.

The proposed law does nothing to hold negligent gun owners responsible for
direct harm, but plenty to make gun ownership more cumbersome for law
abiding, nonnegligent people. I676 supporters argue that this
bureaucratic inconvenience is a small price to pay and downplay fears of a
slippery slope. But as Mill noted more than century ago, "this encroachment
is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the
contrary, to grow more and more formidable."

The infectious regulation of adults' private activities has run rampant,
weakening the pillars of a classical liberal state. By blurring the line
between selfharm and social harm, noisy lobby groups and opportunistic
politicians have succeeded in depriving others of pursuing good in their
own way, or impeding their efforts to obtain it.

Those who support strong gun rights may disapprove of those who champion
drug medicalization, and vice versa. But both minorities face the same
attack on their precious freedom to do as they please without harming
others.

Like it or not, they are allies in liberty. And their support for each
other in November will help determine whether Washington returns to the
first principles of a free society or continues its creep toward warm
'n'fuzzy totalitarianism.

Michelle Malkin's email address is: malkin1@ix.netcom.com