When Right-Wingers Say "Freedom," They Really Mean "Risk"

There is no more frequently used word on the political right than “freedom.” It justifies permissive gun laws, laissez-fair economic policies and, somehow, book bans. It’s tempting to see such mass application as proof that a word has become meaningless. But I think what’s really going on is that “freedom” has a stealth meaning for many on the right, one many of them are not even conscious of, but the horrifying results are all around us.

I’ve been thinking about what right-wingers mean when they say “freedom” partly because I’ve been researching and writing about gun culture for a few years now. But what crystalized freedom’s meaning for me was the COVID-19 mask debate. In short, when pro-gunnies or anti-maskers say “freedom,” what they really mean is “risk.” Specifically, bodily risk to your physical well-being or even your life. A close look at right-wing uses of “freedom” and the results of policies that worldview has ushered in shows that a sizable portion of the US population conflates freedom and physical risk. When they complain of their freedoms being trampled, what they’re really protesting is someone curtailing their ability to put themselves and others at greater risk.

There’s a funny thing that happens in gun culture where behaviors that are objectively risky get identified with safety and freedom. One major example is walking around in your daily life with a gun, which is constantly touted in pro-gun circles as a way to exercise your freedom and protect yourself and others from harm. I’ll come back to the “freedom” piece, but because attaching a gun to your body significantly increases your chances of taking a bullet, the only way doing so makes life safer is if you were at some special risk without the gun: you’re a woman with a violent ex who stalks you, or you’re often in public spaces with elevated crime rates. But those descriptions don’t fit most people who carry. According to veteran gun researchers Philip Cook and Kristin Goss, most carriers are white men in rural places (p. 22) where the biggest risk of getting shot is people turning their guns on themselves.

Something similar was going on in the mask debate. The objectively risky choice was identified with freedom, and the safer choice (from a health standpoint) was identified with weakness/wokeness/tyranny. While the risk of COVID lockdowns hurting communities economically was very real, and it’s at least plausible that masking among young kids and their teachers deprives them of necessary social interactions, masking in general isn’t particularly onerous or difficult, much less risky.  

So what’s going on? Is it just a matter of lots of people being empirically wrong about what’s risky and what isn’t? This is part of what’s happening, particularly with guns. From 1999 to 2016, rates of violent victimization in the U.S. roughly halved, from more than 40 per 1,000 people to around 20, while from 1999 to 2022 the number of people with concealed carry permits increased seven-fold, and the primary reason given for owning a gun has changed from “hunting” to “personal protection,” even as protection became less necessary. Most people who carry regularly elevate the risk of societal danger beyond reality while downplaying risks associated with gun-ownership like suicide, the leading cause of gun-related death in the rural places with the highest concentrations of gun-owners. In practice, this means most carriers prefer a high-risk lifestyle to a low-risk one, even as they say the opposite.

If your version of liberty is a life awash in firearms, then what you really mean by “freedom” is “risk.” But this semantic switcheroo is not simply a matter of being uninformed about the dangers of firearms; it’s also about being more scared of threats to your identity than threats to your life.

It’s logical to assume that someone who carries is trying to protect themselves from getting shot or otherwise violently attacked, and indeed this is the reason most would give if asked (hence “protection” being the top rationale for gun ownership). But sociologists studying carry culture find that what these men – and the vast majority who carry are men – are most afraid of is being dominated by another man or, at the societal level, the disappearance of a certain brand of traditional masculinity. In other words, what many men who carry are most concerned with defending is masculinity itself. That risk – the risk that they will be out-masculinized, or, in their eyes, feminized – outweighs the real bodily risks that come from living an armed life.

The mashup of freedom, risk and masculinity is very old, and in the US it’s also tied up with guns. Sociologist Scott Melzer coined the term “frontier masculinity” for the specific brand of manliness within the portion of the gun rights movement represented by the NRA. It is “[c]haracterized by rugged individualism, hard work, protecting and providing for families, and self-reliance.” It’s “the mythologized dominant version of manhood from America’s frontier past” (p. 16) – “mythologized” because it’s as much a product of Hollywood as of history, a fact chronicled at length by historian Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation. The archetypal act of American self-reliance, fed now by more than a century of cultural production, is carving out a life in a wilderness beset by all manner of threats, a place risky with weather, animals, arrows and bullets, but free from bureaucrats or speed limits or nutrition pyramids or vapor-reducing gas-can spouts. On the frontier, survival is hard. Threats are real. Those who manage to carve out a life and raise a family on their own terms have proven themselves in a way that is more true and real than is possible in nearly any other kind of life because of the risks. What’s the meaning of survival without threats?

But what happens when the frontier closes and life becomes ... actually pretty safe? If your definition of manliness requires bodily risk, then your manhood is threatened when those risks go away. Inventing new ones protects your masculinity but makes a violent death for yourself and others more likely, which makes carrying a gun more appealing to more people, a depressing and dangerous spiral of made-up and real risks. The spiral is accelerated by gun marketers and abetted by the insane legal theory, held nowhere else on the planet, that owning gun or even carrying one in public is not a special privelige granted to those who can prove their competence and need, but instead is a basic right of citizenship granted to every adult until they prove otherwise. This is where we are.

The ”freedom is risk” regime goes well beyond guns, with truly disastrous effects. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic recently gathered the data on the riskiness of life in the US. One simple but horrifying takeaway: In our late twenties and early thirties – arguably the prime of our lives in many ways – “the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations.” In the below chart, the x-axis is age, and the y-axis is likelihood of Americans’ death expressed as a multiple of other countries’ mortality rates. So at 1, our mortality rate is equal to theirs, at 2 it’s doubled, and so on. At every age until we reach our 80s, Americans are much more likely to die – and much more likely to die violently – than the residents of our peer countries.

One reason is guns. In the last few years, firearms became the top cause of death of American children, overtaking car accidents.

But another major factor is a lack of access to health care. I think it’s no coincidence that arguments against government-funded health care are framed in terms of freedom. The stated reason is that any form of socialism means an erosion of individual liberties. But these freedom-focused arguments are almost never grounded in specifics, and what the specifcs actually show is that American life is uniquely risky, and more widely available health care and less widely available guns could make it less so.

These risks – of getting hit by a bullet, of dying from an undiagnosed or untreated disease, of catching COVID while refusing to wear a mask – line up pretty squarely with policy choices preferred by right-leaning people and justified under the banner of freedom.

So what’s to be done? My field is rhetoric – not public policy, or medicine, or sociology or psychology. I study arguments. On that front, what we need to do is expose the right-wing version of freedom for what it really is: increased risk of death. And we need to reclaim freedom as the reduction of risk. People are more free when they aren’t fearing for their lives or walking around with a gun strapped to their bodies. We’re more free when we’re not beholden to our employer for health insurance, or chained to tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, or cowering under our desks in active shooter drills. American life is risky with bullets and sickness and debt, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be much, much more free.