That's a misrepresentation of gun control. There may be certain individuals who'd prefer to do away with the second amendment but as a group, gun control supporters are more about making sure guns are owned and used responsibly. What you said was such an oversimplification and oversimplification or "bumper sticker politics" is what's wrong with political discourse in the US. Without getting into a whole gum control debate I'll just say I think we can all get behind keeping guns out of the hands of known criminals, the mentally unstable,
The Supreme Court has ruled that the 2nd Amendment confers the right to keep and bear arms on individual Americans.
Interpreting the 2nd Amendment, as many politicians still do, in a way that nullifies it ("I believe in the 2nd Amendment but not that it applies to individuals") is indistinguishable from believing in its abolition, and no different in theory than supporting the abolition of any other part of the Bill of Rights.
I have no issue with people who seek a constitutional amendment to remove the 2nd Amendment. I do have an issue with people who favour gun control measures that have been ruled by the Supreme Court as violations of the 2nd Amendment but still claim to support the Bill of Rights.
Americans have an individual, inalienable and fundamental right to possess firearms. This is not my opinion, it is the opinion of the highest court in the land, and the only body with the constitutional authority to decide this issue. If you disagree, you do not support the Bill of Rights in its entirety.
Your strawman arguments about things that are already illegal and have never been in dispute (did the NRA have a "let convicted felons own guns" campaign I missed?) may not be bumper sticker politics but that is only because they are verbosely misleading rather than concisely so.
"Shutting down freedom of speech, indefinite detention, arbitrary expropriation are authoritarian. A non-flat tax is not."
I'm not talking about taxes now. I'm talking about what taxes would be if the left had it their way (much higher), which in my mind, is authoritarian. Take a look at every single hard-left country in Europe: taxes are astonishingly high and the government has much more control over citizens' daily lives.
When lots of people are dependent on the government through large social nets, they will almost never vote against the hand that feeds them.
As you go too far right or left, you meet in the the same place and it's something I really don't want running my life.
Taxes are important, but we need to have a balance.
In politics especially, it takes a constant struggle to keep in mind that words have actual meanings. They're not just matters of opinion, and "authoritarian" isn't just a gussied up way of saying "ewww gross!" about a political matter or position. It is a real word with a real meaning and a real history.
Consider, for instance, the Kirkpatrick doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkpatrick_Doctrine). It's possible to debate the plausibility and soundness of it as a foreign policy principle, but that's because authoritarian has a real meaning beyond "ANTI FREEDOM!! (TM)". It has to do with how the center of political power interacts with its opposition, particularly in contrast to how totalitarian states do so.
Note that the countries which had the greatest amount of government intervention in the economy and actually did take a bunch of guns from people are very explicitly not authoritarian: they're used in contrast to the authoritarian states of (mostly) Latin America, which were hardly high-tax or anti-gun.
It sounds like you would regard any form of taxation as authoritarian. I'd like to know of a system of taxation that _doesn't_ "[force] one group of people to pay more taxes than another..." for one motivation or another.
Though really, higher or lower taxes are in practice beside the point. Whether it's the government, or the employer, most people will never be financially independent and will always find themselves beholden to whichever hand --government or boss-- feeds them.
I argue that if our ultimate goal was financial independence for each and every citizen as opposed to partisan quips about "job creation" and "taxation" and "regulation" then we wouldn't have any major concerns about those things to begin with. They'd be non-issues; ancillary concerns rather than concepts at the forefront of everyone's minds. Precisely because every player has the capital necessary to make a sufficient stand for themselves.
For some reason though I don't think most would approve of such a citizenry.
scarmig is right. Authoritarian does not mean the existence of coercive laws and institutions, it is about how power is distributed and the manner in which is it exercised.
If a given tax regime has democratic support, collecting the tax will be coercive but the institutions that collect it need not be authoritarian.
Shutting down freedom of speech, indefinite detention, arbitrary expropriation are authoritarian. A non-flat tax is not.
Not that the "left," insofar as it exists in the federal government, is consistently much better on those issues.