Yes, there’s a silly positive fetishism about guns that sees them as intrinsically liberating objects, and liberals and leftists easily recognize and critique that attitude. But there’s also a silly negative fetishism, a noli me tangere attitude, that studiously ignores the fact, and its implications, that armed force is a fundamental element of the political state in which we all live, on which we depend, and from which some of us benefit more than others. That attitude is part, I think, of the casual “imaginary pacifism” that crops up repeatedly as a constituent of American liberal ideology.

Jim Kavanagh: The Rifle on the Wall: a Left Argument for Gun Rights