It don’t think you’d actually want the ‘help’ of self-organized militias even if they offered it but your apt illustration of their hypocrisy is noted.
Stranger
This is exactly what I’ve been wondering today.
But that’s how current second amendment supporters interpret it, and it’s consistent with current supreme Court guidance on how the right is applied to individuals. (and not restricted to well-regulated militias.)
I’m not a fan of the second amendment. I think it’s unfortunate that it’s in the Constitution. But i think it IS part of our laws on the assumption that political violence is sometimes warranted.
While not law this is the quote I usually see 2A people like to throw out there:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” ~Thomas Jefferson
IMHO, the snipped quote of that letter read in context seems to make it clear that Jefferson had no problem with the government putting down rebellions.
It’s a Born in The USA misunderstanding of plain and obvious meaning.
Cow Zedong. Just so long as the cows don’t ally with chickens in choppers I think our burgers are safe.
Here in the United States, we’ve got a love for the idea of revolution thanks to both our history and the national myth surrounding our origins. The nascent United States was very fortunate that their little revolution didn’t end up eating itself once the British were defeated. (Though I’d argue the founders kicked that particular can down the road to be handled in 1860.) At least when I was in grade school, there was a tendency to ignore the nastier side of the revolution. We celebrate the Boston Tea Party but tend to downplay instances of Patriots tarring & feathering Loyalist officials, threatening their families, or burning King George and others in effigy.
As a whole, I think we have some odd, conflicting attitudes when it comes to violence. As a wee Odesio, my heroes were the likes of Luke Skywalker, Optimus Prime, and Rick Hunter all of whom doled out violence when threatened. But the lesson I learned in school was even if little Billy had me pinned to the ground, throttling the life out of me, my teacher and the administrators would punish me if I hit him even if it was just to get him to stop from beating the hell out of me. It takes two to fight, right?
For a lot of adults today, I think that conflict is still there. In the abstract, they might agree there’s a point where violence is acceptable, but they get very uncomfortable when it comes to deciding when it’s acceptable. Obviously violence is the answer sometimes. It might not be the one we favor, but sometimes it’s the only practical situation. I’m just not always sure where to draw that line. But once you cross it, you better hope you win. Or at the very least wait a few years for a new administration to come in and pardon you.
Firearms rights advocates are interpreting the statements to favor that argument, and strident gun control advocates argue that the ‘militia clause’ indicates that it is not a personal right but rather in reference to the military (never mind that all of the other first nine amendments of the Bill of Rights are classified as personal rights and protections). Both are mostly wrong:
The early American experience with militias and military authority would inform what would become the Second Amendment as well. In Founding-era America, citizen militias drawn from the local community existed to provide for the common defense, and standing armies of professional soldiers were viewed by some with suspicion.4The Declaration of Independence listed as greivances against King George III that he had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power” and had “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” 5 Following the Revolutionary War, several states codified constitutional arms-bearing rights in contexts that echoed these concerns—for instance, Article XIII of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights of 1776 read:
That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.6
The founders felt that standing armies were a threat to liberty because they could come under the control of a despotic leader, so that armies should be drawn from the organized militias under control of each state. When called up, men were generally assumed to provide their own arms (thus the protection of personal ownership for militia service as well as personal defense and utility), and in fact the Constitution has a clause that restricts the funding of an army for a period of more than two years. The ownership of firearms under the 2nd Amendment was never intended to be restricted to “well-regulated militias” (which, in the parlance of the day meant well trained and organized, not regulated in the sense of government controls) but rather to provide the basis for such groups to be assembled for the common defense.
In the context of the day it made good sense, and was not particularly controversial. Nearly every household in Colonial American had a musket, blunderbuss, or other firearm for both defense and utility, and given the variety of European colonial powers and the Indian nations that posed a threat to colonists it would be insensible to restrict ownership. Of course, it was virtually impossible to go on a shooting spree with a muzzle-loading rifle or a brace of pistols so the entire notion of a ‘mass killing’ incident by a lone individual was not considered; to engage in political violence on a scale that would threaten an invading power or an autocratic regime would require broad resistance that would compel many people to rise up and fight. How it should be interpreted in light of both the modern technology of repeating arms and the weird, jingoistic fetish culture that has grown up around gun ownership is another question but it is definitely a right of individuals.
The founders who wrote the Constitution and the 2nd Amendment, however, did not do so just so the federal government could be overthrown; indeed, although there were concerns about the concentration of certain powers of the Congress and especially the office of President (although it was extremely weak by modern standards), the federal government basically had neither the authority nor means to raise an army to squash a serious insurrection without calling upon the state militias as it did during the so-called “Shay’s Rebellion” of 1787.
Thomas Jefferson wrote a lot of things, many of them contradicting other things that he wrote, and of course wildly inconsistent with both his personal and public behavior. People really like the visceral carnage of that quote even though it isn’t clear that they understand the context in which it was written, and one particular enthusiast was Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. So…good company for those who want to espouse it at every opportunity.
Stranger
Just curious, when did the US develop something like the federalized military we have today?
IIRC it was the War of 1812. It became apparent that militias just were nowhere near sufficient to the task of defending the US so the US needed a military of its own.
When I was in college I had older professors for whom the Spanish Civil War had been the defining event of their youth. “We have to stand up to them early!”
The associate professors’ defining event had been Vietnam: “You’ve been lied to by your own government!”
They were both right, but they were both wrong. In some ways Spain’s civil war was similar to Vietnam’s, and in other ways it was wrong to apply the lessons of one to the other.
What did I know? I’d been in some hairy juvenile delinquent shit before I cleaned up my act and went to college, so the defining event of my own youth was that violence isn’t something that people employ for their own reasons, but rather that violence enslaves people for its own madness.
And later, I enlisted and saw how fucked up the military really is, and became a pacifist. War is too serious a matter to be entrusted to the generals politicians human beings. Violence is only justified to prevent greater and immediately imminent violence.
Not really; of the approximately 450,000 men called up (going from memory, don’t quote that) virtually all were associated with and organized under state militias along with the United States Volunteers. At the end of what is now termed “The War of 1812”, which actually ended in 1815, the size of the peacetime US Army was limited to 10,000 men comprised of one rifle regiment, one artillery corps, and eight regiments of infantry. It was barely enough to deal with the Native American incursions and eventually had to be expanded to fight the Seminole Wars of the late 1830s. The Regular Army was finally expanded in the Mexican American War 1846-8, and remained at a permanently higher level of authorized enlistment because of the consequences but was never staffed to the authorized level, and by the time of the American Civil War, the ranks of professional soldiers had dwindled to less than 20k, with only about 1,100 officers. It was because of this war and Reconstruction after that resulted in the United States maintaining a large standing Regular (professional volunteer) Army, albeit still supplemented by militias (and after the Militia Act of 1903 the National Guard) and draftees in time of war.
Some—for instance, Vladimir Putin—would argue that violence is its own justification. Certainly the Carthaginians would have wished that they had the greater capacity for violence than the Romans.
Stranger
Eh…I think it was the real start of reform to a federal standing army.
The War of 1812 dramatically illustrated the inadequacies of the militias. Congress was not keen on a standing army so the government called out 450,000 men from the state militias during the war. The state militias were poorly trained, armed, and led.
The British Army soundly defeated the Maryland and Virginia militias at the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814 and President Madison commented “I could never have believed so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day”.[46] - SOURCE
It took a while to make it all happen (1903 Militia Act) but I think that was the start.
“You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
“To Every Briton” by Mahatma Gandhi, 1940 the standard gotcha cited by the anti-pacifists.
…who never acknowledge their own aiding the situation to get so bad that war is unavoidable. The US ambassador telling Sadaam he’d have to work out his differences with Kuwait on his own, the US reneging on Vietnam elections because the Communist might win, “Occupying” Germany only on the banks of the Rhine in 1919 to ensure no build up of troops; but indifferent to the anarchy going on further inland, sending American spin-doctors to help Yeltsin be elected while the emergent oligarchs raided Soviet industry, etc.
I should add for sake of the OP:
This is why rabble will be positively creamed by organized troops be they police or militia or a regular army. Rabble will be annihilated by these groups. The rabble’s only hope is numbers. And that means they need to collectively be willing to rush such forces and sacrifice their lives.
That is a tall order most will not do. And if they do manage to come together the government forces are screwed and it’s the fall of the government. Full on revolution.
I’m close to the never side, but as when it could be justified, the above leaves out an enormous piece of the possible justification. It can only be justified when there is reasonable probability of the government being overthrown! So there is no real justification today in North Korea, because the military is paid well enough to be loyal to the regime. Anti-regime political violence there would at present be suicidal. Contrast with 1917 Russia, when hungry ill-clothed unpaid Russian soldiers mutinied.
As for the current situation in the U.S., this has not gotten enough attention:
Federal law enforcement is also getting 3.8 percent.
This contrasts with a bare 1 percent civilian raise.
While there have been previous years where the military got a bigger pay raise than the civilians, usually the difference was just 0.5 percent. I cannot find a link but believe this is the biggest differential hike, for those who would be fighting back against human rights fighters, in U.S. history. ICE and the FBI and the Army already know about it. And it will cement loyalty.
In the American Revolution, Hessian soldiers, fighting for the British, were given 50 acres of land each as an incentive to desert. That’s the sort of winning move the human rights crowd would find impossible to replicate.
Left-wing American revolutionaries today are clueless about what it really takes to win. That’s far from the only reason they shouldn’t try violence, but it is a big one.
Well…to hear the right tell it all lefties live in tenements/hovels. Rural America is where conservatives live and have all the land. Liberals can offer more. 
Never the answer? Well, a state where political violence is expected and normalized is a worse state than a democracy where there is a relatively strong agreement on the legitimacy of democracy based upon the concept of intrinsic rights. So, in general, perhaps you can find some cases where one needs a revolution but in the USA it would be a serious and dangerous step backwards.
Are there any cases we can think of where political violence was the answer? As in, a country was headed in the wrong direction until so-and-so got shot and then things starting going in the “right” (as in positive, not as in the political leaning) direction again?
Pablo Escobar comes to mind as a maybe. He wasn’t a politician but he might as well have been. His cartel eventually killed enough people for a violent resistance to form and he himself was eventually hunted down like a dog. But having said that, his violent end didn’t put a stop to cartels in Colombia.
Maybe James Garfield? His assassination led to the reform of the civil service, ending the practice of handing out civil service posts as rewards to political supporters.
Shinzo Abe, then a former Prime Minister and serving politicians, was assassinated by a man angry about the corrupt influence of the Unification Church.
The assassination brought scrutiny from Japanese society and media against the UC’s alleged practice of pressuring believers into making exorbitant donations.[10] Japanese dignitaries and legislators were forced to disclose their relationship with the UC, and Kishida was forced to reshuffle his cabinet amid plummeting public approval.[11][12] On 31 August, the LDP announced that it would no longer have any relationship with the UC and its associated organisations, and would expel members who did not break ties with the group.[13] On 10 December, the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors passed two bills to restrict the activities of religious organisations such as the UC and provide relief to victims.[14]
Abe’s killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that “… Yamagami’s political violence has proved stunningly effective … Political violence seldom fulfills so many of its perpetrator’s aims.”[15] Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as “among the most successful assassins in history”.[16]
The Assassination of Shinzo Abe comes to mind.
The assassination brought scrutiny from Japanese society and media against the UC’s alleged practice of pressuring believers into making exorbitant donations.[10] Japanese dignitaries and legislators were forced to disclose their relationship with the UC, and Kishida was forced to reshuffle his cabinet amid plummeting public approval.
Abe’s killing has been described as one of the most effective and successful political assassinations in recent history due to the backlash against the UC that it provoked. The Economist remarked that “… Yamagami’s political violence has proved stunningly effective … Political violence seldom fulfills so many of its perpetrator’s aims.”[15] Writing for The Atlantic, Robert F. Worth described Yamagami as “among the most successful assassins in history”.