But who’s actually banning alcohol? Who’s banning nukes? Even tobacco isn’t being banned: it’s only the infliction of tobacco smoke on unwilling non-smokers that has been subjected to anything like a draconian criminalization (and quite rightly, IMO. If smokers would only come up with some kind of apparatus that would let them smoke in public places while using technological wizardry to whisk away their smoke into a receptacle so the rest of us don’t have to breathe it, I’d be out on the barricades the next day demanding immediate repeal of smoking bans).
There are lots of vocal “anti” extremists on every issue from owning guns to drinking alcohol to eating meat. That doesn’t mean that we should make all controversial behaviors a “right” to protect them from the fanatical anti’s.
Hell, the fanatical anti’s got much closer to totally banning alcohol than they’ve ever got or are likely to get to totally banning guns, yet we alcohol drinkers aren’t trying to deploy the Constitution as a shield against their further assaults. Are you telling me that we wine snobs have more courage than you gun owners when it comes to upholding our preferences in custom and law on their own merits, rather than invoking an obsolete application of the concept of “inalienable right” to help us out?
You just can’t read or something. If the gun is not pointed at you, you are not at “gunpoint”. And when I was being held up, just like they say, everything went into slow motion. And in my case it was because my mind was racing. I was going over the possibilities. What could I do. I was watching to see if that gun came back up and I was ready to at least try to fight back.
And I know that if I had pulled a gun out of my jacket pocket I could have emptied it into the perps face. He couldn’t have reacted fast enough to save himself.
Never attribute to accuracy what can be explained by paranoia. I’m with you. I’ll check out your linked cite later when I have more time to read through it.
Today? Well, the temperance movement has kind of run it’s course at this point, but that wasn’t the case in the past. Prohibition and all that. And it COULD happen again, if the winds of change blew through the country again. I think Prohibition is a good example though…it wasn’t a large majority of Americans who wanted to ban alcohol…it was a very vocal and dedicated minority that was able to push it through. And they could do so because, as noted, alcohol wasn’t and isn’t protected under the Constitution. I think personal firearms would follow a similar trajectory, at least in the short term assuming the 2nd could be struck down.
Nukes have effectively been banned, at least from the perspective of new nuclear power plants, in the US for several decades now. And the political hurtles that would need to be overcome to turn that around would be pretty formidable, IMHO. It could happen…and, maybe it will (hell, it would be nice if we could simply complete the freaking STORAGE facility in Nevada as a starting point), but it would be an uphill struggle. I think the same trajectory would play out in personal gun ownership if the 2nd were struck down as ‘an anachronism’. YMMV of course.
Not yet, no…but I’ve watched this issue for the past several decades and it’s clear we are moving towards tighter and tighter controls of tobacco and an eventual ban. It’s more an academic topic for me, since I’m a very casual smoker (an occasional cigar…maybe one or two a month, at most), but for folks who use the product and want to continue it’s become increasingly difficult and expensive. Now, you may say ‘well, that’s as it should be’, but ISTM that this could be said about anything…anything that one doesn’t personally care a lot about. Pick something you DO care about, then consider how you’d feel if it were banned. Now, pick something you care about that a large number of people DO want to ban it, and think about how you’d feel if that thing you cared about was protected by the Constitution…and then those protections were removed and it was open to all those folks who wanted to ban it.
Well, except when they ARE protected rights and someone is trying to change that…and doing so, in the past, not through Constitutional means but through back channels and redefinitions. I actually feel better about this attempt to say that the 2nd is ‘an anachronism’ and that the Amendment should be struck down on that basis because, frankly, it implies actually attempting to modify or even eliminate the Amendment through the mechanisms in place to do so…instead of the tactics that were tried in the past to do an end run around the Constitution and the will of the people. If the anti-gun folks can convince a large majority of the American people that the 2nd is ‘an anachronism’, and they do manage to strike down the Amendment through Constitutional means, I will be unhappy, but I’ll certainly go along with it, as I do with other decisions my fellow citizens make that I disagree with.
But, you see, they DID deploy the Constitution to try and ban alcohol…and then it was redeployed to strike down that ban by striking down the ban on alcohol. I could easily see something similar happening if the 2nd were struck down…the ‘antis’ have at least as much political support as the temperance movement did. I could see something very similar happening in the entire trajectory of Prohibition, from a new Amendment effectively banning personal firearms.
As to courage, well…I’m willing to throw down any time the anti-gun types get the balls to ACTUALLY try and throw out the 2nd through Constitutional means. Bring it. I’d respect the anti-gun movement a hell of a lot more if they WOULD attempt to use Constitutional means to eliminate or modify the 2nd to take away the personal ownership option as a protected right. This whole ‘let’s ignore the intent of the folks who wrote the thing, and instead interpret it to be all about the militias’ is, to me, a load of horseshit…and speaks volumes about the ‘courage’ of the folks who use such tactics. We have the means, written right into the very fabric of our system, to modify the Constitution, BOR and any and all of the Amendments. If they are ‘an anachronism’, then the means exists to strike them down. So…strike away (not really talks to you here, Kimstu, or the OP either, as I don’t think you or, as I said, most of those joining in this debate are in that camp).
I suppose what I’m trying to say is: (and I often hate seeing this phrase thrown around) if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Anachronism or not. Is it necessary? Probably not, but like I said I don’t see the point in repealing it just to make it a law. And I of course do not think it should be repealed entirely, which is another reason I wouldn’t want it repealed, because it’d make it that much more vulnerable. The more rights the merrier. A constitutional right to buy food may not be needed, but if it was amended into the constitution I sure wouldn’t object it.
I agree, which is why I chimed in on this thread: if you think that legal gun ownership shouldn’t be a constitutional right, then speak up against its constitutional status, rather than against guns per se. Whether or not one personally likes guns is irrelevant to whether there exists or should exist a constitutional right to own them.
In fairness, though, I have to point out that using “it’s all about the militias” arguments to justify gun-control regulation is not a new tactic devised by gun-ban advocates. Rather, it was the standard American legal approach to the subject until the 1960’s or thereabouts, as the article I linked to above describes:
That didn’t fucking work when The Glorious Infallible Founders were still alive. Think that the whiskey tax had the “armed support” of the people? Fuck no, Washington had to send in the army, such as it was, to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. So much for the NRA wet dream that an armed populace could serve to stymie an oppressive government.
After 287 posts has it been noted that rising up against the government is only one reason to be armed? That one isn’t very applicable these days but if some influental people are effective in getting others to take it to the streets being armed may be handy.
Washington led members of several state militias, composed of citizen volunteers. To the extent that they didn’t take the protesters’ side and tell Washington to go screw himself (like in L. Neil Smith’s Gallatin alternate history), the issue was indeed decided by by an armed citizenry. Ditto the Civil War when the northern public supported- or at a minimum, acquiesced to- being drafted under the fed’s militia authority to suppress the rebellion. World War Two was the last time civilians wholeheartedly agreed to serve under arms. In the Korean war the public quickly tired of an apparently futile stalemate and during Vietnam flatly revolted.
There’s a huge difference between citizen soliders, even summarily drafted conscripts, and professional soldiers who make shooting whoever the government tells them to their vocation. You only need to look at the history of Latin America to see what happens when a large standing army becomes a player within a country’s internal politics.
I agree with XT that it’s disingenuous to regard guns as just another kind of property, which shouldn’t have any special protection. The “right” could be more broadly worded as the right of the people to possess the means of deadly force, or the right to not be made helpless against imposed authority.
The Civil War had many examples of the classic militia model: units formed of local men, led by a local officer, and with uniforms and weapons they provided themselves. I always thought the Zouave units looked rather dashing. There were still militia units during the Spanish American war, though one famous one had an influential leader who managed to get them partially armed with government owned weapons. It wasn’t until WWI that they finally disappeared from American battlefields.
But the (eventual) public opposition to the Korean and Vietnam Wars was expressed in protest and electorally, not by force of citizen arms. As noted in the article I quoted above, very few people except Black Panthers were even thinking about private gun ownership in terms of “defending our freedoms” in those days. And since then, we’ve had no “citizen soldiers” at all, in the sense either of a mustered militia or of conscripted civilians, for almost forty years here in the US.
The only military force we’ve had for going on half a century is precisely the “professional soldiers who make shooting whoever the government tells them to their vocation”. Yet we’re not currently controlled by a Latin-American-style military junta, and don’t seem likely to be.
So nothing in your argument is persuading me that an armed citizenry is still useful in any pragmatic way for protecting against encroachments by the government upon popular freedoms. That battleship has sailed long ago.
Consequently, AFAICT the argument about “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” has become, as the OP notes, an anachronism.
Like I said, the fact that private gun ownership no longer serves an essential civic purpose in providing for national defense does not mean that private gun ownership is a bad thing. But I think it’s time to face reality about its changing role, rather than clinging to patriotic fantasies of a sentimentalized past.
First of all, Washington didn’t lead anyone. He sent an army made up of members of several state militias. This well-regulated militia was no more the armed citizenry than the present-day National Guard is.
“Disingenuous”? How you figure? You certainly can disagree with the position that guns shouldn’t have any more special protection than other kinds of property, but I don’t see why it should be considered disingenuous.
Unless you’re just already convinced that anybody arguing for that position must be lying, which doesn’t seem particularly conducive to debate.
I’d oppose enshrining any “right” of that form in the Constitution too. The reality of the modern state with its standing army is that it can overpower (any small subset of) its civilian citizens by military force if it so chooses, and that’s not going to change. I see no useful purpose in seeking constitutional sanction for merely ramping up the firepower required for the state to crush civilians effectively.
We can hope so; if you’ve ever read the history of how the old Roman citizen militia gradually became replaced after the Punic Wars by the professional Legions, the analogy is alarming. When the four vocations left in a country become rich property owner, menial servant, unemployed citizen on welfare, and career soldier, the country has reached the brink. Numerous commentators have noted the widening culture gap between the people serving as career soliders and the rest of the country. If our soldiers ever stop thinking of themselves as the same people as the “civvies”, look out. Right now about the most hopeful thing is that a lot of the US armed force, especially long-term logistical support, has been moved to the National Guard units which are still manned by part-time volunteers.
I’m with you. I’ll check out your linked cite later when I have more time to read through it.