I’ll bear it in mind. But that sounds as though the real crisis of concern here is not the dim future possibility of the total disarming of the private citizenry, but rather the present and ongoing professionalization of the military.
If that’s the threat we face, then why are you even here arguing over an individual right to private gun ownership, instead of out there demonstrating for the dismantling of the standing army and the restoration of volunteer citizen militias in its place? Seems like fiddling while Rome burns, to coin a phrase.
“Volunteers”? How you figure? The National Guard get paid for their service just like the rest of our professional military do.
Of course, the National Guard, like the rest of our professional military, voluntarily joined the service instead of being conscripted. But I thought that according to you, that was part of the problem: conscripts and volunteer militias are “citizen soldiers” while “professional soldiers” who freely decide to take soldiering jobs for pay are oppressive-juntas-in-embryo.
Because the justification for its status as a fundamental constitutional right—namely, its civic purpose in making provision for national defense in the absence of a standing army—is obsolete, since we now do have a standing army.
Consequently, the notion of gun ownership as a fundamental constitutional right has lost its original essential justification and is now an anachronism.
That doesn’t mean that gun ownership itself is an anachronism, of course, and AFAICT nobody here has been trying to argue that it is.
Nope, because the citizens no longer have that power in terms of comparative armament. The US military could take down any realistically-sized group of armed citizens (with the possible very hypothetical exception of some elite law enforcement personnel) without even breaking a sweat. Guns in the hands of private citizens are no longer any kind of credible threat to the professional army of the state.
The only practical, realistic control that citizens still have over the military these days is via their participation in electoral democracy, not via their weaponry. Consequently, treating individual ownership of weapons as a constitutional right is anachronistic.
Yet our magical military, which costs more than anyone else spends in the world was stymied by a far smaller force of poor under educated men in Afghanistan?
By what action does a cast ballot control a military junta?
Yup, for a variety of reasons that have little or no practical relevance to conditions that the US military would face in taking out a small band of armed rebels in the US.
For one thing, the Afghani/Taliban fighters have military-style (and in many cases military-issue) weapons such as rocket launchers, anti-aircraft guns, heavy machine guns, and other items that are not legal for individual ownership in the US even with the Second Amendment in force.
It doesn’t. But as John Mace pointed out, if we were actually facing civil war against a military junta in this country, then the constitutionality of weapons ownership would be irrelevant as a practical matter.
We’d be calling up the Taliban for the number of their armaments supplier and buying up all the illegal rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns, etc., that we could get our hands on, without worrying whether we were violating the Constitution (which would be effectively in tatters due to the seizure of the government by the military junta anyway).
So there is no need to preserve in the Constitution as we now have it a fossilized remnant of the extinct power that civilians once had to control their government by force of arms. If we as a people ever again did encounter a situation where we needed to control our government by force of arms, we wouldn’t be relying on the comparatively few and ineffective weapons that the Constitution now guarantees our right to legally own. Instead, we’d do whatever it took to illegally acquire whatever effective weapons we could, and postpone thinking about the Constitution until after we’d won the war.
By the way, this sort of discussion is exactly what I meant when I said:
All those things are legal provided one pays the required fees, fills out the required forms, and otherwise jumps through BATFE’s legal hoops. There are thousands of legal machine guns, anti-tank guns, etc. in civilian hands here in the US. Things that throw explosives can be owned, but the shells/rockets/bombs are themselves classed as destructive devices and have forms and taxes and such associated with them.
You may want to research this a bit more, rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns are not the primary weapons used.
An armed populous helps deter a military takeover of the government, you are making the same straw man argument that John Mace is, there does not need to be an actual use of the arms for them to be of use.
You may want to do the math on how difficult it would be to confiscate 270,000,000 firearms, that is the point.
BTW the fact that it is highly unlikely that we will ever need to exercise this right in our lives does not invalidate the need for that right, this world will exist far beyond our time.
Yeah, sorry, I should have said “not legal for civilian acquisition without government supervision”. The requirement for explicit government approval to acquire any such items, IMO, kind of obviates their effectiveness in enforcing direct civilian control of the government.
Unless you’ve got some fantasy in mind where tens of thousands of ordinary law-abiding Joe Blows conscientiously assemble stockpiles of such items just in case, with the approving legal endorsement of our democratic government, and then Evil Military Junta suddenly steps in and the Joe Blows save the day for liberty with the inspiring knowledge that all their freedom-fighting armaments were constitutionally and legally acquired.
Now I’m no anarchist, but even I can see that in such a situation you don’t need the “legal acquisition” step to get the job done. Realistically, there is no chance that such weapons would be accumulated in private ownership in numbers that would be simultaneously legal and effective against an opponent on the scale of Evil Military Junta.
Strawman, hunting rifles are enough, they are all under the regulation of the government too (except for private sales).
You are the one making the fantasy claimes, I cited dozens of countries that have had democracies that were taken over my the military in the past century, you have provided nothing but speculation.
I would far rather the risk of resistance deter a take over than need to establish some black market to correct a problem after it happens.
Blue-sky speculation about the possible deterrent effect of an armed populace on power-hungry wannabe-warlords does not, IMO, justify treating the arming of the populace as an inalienable constitutional right.
Mind you, as I’ve repeatedly said, I have no objection to having an armed populace for no other reason than that the populace simply likes to be armed, as long as it can manage its arms in reasonable safety.
But I don’t think that preference justifies declaring arms ownership in the modern world to be a constitutional right. Nor do weaksauce hypotheticals about how arms ownership is still somehow subliminally guaranteeing freedom from potential military overlords even though individual arms owners wouldn’t have a hope in hell of actually outgunning any such overlords with any weapons that they actually own or are realistically likely to own.
Sure, democracies can be taken over by the military. That doesn’t mean that private gun ownership is all that’s preventing democracies from being taken over by the military, or that a right of private gun ownership is needed to prevent a democracy from being taken over by the military. There are plenty of democracies with very low gun ownership rates that aren’t suffering from military coups.
Your hypothetical “risk of resistance deterring a takeover” is, as I’ve said, not adequate to justify enshrining individual gun ownership as a fundamental right. I may believe that buying Russian petroleum helps deter Russia from throwing a nuke at us, but that doesn’t mean that the right to burn fossil fuels needs to be written into the Constitution.
No particular fantasies in mind. Simply noting that many thousands of such weapons are out there, legally, in civilian hands. Some indeterminate number, too, are illegally in civilian hands. Those classes of weapons don’t matter in any case in a situation where civilians are fighting the government and its standing army. Irregulars who get into firefights with with even moderately trained and equipped soldiers inevitably get badly mauled. Harassment, assassination of civilian government personnel and their families, sabotage and such are the effective tools in the irregular forces toolbox. Simple civilian arms such as may be bought at any gun store right now are perfectly adequate for the tasks requiring guns.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, and counts as one among many valid reasons (although admittedly a rather hypothetical one) why some people might reasonably like to own guns.
But it does not strike me as a valid justification for the Constitution’s recognizing any fundamental right to own guns.
The argument seems to be “Gun ownership may allegedly have some unproven degree of deterrent effect against the possibility of military takeover of the nation and effective destruction of our democratic system of governance. And if we did nonetheless happen to suffer a military takeover of the nation and effective destruction of our democratic system of governance, it would somewhat increase the effectiveness of a hypothetical resistance movement.”
Well, big whoop, TBH. That sort of apocalyptic what-if scenario IMO just isn’t an adequate argument for putting gun ownership in the same class as free speech and fair trials and so forth as one of the most important and fundamental things that citizens are inalienably entitled to.
I don’t think that a fundamental individual right recognized in the supreme law of the land should be primarily motivated by a hypothetical scenario in which the supreme law of the land is effectively nonexistent. It may be instructive and useful for us to take thought about what we would do in an imagined situation of civil war and anarchy while tyrants wiped their asses with the Constitution, but IMO it is not the province of the Constitution to specify rights based on such an imagined situation.
Most of the major conflicts the US has been involved with in the past 50 years prove your claim to be false.
The fact that a side suffers higher casualties does not mean they will lose.
The idea that small arms are not effective tools for insurgents has no basis in fact. Ché Guevara, Mao Zedong, and the Vietnamese all used prolonged guerrilla war-of-attrition tactics mostly fought with small arms.
The U.S. supplied counterinsurgency In El Salvador attempted to use the “scorched earth” tactics like they also tried in Vietnam, The FMLN still existed despite US funded death-squad terrorism.
So yes, there are real costs that a potential actor planning a coup d’état would have to address.
A population with a large collection of arms is a deterrent.
Sez you. As I noted above, plenty of democratic societies whose populations do not have a large collection of arms have not been taken over by the military. So clearly, an armed populace isn’t required as a deterrent against a military takeover. And the degree to which it actually does deter at all against a military takeover is, to put it kindly, unproven.
Even if I were convinced that individual gun ownership did deter military takeover to any non-negligible extent, though, I wouldn’t necessarily be convinced that it ought to be a constitutional right. As I noted above, I can believe that various activities may provide some unproven level of deterrence against various hypothetical Bad Things without believing that those activities are therefore entitled to constitutional protection.
As for the rest of your argument, I don’t see how it applies to the statements by Scumpup that you seem to be responding to.