A nice theory, but what it gets you in reality is massacres. Personal firearms are useless against an oppressive state, but great for killing other citizens. Especially when the oppressive government approves of the killing.
An armed populace results in random killings, lots of suicide, murderous mobs, and death squads. Not a glorious revolution against the oppressor. Which is why it’s the authoritarians who are so enthusiastic for the Second Amendment. It doesn’t protect anybody from them, but makes it much easier to delegate the job of murdering undesirables and to excuse government violence.
If you were talking about mass shootings, I would agree with you. When the Second Amendment was written, I don’t think the signatories envisioned how much carnage a single person could cause with a semiautomatic weapon like an AR-15.
But massacres? They don’t require firearms at all. I was just reading about the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572*, which resulted in thousands of deaths, but all by the sword or throwing people out of windows. No firearms needed.
My point is that modern firearms may or may not be useful against a tyrannical government. And they are a huge factor in deadly mass shootings. But when a mob is involved they don’t need firearms to commit atrocities.
*Which came up by going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole after reading about the French political philosopher Jean Bodin mentioned in my OP.
They make massacres much more efficient, however. Death squads can kill far more people with guns than they can with melee weapons, more safely, and with much less in the way of training. You can’t kill everyone in a crowd from across the street with clubs and knives.
The point in the eighteenth century when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was ratified was that keeping the ability to be armed in the hands of the people was a hedge against tyranny.
That’s what I was saying was unusual; most governments appropriate the monopoly on violence and then if the populace (“the People”) are subsequently disarmed for some reason, then they don’t have any recourse against a tyrannical government. So the writers of the Bill of Rights explicitly kept that portion of that monopoly on violence in the hands of the People as the Constitution was being formed. It’s unusual compared to other countries.
I’m not arguing for or against gun control here or the present-day utility of small arms vs. an organized military force, I’m just saying that it was and is unusual for a country to, in its foundational documents, explicitly let the People retain a piece of the monopoly on violence.
The Hutu militias certainly did plenty of murdering and massacring with only machetes. Any tool can be a weapon in the hands of an angry and resentful person.
What has really changed since the late 1700s is that although the lethality of modern firearms has gone up vastly vs then, the lethality of a real modern military has gone up a thousandfold more.
The intent of the Founders was as @bump says; to retain to the citizens the ability to overthrow their government if necessary. Both by keeping citizens armed and by ensuring the government never developed a significant standing military. And back then, the collateral risk of the citizens misusing their anti-tyrannical tools was small enough to ignore.
Time has utterly invalidated all of that. So here we sit with unforeseen problems and unintended consequences galore while the original intent is useless. And of course we know our founding documents can’t realistically be altered due to the overly restrictive conditions put on the change process.
Such that we now see the only way to alter them is to simply ignore them, drop them on the floor, and stomp on them with a gilded but shit-covered boot. With a diamond “T” encrusted on the shaft.
Massacres typically are committed against the unarmed. Didn’t the victims in any of the massacres cited fight back?
This. I doubt the Founders envisioned an armed populace AND a gigantic standing military that they might have to contend with. The idea was that “a well-regulated militia” would suffice for the USA’s legitimate defensive needs. But as so frequently happens, whenever a formerly small weak nation becomes successful it starts getting into the empire business. It happened with the ancient Israelites who clamored for a king, it happened with the Roman republic and it happened with the American republic. I believe that in the USA the turning point was 1898, when after having conquered the territory contiguous to the homeland the USA annexed Hawaii and won the Spanish-American War. Citizens’ militia are fine if you’re defending the walls of a city, less so if you’re defending the frontiers of an empire.
ETA:
Admittedly the Founders could not have envisioned “indirect fire”– over-the-horizon artillery and aerial bombing. “Death From the Sky”, that can obliterate any force unable to respond in kind. George Orwell said as much when in his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” he pointed out the contrast between inherently democratic weapons and inherently tyrannical weapons, with bombing planes firmly in the latter category.
I argue this has less to do with expansionism and more with the evolution of a standing, professional army, which coincidentally occurred around the time we began pursuing empire-building.
With the advent of long-range artillery, missile systems, electronic warfare, aerial combat, etc, a hastily formed militia cannot perform nearly to the same standard as a dedicated professional army unit. Carrying a rifle and pulling security is one thing, but can you imagine Bob from the Wal-Mart suddenly having to fly a fighter jet or operate a HIMAR?
The question is, where does this ‘legitimacy’ come from?
In my more cynical moments I have remarked that ‘the government is just the biggest protection racket in town’.
This is not necessarily all that bad: at least it keeps the lesser warlords somewhat in check…
And a smart protection racket realizes that it is more profitable to maintain an ongoing asset stream from its ‘clients’ (as taxes), rather than just stealing everything they have right now and then shooting them…
At least in the case of the Israelis where almost every able-bodied adult has to undergo actual military training, I presume that their civilian reservists include a substantial number of people trained in one or more MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)'s.
What do the Finns do? I understand that they take citizen preparedness for a Russian invasion highly seriously, but I don’t know any details.
That actual military training and MOS designation is carried out by a standing army organization. Reservists I’d argue are completely different than militiamen.
The former is a professionally trained soldier 10% of the time, and a regular civilian 90% of the time, and those percentages can flip on a whim in times of war. The latter is a regular person with little or no training of any kind, armed with whatever weaponry they personally own.
Which again comes back to historical changes that the FF in essence assumed could never occur.
The professionalism of the best armies in the 1770s was a fraction of what it is today. A raggedy militia didn’t need any training beyond basic firearms operation to be within spitting distance of the training level of most (not all) organized militaries of the day.
The British were famously one of the better armies of the era in terms of skill and discipline of the lowly troopers. And still the Colonial militias fared decently against them in most battles.
Fast forward to now. That balance of skill & power is not even remotely still true.
Maybe. I don’t want to go off on a tangent over the Second Amendment (which can happen all too easily) but there are different possible interpretations of what was intended.
The Second Amendment refers to “a well-regulated militia”. I feel it can be argued that the writers of the Second Amendment saw a constitutionally armed group of people as an instrument through which the government carried out its use of force.
American myth about the minutemen notwithstanding, even in the 18th century, a militia was really no match for a professional army. George Washington himself had little regard for the militia as a military force.
I don’t feel that this was really the case. Washington and other officers frequently complained that the militia troops weren’t up to the standards of regular army troops. He told Congress that the Americans couldn’t win using civilian soldiers and needed a regular army like the British were using.
I’m not sure the point was for the militia to fight and win vs. a professional army straight up in the field, but just be a force-in-being that changes the equation as far as whether something is worth doing- invasion, tyranny, etc… in the face of having that around.
And from that perspective, a militia or an armed and angry populace could very well cause a lot of trouble and make trying to impose tyrannical rule on someone very difficult, or in the case of maybe incomplete military support for the tyranny, even something that could overthrow it.
One complication to the situation in the early United States was that the 1787 constitution established that the federal government was to have a monopoly on foreign relations, and that especially the federal government alone was to determine if the several states were conducting armed hostilities with a foreign power. To that end the states were forbidden not just the right but the actual capacity to independently pursue their own foreign policies: they were forbidden to keep “troops” and “ships of war” in peacetime.
That said, no one was willing to trust the federal government with a monopoly on military force. So the dilemma was that the states needed something like an army but not actually an army. The result was the quasi-civilian militia forces; and I for one would like a cognizant explanation of exactly how one distinguishes between a permanent state army filled by conscription and the mandatory muster of civilians in armed service; that is, exactly how do you distinguish between militia and troops? The waters were further muddied by the fact that the mass of the populace regarded militia duty as a pain in the butt, like jury duty only worse, and would have regarded universal mandatory drilling as an attempt to regiment the population under military control. So the states rapidly came to depend upon a select militia, those volunteers who stepped forward for regular training and were something in-between state police and a pre-federal National Guard.
Sure they did. Doesn’t help when you are outnumbered.
Not really. Saddam Hussein didn’t bother with gun control and held onto power just fine until the US conquest of Iraq. It was the US that forced gun control on Iraq, ironically enough.
Assuming that’s the case, then how does eliminating civilian possession of guns change the equation? You seem to be presuming that the aggressors will always avail themselves of guns and that the victims will almost never do. Sure a minority can always be overwhelmed but wouldn’t an armed minority put a higher price on their lives– enough to make even an equally armed majority think twice?