A great debate on the future of gun rights and gun control after the Washington D.C. v. Heller decision is shaping up over at Cato Unbound. Cato’s Bob Levy, who was co-counsel for Heller, leads off with his take on the decision and its implications. And today Dennis Henigan of the Brady Center contributes a sharp reply, arguing that though the decision was terrible jurisprudence, it’s actually good for gun control. He argues that by decisively forbidding outright bans, Heller has defused the argument that gun control regulation sets us on a slippery slope to total gun confiscation. And therein lies what Henigan calls the “Heller paradox”. By making Second Amendment rights clearer, the Court has made gun control easier. I actually find this argument pretty seductive. Am I wrong?

Dave Kopel pipes up on Friday, and on Monday we’ll have Duke Law’s Erwin Chemerinsky.

Here’s something I hadn’t considered:

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

That’s from anti-copyright guru Rasmus Fleischer in the lead essay of this month’s Cato Unbound. But that’s a good point. Suppose you can put everything on Lexis, or every movie ever made, on a thumb drive. What are they going do, ban Fed Ex? Thumb drives? Fleischer seems to think copyright is hopeless, but that in the short term, the attempt to police violations could really harm civil liberties. I suspect he’s right.

I’ve recently become a big fan of the eminent political theorist George Kateb (I’m actually pretty baffled about how it could be that I didn’t know of him until late last year), so I’m pretty thrilled he agreed to write the lead essay for this month’s Cato Unbound on the value of patriotism. A thoroughgoing individualist, he doesn’t find much value in it. Here is an especially fine passage:

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. Socratic notions of gratitude or Jamesian notions of infinite indebtedness are not necessary for this love. In the sport, where aristocrats used to play their games, elites now mobilize groups or masses to slaughter each other. Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

Now, I know a lot of folks think there is a kind of benign patriotism that is centered on the celebration of the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and the culture that values them. Maybe. But go to GOPAC and tell me that the patriotism of liberal principles, and not the vulgar “highest kind of team sports” eagles and bunting and wiretaps version, is the most salient incarnation of patriotism in America.

Hey, political theory geeks! This month’s Cato Unbound should be pretty sweet. Here’s the editorial summary of Anthony de Jasay’s lead essay, “Government, Bound or Unbound?“:

Reprising the topic of his 1989 essay, “Is Limited Government Possible?” political theorist Anthony de Jasay continues to express limited skepticism. According to de Jasay, the incentive of political actors is to gain power by putting together winning coalitions, and to stay in power by rewarding their supporters at the expense of their opponents. If constitutional limits stand in their way, they will eventually be reinterpreted, undermined, or otherwise worked around. Governments are more delayed than limited by constitutional rules, like a lady with the key to her own chastity belt. If governments are effectively limited, de Jasay argues, then it is by means of the structure of campaign finance, the practical limits on tax rates, and public panic at the prospect of economic ruin. De Jasay admits conventional cultural and moral norms may limit government, but doubts these are strong enough to fully check the interests that drive politics.

It’s long, but very worthwhile. Stay tuned for University of Arizona political philosopher Gerald Gaus, author of On Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Michael Munger, chair of the Duke University political science department; and Randy Barnett, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution.