heinleinblog

You don’t have to be a libertarian to oppose gun control, but libertarians are strong defenders of Second Amendment rights.

RAH shared this libertarian perspective. According to letters included in Grumbles from the Grave (1989), the original draft of Red Planet (1949) included a lecture on the evils of gun registration. Heinlein’s editor balked and insisted on a rewrite.

He rewrote the passage into a lecture from father to son on the need for gun safety. Heinlein explored the possibility a world with absolutely no gun control in Beyond This Horizon (1942). In this tale, any person can go armed. Duels are a fact of life and are not considered crimes — as long as the other person was also an “armed citizen.” In other words, it the only gun control was self control and personal responsibility.

Horizon is not considered Heinlein’s best work, by far. Yet it introduced a favorite quote among libertarians: “An armed society is a polite society.”

Some believe that Heinlein’s views shifted to the right. Isaac Asimov — a close friend when RAH was married to first wife Leslyn — blamed this shift on the influence of Virginia Heinlein, his second wife.

The problem is that Horizon establishes Heinlein’s pro-gun viewpoint during a period in which Heinlein’s latter-day critics contend he was a liberal. This lends credence to the contention of Heinlein scholar Bill Patterson and others that Heinlein’s core beliefs shifted little or not at all, while the popular definition of “liberal” drifted far to the left, leaving Heinlein to be labeled a conservative.