There’s almost no point in writing about the Heller decision, because the arguments on both sides are so well rehearsed. Almost anything I might say on the subject has been said ad nauseum by others. So let me just make a couple of quick observations.

First, liberals and conservatives both confidently assert that the evidence is incontrovertible that gun control {increases, decreases} crime. I haven’t studied the data closely enough to have a strong opinion one way or the other, and frankly I suspect most of the other people with opinions on the question don’t know what they’re talking about either. But both sides seem able to marshall at least plausible arguments in their favor, which means that while I’m not confident of the sign, I am reasonably sure that the magnitude of the harm (or benefit) is small.

And therefore, as a liberal, my general attitude is that in the absence of compelling evidence of harm we should have a bias toward letting people do as they please. Owning a gun may not, on net, improve your safety, but it’s certainly no more dangerous than smoking, drinking, having unprotected sex, or many other activities that people are free to do in the privacy of their own homes. A lot of liberals seem to have a strange blind spot about this; liberals generally have a strong presumption in favor of letting people do as they please in the privacy of their homes, but that seems to get forgotten when the subject is owning guns.

One argument I definitely don’t agree with is Tom’s point that gun laws are good because they give police a convenient pretext to lock up people they don’t like. As Tom himself acknowledges, no self-respecting liberal would accept this argument in almost any other context. For example, most liberals are concerned with the way drug laws give the police a pretext to harrass black men and knock down their doors in the middle of the night on flimsy pretexts. If liberalism is about anything, it’s about binding government officials to the rule of law, so that whether you get arrested depends as much as possible on objective rules, not on the whim of government officials. It’s probably true that many urban gun owners are bad people. But many others—especially in bad neighborhoods—are otherwise law-abiding citizens who believe (perhaps erroneously) that owning a gun helps keep their families safe. In a neighborhood where most people own guns, the result of a gun ban is that a police office has a ready pretext to arrest almost anyone, which is surely not something to celebrate.