That wasn’t the view of Harlon Carter the force behind the change in the NRA in 1977.
We can win it on a simple concept – No compromise. No gun legislation. Carter opposed background checks for gun purchasers, saying that the acquisition of guns by violent criminals and the mentally ill is the “price we pay for freedom”.
Reading his wikipedia entry he sounds like a peach of a guy.
On March 3, 1931, 17-year-old Carter shot and killed 15-year-old Ramón Casiano. Carter believed that Casiano had information about the theft of his family’s car, and, carrying a shotgun, he pointed it at Casiano and demanded that he return to the Carter home to submit to questioning. When Casiano refused Carter fatally shot him. No evidence tying Casiano with the car incident was ever found.
…
In 1936, Carter began a career with the United States Border Patrol where his father had also worked. Carter rose through the ranks and commanded the entire border patrol from 1950 through 1957 where he led Operation Wetback.
In response to repeated attacks on the Second Amendment rights, NRA formed the Legislative Affairs Division in 1934. While NRA did not lobby directly at this time, it did mail out legislative facts and analyses to members, whereby they could take action on their own. In 1975, recognizing the critical need for political defense of the Second Amendment, NRA formed the Institute for Legislative Action, or ILA.
In other words, the NRA saw stuff coming but did little at that time.
The NRA has been destroyed by corruption, lawsuits, legal actions and hemorrhaging membership. It no longer spends a significant amount of funds on lobbying.
How about this broader general principle though: should it be unconstitutional for the government to possess a monopoly on armed force? Should the government retain the power to conquer the population? Jim Kavanagh, aka The Polemicist, put it this way in his essay “The Rifle On The Wall”:
Let’s start with this: The citizen’s right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force. This should perhaps be stated in the obverse: to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the citizenry as a whole.
(…)it is not fundamentally about hunting, or collecting, or target practice; it is about empowering the citizen relative to the state.
The NRA got involved in political action because of federal gun laws, not states and cities as you maintain. The fact that they encouraged their members to to lobby their representatives rather than hire paid lobbyists is irrelevant.
If you read my post I was referring to the popularization of that notion back in 1977, and frankly while the NRA occasionally plays lip service to supporting reasonable restrictions it is always in the context of differentiation from whatever restriction they are currently contesting. If restrictions had been loosened such that the the sole remaining restriction was that felons should not be allowed to carry machine guns on planes, they would take the side opposing it.
And if you would prefer I will revise my claim to an even stronger statement that before the latter decades of the 20th century nobody considered the 2nd amendment to say anything about individual ownership.
Sorry but that Nimitz class aircraft carrier has sailed, probably over a century ago. There is no way the armed citizenry can have enough firepower to contest the armed force of the federal government and still provide for the common defense. I guess the possible exception would be to outsource our national security to extremely wealthy civilians like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, but that would definitely not keep us free.
The NRA is now gun nuts. It became that way, imho when i opposed Biden bipartisan gun control bill- which did not limit the rights of responsible law abiding gun owners one iota. Fortunately, they are also dying off.
“If the government wanted to institute a dictatorship, we’re screwed” is hardly a comforting reassurance of why it should be okay for the government to restrict or ban gun ownership at its discretion. Maybe lifting restrictions against the sale and ownership of select-fire rifles would be a step towards rectifying that.
As infamous a precedent as Scott v Sandford (1856) would seem to contradict that. The majority decision denied that African-Americans were or could be citizens because of the (to the majority justices) self-evidently absurd notion that they were then to be accorded full civil rights; one of which that was explicitly enumerated was the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”
Yes. First because without monopoly of force you get warlordism, and the constant fighting that comes with it. Most likely ending with a victorious warlord installing themselves as dictator, and that constitution becoming a dead letter. And many, many massacres beforehand.
Second because as said, in order to make the government that weak it has to be so weak it can’t function as a government at all. A government that weak basically doesn’t exist for all practical purposes. And it would be incredibly vulnerable to outside attack, even the bigger criminal gangs would be an existential threat.
And third, it encourages tyranny. Any local band of fanatics or control freaks would be able to set up their own pocket dictatorship, and the government couldn’t help their victims in any way. Which is the point of the idea, of course.
If I may say this pointedly, we’re mostly talking about old, and sometimes very OLD twists in the gun rights movement.
Back to the OP, and the cited article:
In that ruling, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court established a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The Supreme Court clarified that standard in June as it upheld a ban on people subject to domestic violence restraining orders having guns, saying a modern firearms restriction needs only a “historical analogue,” not a “historical twin,” to be valid.
Broomes, an appointee of Republican then-President Donald Trump, said prosecutors in Tamori Morgan’s case failed to identify such a historical analogue to support charging him with violating the machine gun ban.
Considering how much backpedaling the SCOTUS did (leading to said June update) I think that if they keep researching they’ll find an analogue the SCOTUS will let pass.
Again, to answer the question in @Czarcasm’s OP, I don’t think it’s big news. I think it’s the existing news, that the SCOTUS almost certainly went too far (especially in overturning existing precedent, but hey, that’s been their whole BAG since Trump), but everyone is applying the new stupid rules, and they’ll look for an option to claw it back somewhat.
How exactly would any local band of fanatics or control freaks be able to set up their own pocket dictatorship if their potential victims were armed too? The Constitution explicitly gave the federal government the authority to call the citizenry to arms to defeat any would-be local warlords, and presumably enough people would answer to defend freedom. I think that the ideal the Founders were pursuing was that democracy would be a majority of the armed– hopefully with ballots, if necessary with bullets.
ETA:
Isn’t that more or less the defense of absolute government authority put forth in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan? And isn’t that what the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century were specifically refuting?
The passage of time doesn’t care whether you are comforted or not, and relying on law written almost 250 years ago, under assumptions that are no longer valid to keep you safe is a mistake. Clinging to that law on the claim that it is necessary to keep you safe even more so.
Same way they always have, by being more organized, better supported and more willing to commit mass murder. Arming citizens just increases the murder and suicide rate, it doesn’t make them able to stand up to an organized force.
Armed citizens are just easier to justify killing, not actually any better able to resist. That’s why it’s the authoritarians who keep pushing guns.
I’ve finished reading the article and I believe the author is in error on several points. If anyone is actually interested in hearing the reasoning I’ll post it. But if you simply insist that he’s right and that if I disagree I therefore must be wrong, then I won’t bother trying to debate with the Argument Clinic.
Yes, exactly. Mobs of armed thugs aren’t capable of resisting the government, but they’re great for terrorizing and massacring the populace.
They’d see it coming miles away; it just wouldn’t do them any good unless they manage to flee the country in time. They’d just die if they tried to fight back.