Blatant inconsistency: Voter ID vs. gun background checks

The last three months have brought two major battles over forcing people to show identification.

The first came in the run-up to November's election. Some folks argued that voter-ID requirements were a relatively simple and painless way to prevent voter fraud. Others argued that such requirements posed an incredible burden on voting stations and on valid voters who, for entirely legitimate reasons, lacked any ID. Furthermore, voter-ID opponents argued that such laws would even scare off voters who ID but felt intimidated by the process.

This month, people are making almost exactly the same laws for and against regulations that would require background checks before gun purchases.

Oddly, however, the people who argued for voter ID measures tend to be the ones who argue against the background checks, and vice versa.

Perhaps there is a philosophically consistent way to come to a different moral stance on these two issues, but I cannot see it.

The right to vote and the right to bear arms are both fundamental guarantees, fully protected by the Constitution. Most people, intuitively, would likely say the right to vote is far more important to a functional society than the right to bear arms — indeed, many would argue that the right to bear arms works against a functional society — but the fact remains that they both get equal protection from the nation's most important legal document and, unless you think you have the votes to amend the Constitution on either point, you have to live with that.

Thus, at bottom, the moral issue is this: either you think that — in order to prevent people from undermining society by exercising rights they lack (or have lost) — it's acceptable to demand that citizens identify themselves in verifiable ways before they exercise their Constitutional rights.

Ah well. I suppose I should not be too surprised. This is, after all, a country where the people who fight hardest for smokers' rights are the ones who want to keep sending marijuana users to jail but where the people who want to legalize marijuana want to send cigarette smokers to jail.