No, I don’t understand that. If anyone on the left ever threatened an armed insurrection to protest a law, or tried to justify the use of violence against authorities, they would immediately be labeled traitors, terrorists, and worse.
It all just became clear:
We MUST be armed, in case our government tries to disarm us.
Makes perfect sense.
Those doing the branding would be hypocrites, or at least not very civically savvy, since one of the founding principles of our nation is that, in extreme circumstances, violence against authority is not only permissible but required. Do you think it’s not reasonable to avow that one would defend the freedom of speech with force, if it came to that?
No, not always. Maybe in some situations, but not in the vast majority of ones where the laws of the land have been followed and new legislation has been passed which is supported by the majority and which does not conflict with the Constitution. Democrats would not have been justified in using violence after the SCOTUS ruling in Bush v. Gore, for instance, even if they felt they were “defending the freedom” of the country or something with a fervor unmatched by all the zealots in history.
A civic liberal egalitarian democratic society is based on the assumption that disputes over policy will be settled politically.
I wasn’t talking about controversial laws in the ordinary course of events, which might well generate a lot of outrage without rising to a level of oppression that warrants armed resistance. (PATRIOT Act, anyone?) I meant the sort of hypothetical situation where there is an actual, serious, and ongoing state of suppression and an existential threat to vital liberties. E.g., the federal government outlaws dissent and starts rounding up critical bloggers. If you think it’s reasonable to resist that, then just understand that there are many gun owners who think of a total gun confiscation in much the same terms.
This is nice when it works, but political processes will not always bring relief from oppression that has been applied politically. There is a whole continuum of illegal methods to apply for redress of grievances, beginning with civil disobedience and ending in armed rebellion. A well-designed political system will make violence unnecessary most of the time, but violence is still justified in extreme cases. When in the course of human events…
The '60s protesters wanted to be pacifists and smoke marijuana. This time it will be people who regard being told to surrender their guns as the first step to their enslavement; rather a different demographic.
At the time they were regarded as specialty weapons useful only in a few special niches. And for a long time people still could get them, if they wanted to pay $200 (that’s 200 dollars in the Great Depression!) and submit to heavy government oversight. The fairly few people who wanted them legally got them, state and local law permitting. If select-fire assault rifles had been the standard infantry arm at the time, more people might have had qualms.
Which is exactly what happened; in the late '60s and early '70s the radical left had a brief love affair with guns, when they thought it was the left that was going to be trampled by government jackboots. And as a result Governor Reagan of California pushed through big restrictions on guns.
More like, a government that would take your guns away is the government you most need guns against.
You are begging the question, specifically, that making possession of guns illegal by itself constitutes oppression, the kind that justifies violent resistance.
Ex-Marines’ opinions aren’t as pertinent as their battle skills. Plus, you left out a step somewhere after “when we win”; the step that goes “half the USA will be put under martial law after the police and National Guards suffer thousands of casualties from insurrectionists”.
The strength and persistence of that paranoid fantasy never ceases to astonish me, but not nearly as much as does the number who embrace it.
How is that begging the question? I observed that political processes sometimes result in unfair treatment, either of minority groups or less frequently of substantial populations. When the very law criminalizes the means or even the will to seek redress of grievances, there are no ways out of oppression that are not illegal. Political processes can try to prevent this kind of outcome but it is unreasonable to hope for perfection.
I never said that I believed a ban on all guns would justify a bloody revolution; I said that there are those who so believe. What constitutes oppression is, has been, and always will be a matter of opinion.
What that faction, whether or not it includes you, likes to call “oppression via tyranny” in this context is something *most *of us call “making a law via the democratic process”. Ample means to object to it, or modify or prevent it, are available via the democratic process to all of those who accept their responsibilities as citizens, not requiring the use of deadly violence.
Why does that require explanation for anyone? :dubious:
Because “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers” is a much catchier line, and fits onto a bumper sticker.
Chicago has had two. Anton Cermak and Carter Harrison.
Because different people have different lines in the sand, as it were – and these lines in the sand are inherently beyond the review of the social contract. We all (or most of us, anyway) have some final straw that might cause us to renounce society, to decide that the powers that be must change or else we must cease to live under them.
Suppose for a moment that somehow a far-right conservative Christian government came into power in the U.S. (Maybe as a backlash in response to sweeping new gun control legislation. 
) And suppose that this faction and its supporters start talking about the need to finally re-criminalize homosexuality, and make all them queers straighten up or else ship 'em off to prison.
If I object on the grounds that I don’t like that choice, they might say the same thing to me that you’ve just said, and tell me that “ample means to object to it, or modify or prevent it, are available via the democratic process.” Suppose they’ve got an uncomfortable amount of support, and it looks like there’s a chance the measures might pass. If I argue that they don’t have the right to imprison me for refusing to change my sexual orientation no matter how many votes they get, they might call me an anarchist or an intransigent lawbreaker. If I suggest that I might resist their propose social order with violence, they’ll call me a terrorist or a traitor.
I’m not trying to say that I think a gun ban is as meritorious of violent rebellion as a program of rounding up people into concentration camps, because I don’t. But some people feel that being disarmed under threat of death or imprisonment, when they’ve done nothing wrong themselves, is an intolerable infringement. I understand their viewpoint, even if I don’t agree on the “intolerable” part.
First, those lines in the sand are not beyond the review of the social contract. Society is free to show displeasure with a particular person’s line, sometimes in the form of imprisonment.
Second, those people who refuse to comply with a law are, in fact, doing something wrong vis a vis the social contract.
I also understand that people think as you have described, but that doesn’t change the fact that their opinions and fears are improper, delusional, dangerous, etc.
Also, I notice that in every scenario you’ve listed for these supposed “can’t have my guns I’d rather fight about it” people shows them ignoring all or most of the legal due process avenues available to them to try and remedy their displeasure. Why is that? I’ll bet I know why: I’ll bet it’s because neither you nor anyone else has ever heard one of these types proclaim “If they try and take my guns, and I get arrested and lose every appeal all the way to the SCOTUS, then by Og it’s time to fight”; they go straight to the fighting, bypassing all the legal remedies or mere civil disobedience in order to charge straight into violent confrontation, don’t they?
That’s kinda the whole point of having a gun for self defense, though, isn’t it?
Nobody says “Hey, I’ve got a gun, so if you don’t leave, I’m going to write my congressman!”
Not a ton to add to the conversation, but I find it amusing that people are bashing Feinstein’s gun ownership as hypocrisy.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen gun proponents say, “if gun opponents tried owning a gun for a while, they’d agree with us.”
No social contract can dictate the contents of a man’s mind; if he decides to go on the warpath he has that irrevocable freedom under the laws of nature, even if all he’s decided is to die in his boots. If he wins, he and his friends will write a new social contract. And of course the existing structure has every right to stop him. It’s just that once one party has already decided that the very structure must be destroyed, and that the matter will be settled with force, force is how it will be settled, whether the social order condones force or not.
I understand and sympathize. I too would be more galled than I probably have the fluency to describe, to be compelled to surrender my arms for any reason other than misdeeds of my own doing. But I wouldn’t try to start a civil war over it, provided of course that the Constitution had been duly and lawfully amended.
You’re absolutely right; it’s a frequent source of distress for me that so many of my political allies on this particular issue are morons. Not to mention that probably more than a handfull of them would probably like to see me stoned to death. Politics makes for queer bedfellows. All I can do is try to encourage more liberal folks to support and perhaps even participate in responsible gun ownership, and hope we that can achieve a balance that excludes extremist paranoia someday.