When gun-control advocates convinced the major media only to report on cases where guns had been used by criminals, the insane, and the irresponsible to cause injury and mayhem, they’d already won their public-policy case to reduce the availability of guns in private hands. What rational person wants to arm violent sociopaths?

It was only when advocates of defensive rights hounded the media with both real-life cases and criminological studies showing that successful defensive gun uses far outnumbered gun misuse — that gun control was unilateral disarmament not of the predator but of the victim — that the public-policy tide shifted in favor of preserving the individual right to keep and bear arms.

A TV commercial when I was growing up asked me to debate the issue of whether cartoon rabbits had a right to eat sugary-coated dry cereals or whether “Trix is for kids.”

So the key question facing the voters of Maine in their referendum Tuesday — in which like every state that has put the question on the ballot they voted “Nay!” — was whether same-sex couples are a minority being denied a civil right to marry, or whether gay-marriage proponents are a special interest using legislatures and courts to overrule a popular consensus that marriage requires one-each penis and vagina.

I’m a libertarian. I don’t want government telling anyone past the age of consent whom they can love, with whom they can live, who is their family for legal purposes, or what they can do with their private parts. Individual liberty does not mean one only has the right to live as a hermit; it includes the right to form bonds with others.

But individual liberty also means the right to disagree.

Your freedom of speech doesn’t mean I have to listen to you. Your freedom of the press doesn’t mean I have to buy your newspaper. Your freedom of association doesn’t mean you have the right to be my friend. And your right to life doesn’t mean you have a claim check to make me feed you, take you into my home, or nurse you to health.

The greatness of the American Civil Rights movement was that it brought about a paradigm shift in how people looked at each other. Perhaps the most eloquent speech of the twentieth century was when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., told us, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

The evil of the American Civil Rights movement was when it departed from the individualism in King’s speech, and instead embraced the very collectivism King opposed: judging people not by the content of their character but as special interests defined by their race, color, creed, national origin, gender, and gender preference.

It’s not an accident that this happened. Julius Caesar conquered France by getting the locals to distrust each other and trust only Rome. Politicians today are still using Caesar’s playbook of divide and conquer, setting the rich against the poor, management versus labor, the healthy against the sick, minorities versus majorities.

Listen to Jesse Connolly of the pro-gay-marriage group Protect Maine Equality after a majority of Maine voters overturned the state’s gay marriage law forced on them by Maine politicians: “”We’re in this for the long haul. For next week, and next month, and next year until all Maine families are treated equally.”

Jesse Connolly doesn’t care what the people of Maine think. To him, marriage is a civil right and he’s happy to thwart democracy to achieve it. Not being a proponent of democracy, myself, I am not entirely unsympathetic to Mr. Connolly’s point of view. Democracy has been described as the wolves giving the sheep a vote on what’s for dinner.

But as a libertarian who wants a society in which both my right to associate and the right to be left alone is respected, I have a problem when freedom is not on the menu.

If the only choice is between the power of the majority as expressed through democratic voting — or power blocs of special interests arrogantly overruling majorities by gaming the system — which side am I supposed to support?

Gay-rights advocates do well when they follow Dr. King’s lead and help us to see them not as stereotypes but as individuals.

But when gays make us see them as an arrogant special interest who think the straight majority are ignorant boobs that need to be conquered by political force, then they’re just one more damned lobby out for themselves.

That’s how to lose the debate.

2. Enact a twenty-year sunset for all currently existing federal departments, agencies, bureaus, military bases on foreign soil, taxes, tariffs, foreign treaties and federal regulations, and thereafter every federal department, agency, bureau, military base on foreign soil, tax, tariff, foreign treaty, and regulation shall automatically sunset every ten years.

3. Outlaw any privately owned entity or corporation from usurping a power granted by the Constitution of the United States to Congress or the President.

4. Require that every ten years the approval of a majority of state legislatures shall be required to renew the continuation of every federal department, military base on foreign soil, federal tax, and foreign treaty.

Look, I know I’ve said, written, and done things that are pretty hard to take at face value.

Years ago a cousin of mine — a distinguished neurologist — told my parents my libertarian beliefs indicated a serious need for psychiatric intervention. This cousin was not only a rich doctor who’d expanded his fortune as an inventor and entrepreneur — when we visited him he was living in a Pacific Palisades mansion — but politically he was a communist. Maybe my cousin the doctor was right in thinking I was crazy since I was a flat-broke writer arguing to a wealthy communist the superiority of capitalism.

A lot of people thought I was crazy when I thought that of all the novel manuscripts written, my first novel would get published — in hardcover, no less.

People thought I was crazy when I suggested as far back as 1987 that pretty soon what we call a “book” wouldn’t be made out of nice-smelling paper, ink, and binding; you wouldn’t browse for it at a store; and it would be something you downloaded and either read on a screen or printed out, yourself.

A lot of people thought I was out of my mind when I wrote a book taking seriously the idea that O.J. Simpson didn’t knife to death his ex-wife and the nice Jewish boy who was returning her mother’s forgotten eyeglasses.

Other people thought I was crazy when another of my books seriously suggested that people who don’t own guns are the cause of crime.

I’d spent years and years hanging out with atheists who were certain I was out of my mind when I finally told them I’d had a psychic revelation from God … then I was only slightly more surprised when I found out that even people who tell me they believe in God are for the most part just as convinced that I’m crazy.

But what am I supposed to do with a Bill Maher who makes a documentary showing how nutty people who believe in God are, then turns around and without even a psychic episode to back it up then makes fun of people who don’t share his faith in global warming or expansive government?

How am I to take seriously the sanity of people who believe in God only because they read about God in the Bible — or heard about God from other people who read about God in the Bible … or people who decide God can’t possibly exist because the only people they’ve met who say they believe in God base their beliefs on these sorts of fiftieth-hand rumors?

In my own current business — I made a movie which I’m trying to get into commercial distribution — I constantly run into movie execs who tell me audiences won’t be interested in seeing my movie because I don’t have an “A-list star” in it. Leave out for a moment how insanely famous the star of my movie is from appearing in the #1 cult TV series of all time. When I point out to these geniuses that one of the top-grossing movies at the moment was made for $11,000 and didn’t have a single name actor in it, it doesn’t change their minds. Neither does giving them a list of A-list-star driven movies that tanked. They still won’t consider distributing an indie movie unless it has an “A list” star.

I believe that government doesn’t work, that the Los Angeles Police Department needed to rent a clue in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and that a more compelling case can be made for the existence of eternal consciousness than for carbon footprints.

But the truth is that the health-care system favored by conservatives is only marginally less government-run than the public option and must-buy health insurance favored by progressives.

All medical practitioners — physicians, surgeons, dentists, nurses, etc. — must be licensed by state and local governments, and approved by the federal government if they are to receive reimbursement for their services from Medicare.

All hospitals and clinics must also be government licensed, with additional licenses for teaching hospitals.

All degrees awarded by medical schools are only valid if they’re issued by medical schools approved by state-sanctioned medical boards.

Doctors may only prescribe pharmaceuticals or medical devices approved by the FDA — that is if they’re not on lists of substances prohibited by law from being prescribed at all, and providing them gets one a visit from the DEA.

Flu epidemics exist or not by a decision made by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also approves or disapproves of the vaccines to treat them.

An entire department of the Federal government is devoted to regulating “Health and Human Services.”

Finally, fifteen percent of the U.S. population — those 65 or older or declared disabled — are already enrolled in fully-socialized “public option” government health insurance through Medicare and Medicaid — and as high as a third of the U.S. population have at times been eligible for 100% U.S.-government-run health care provided through the Veterans Administration.

So Fox News and right-wing radio pundits ranting that President Obama and the Democratic Party want to bring socialized medicine to America is not only hypocritical and ignorant of history. It’s just obliviously silly.

I’m 56 years old, and I have never drawn a breath when my health care wasn’t fully regulated by — often paid for by, and sometimes directly operated by — the government, at one level or another.

It’s undeniable that expanding government health insurance to those under 65 who aren’t veterans or disabled — and forcing healthy people to buy healthcare policies to lower premiums for those with preexisting illnesses — is indeed moving in the direction of universal single-payer health care.

But to argue that President Obama and the Democrats want to bring us socialized medicine ignores the obvious.