What was it that some leftist said at the UN conference on gun control after the Brazilians defeated the proposed gun ban? "Some things are too important for a democracy to decide."
For an excellent explantion of the fundamental differences between liberal and conservative thought (and by "thought," I don't just mean what we think, but why we think it), read A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. Constrained thinkers (that's us) and unconstrained thinkers (libs) view the world in fundamentally different ways. Sowell places the two "visions" (which are basically gut feelings about how the world works) side-by-side and explains why each one leads to the conclusions it does.
It's not quite as easy a read as most of Sowell's other work, but it's great if you want to understand the basics of human political thought. Everything comes down to how we view cause-and-effect relationships.