Loss and Liberty

Matt responds in the comments to my first Bryan Miller post:

Interesting, check out Mr. Miller’s lead post. His brother was Mike Miller, the FBI agent that was killed in DC in 1994.

Which means his niece is Dale Miller, who works for CeasefireMD and testified in favor of the AWB here last year.

We have a family here who blames the object and not the person. His loss, however, does not give him an unrestricted moral high ground. Taking him to task could get interesting.

Matt has more over at his blog too. I didn’t know this, actually, but it’s not too surprising. Many of core anti-gun activists are people who experienced some kind of loss through violence. It’s not something I’m unsymapthetic to, or can’t understand. Losing my mother to cancer when I was in college played a role in my desire to work in the drug discovery field. The desire to “do something” so other people won’t have to go through what you did is an understandable and even noble reaction to a tragedy.

But I do pretty firmly agree with Matt’s premise, that it doesn’t give him the moral high ground in this debate. Grief cannot be a reasonable basis for public policy, especially when a constitutional right is at question. As much as I might sympathize with someone’s loss, we can’t relent when someone uses that grief as a basis to remove other people’s liberty. That’s why, despite the fact that my mother died of cancer, I have vowed to give no more money to the American Cancer society. There’s things that are more important than my grief.