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"The Second Amendment is about revolution."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/7/4/881431/-Why-liberals-should-love-the-Second-Amendment
I am the choir. I do not understand liking anti-gun laws.
I am the choir. I do not understand liking anti-gun laws.
Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)
I believe the difficulty the US has had with insurgents in the middle-east, and the IRA, have been ample evidence to the contrary. Tanks are useless against a target you cannot find.
Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)
The mujahedeen (and later Al Qa'eda) and the Taliban did in fact have lots of guns at their disposal in their fight against the Soviets and later against us. They didn’t get them because the constitution of the puppet communist Afghan state guaranteed them guns so they could overthrow their oppressors, they got them because they were a more or less organized fighting force and we and our NATO allies and the Pakistanis and the Saudis gave them to them. That’s a very different sort of situation from the notion of Americans deciding taxes are too high or something and using violence or the threat of violence against the U.S. government, with means protected by the U.S. Constitution, to overthrow the government.
We already have a means of changing the behaviour of the government; it’s called an election. If you say that elections are imperfect, I will certainly not argue. But when my local police and judiciary are deciding whether to support my right to freedom of speech or of conscience, I’d prefer for them to be wondering how far they can go in upholding the law before they get voted out of office than how far they can go in upholding the law before they get killed. Plenty of people in Jim Crow lynch mobs had guns.
I don’t mean to say that guns can only be used to subjugate and never to defend, just that if you’re counting on the Second Amendment to enforce all the rest, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be used to destroy all the rest instead.
Backing up a bit, guns (handguns and longarms) are a particular piece of technology from a particular era in human history. To my mind, enshrining a right of access to a particular tool like that is a bit like enshrining the right of unfettered access to movable metal type and hand-operated wooden printing presses. (Sure, New York Times, you can print anything you like, if you typeset and print it by hand; here in America we have freedom of the press!) Or if the right of freedom of religion enumerated all the religions you were allowed to have. (Sorry, Bahá'ís, I don’t see you listed here; have you considered Mahometanism or the Hindoo faith? Or of course, Deism is awfully popular!) Or if the Full Faith and Credit Clause applied only to accurate copies of documents written with a goose quill. (I’m sorry, Massachusetts drivers licenses aren’t valid here in Rhode Island. I don’t know what the Mass RMV is thinking, not giving people proper parchment licenses!)
I’m sort of conceding the point here that the Second Amendment was intended to protect the ability to revolt. (In the context of the early years of the Federal constitution, that would have been the ability of the new states to revolt against the federal government more than the ability of citizens to revolt against any level of government.) But I think it’s a very dated and broken and counterproductive way to do it.
(And I don’t really want to concede that point, despite my own intuitions about the situations of the Framers, because there’s been more than a century of admittedly controversial jurisprudence by some pretty smart people who thought that that was not what the Second Amendment was for and that the Second Amendment was not incorporated by the Fourteenth, and I know next to nothing about all that legal history. But it certainly seems plausible that people who, or whose friends, had been shooting at redcoats in recent memory might have thought that the ability to shoot at people in uniforms was a thing worth enshrining in the Constitution.)
Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)
Yes, but the point is, in response to:
"...in the 18th century, firearms were a credible deterrent to a despotic government. In the 21st, they aren’t...."
Counter-insurgency is hard. A despot had better fear small arms in the hands of a large percentage of the people.
Re: One person’s notion of the point of restrictions on gun ownership. (part 3)
But in any case, I don’t think that you would disagree with the claim that the power differential between a citizenry with firearms and the military of a powerful nation was much much smaller in the 18th century than it is in the 21st. (And it was even smaller in the 16th, and will presumably be even greater in the 22d.) So if the point of the Second Amendment is to guarantee that the people can overthrow their government by violence if that government does enough things they don’t like, its effectiveness is definitely decreasing over time. (Unless you argue that citizens, alone or in unofficial groups, are entitled by the Second Amendment to the same kind of weapons the government has access to, but I don’t think anybody on this thread is arguing that. Although I wonder what the Founders would have thought of World War I technology.)