Arm the troops. But arm the people?

It would the an understatement to say that the Republican Party is a firm opponent of any attempts to restrict gun ownership in the United States. All of their presidential hopefuls have adopted the NRA's "good guy with a gun" talking point. This is a good indicator that this will become a platform position in the next general election. So really, if anything, the GOP wants to help expand the market of gun ownership in the United States.

This creates a contradiction between their position on the subject of war. With the exception of a small libertarian minority, the Republican party is still the party of unilateral, single-minded military action. For all their disdain for entitlement programs, their desire to further bloat an already massive military budget and to re-engage in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan renders their supposed advocacy of small government as mere rhetorical nonsense. Telling, then, that they have not, with only a few exceptions, challenged President Obama on issues of war and national security during his time in office. If they attempted to put up a real challenge to extra-judicial killing or indefinite detention they would be restricting the abilities of future Republican presidents to conduct those acts as well. So the contradiction we end up with is "Let's make our military bigger, stronger, and meaner and also protect our right to shoot at it."

Having said this, we see a different, albeit related, contradiction from President Obama and many Democrats. He has worked to block, or in the case of the Libyan War has outright ignored, attempts by Congress to hinder his ability to use violence internationally whenever he sees fit. This not only contradicts positions he took as a candidate, but also his advocacy of stricter gun laws. As far as the Obama administration is concerned, his constituents should be hindered in their capacity to conduct mass killings, and he should not. He should have the power to commit acts of terrible violence anywhere on Earth at all times, and will kill anyone he chooses without oversight regardless of how many innocent people die in the process, but Americans should not shoot each other and should not arm themselves.

Perhaps, reader, I am alone in seeing these contradictions. Unfortunately, while preparing this piece I attempted to find any kind of polling data that would link views on gun ownership to views on foreign policy and the war on terrorism, but was unable to. It is odd to me, given the horse-race nature of the election commentary by the media, that no one has researched whether there is a correlation between an individual US voter's view of gun ownership and how those views relate to other issues. A majority of gun owners are indeed Republicans, but apart from Nate Silver's breakdown there is virtually no research on how an individual's opinion on the 2nd Amendment correlates to their opinion of the 1st Amendment, or on the separation of powers, or the state secrets privilege.