If I were living in the colonies in 1776, I would have been a Loyalist. If “taxation without representation” is justification for armed rebellion, are the folks in Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia justified in taking up arms?
In my opinion, people are justified in using violent means to overthrow a regime when the regime is acting in an intolerable manner and there are no non-violent means to change that are reasonably available.
I’m kind of curious how the Colonies would have handled the imperial abolition of slavery in the 1830s. I can picture a second revolution, though perhaps just of the southern colonies.
In any case, I’m unclear how the Second Amendment justifies insurrection by any stretch of imagination, when the Constitution is explicitly opposed to rebellion and such.
It’s hard to know, except in hindsight. Often after a successful revolution, you just meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Or even worse.
I do admire John Brown.
Sidenote:
In fairness to the Colonists of the time, “taxation without representation” was merely a populist rallying cry. It was not the full intellectual justification behind the revolution which is enumerated very clearly in the Declaration of Independence.
Their grievance was against the King himself who failed to protect the colonies from abuses levied by Parliament, one of which was unlawful taxation. Since the colonies were chartered in the King’s name, the colonists felt that Parliament had no jurisdiction over them.
Or start WWI
First let me say that I fundamentally believe in the right to self defense as a human right. Therefore, I don’t see any principled way to justify disarming citizens while arming government agents.
However, in this day and age of modern militaries (the argument regarding the pros and cons of modern standing militaries is a separate one), I do feel that the 2nd amendment is a bit dated and should be rewritten to enshrine the right to self defense and to specify defense against whom exactly. The US had no standing military to speak of unti at least the mid-19th century, and popular opinion was largely against one. Americans for the most part did not view armed defense as something reserved for a soldier class, but viewed it as a duty of every able bodied free citizen.
Several people tried to kill Adolf Hitler without success (although a time-looping Tom Cruise is inching ever closer with each iteration), and the Central Intelligence Agency had a concerted campaign to figure out how to kill Fidel Castro in the early 'Sixties, who instead annoyingly live another five decades, which either speaks to the difficulty of assassinating someone who is aware and has the means to secure himself, or the utter incompetence of the CIA (not mutually exclusive).
Even if you manage to kill the leader, totalitarian regimes are rarely so unstable that they completely collapse at the death of the leader. Neither the Soviet Union nor the Peoples Republic of China fell apart when their founding leaders died, and continued to survive despite internal power struggles. The “Go back and kill Hitler” meme only works if you assume that an angsty failed artist was the only thing that caused Germany to tilt toward fascism and anti-Semitism even those fascist and hyper-nationalist regimes were emerging all over Europe.
Here’s the thing; the Afghans don’t have to “win”; they just have to make it so costly and unpopular that US and Coalition nations decide to give in, and they are perfectly happy to throw people into the grinder on often-literal suicide missions in order to make that pain felt. A domestic rebellion is a different animal entirely, insofar as tyrannical leaders don’t have anywhere to go, and as long as they enjoy a measure of popular support such that they don’t have soldiers literally abandoning their posts, partisans can make life unpleasant but they cannot defeat a modern professional army. The Red Dawn scenario of scrappy rebels is good storytelling but in practice the Wolverines would be killed or starved out in a winter.
Well, okay then. So, what prevents the next batch of malcontents from doing the same to the newly self-appointed leaders if they do not feel that their interests are being represented?
Mao Tse-Tong said that “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” but Mao would not recognize the government today’s PRC as resembling anything like his revolutionary ambitions. Guns (and bombs, gas, et cetera) are great for creating instability but they don’t lend themselves to creating a continuity of governance without some kind of popular consensus among the people who control industry and infrastructure. Want to shut down the government? Recruit farmers, truck drivers, and airplane pilots to your side. After a week of no deliveries even moderate sized cities will be in chaos, and as good as military logistics is on the battlefield, it cannot replace what the private sector does to keep the country working within its own borders.
Stranger
In my opinion, all the amygdala-driven gun-cradling fantasists completely lost all legitimacy with this “I need mah guns to overthrow tyrants!” argument when it was determined that A) our government irrefutably spies on all of us all the time, forever, and won’t even pay lip service to stopping, and B) our government passed the Patriot Act and it’s various associated laws literally establishing a police state that hasn’t been dismantled to this day…and what did our esteemed gun crazies do in response? Anyone? That’s right, nothing. They sat on their fat little butts and did absolutely nothing.
The fact that since 2014 police have reliably stolen more than robbers every year and we are steadily losing the right to assemble are just icing on the cake that don’t really matter either way, because no gun nuts are ever going to do anything about it.
But I suppose this is tangential to the hypothetical - as to what it would take ME to pick up arms and try to violently insurrect, that point doesn’t exist. I don’t think it would actually solve anything, either personally or societally. And personally, I’ll flee this sinking ship well before it gets to that point, and live out the remainder of my days in some nice tropical paradise as an expat. Cowardly? Perhaps. But if everything is screwed on a societal level anyways, I don’t see that it does any good to go down with the ship, or to stir the pot even more. So more the “least bad” option available at a personal level.
QFT. More power to you, not cowardly at all.
I’m a firm believer in voting with your feet and avoiding violence whenever possible.
I think the simple answer to the OP is “never”. The only circumstances in which taking up arms against those in power would be a collapse of democracy and the rule of law. When there is no functional Constitution, it’s meaningless to explain your actions according to Constitutional principles. The justification for lethal force would rest on one’s personal ethical principles.
That’s why Constitutional protection for the violent overthrow of government is a ridiculous concept, almost an oxymoron. It’s never justified in a functional democracy where the rule of law prevails; and if those things do fail, the Constitution is irrelevant and you just have to do what you think is right.
Thing is, you’re sliding from personal self defense to defend of the state, there, and since by your own admission, the 2nd Amendment amendment should be rewritten for clarity, I’m not really sure how this relates to my earlier comment.
It was never supposed to be a check on a properly functional democracy, so that’s kind of a silly thing for you to say…a strawman, basically. It was supposed to be in case the democracy stopped functioning because the founding fathers didn’t actually know if their little experiment would work and they saw what happened when a strong government essentially disarmed the majority of the populace, and also, in their minds at least, how an armed citizenry could defeat one of the great powers on the planet (with a little help from our friends, of course).
Whether that’s still true today is, obviously, debatable, but only crazy people and the fringe talk about ‘second amendment solutions’ wrt a properly functioning democracy.
I don’t think it will happen at all, gradual or sudden. I think at this stage we are beyond that. Since both sides use gerrymandering and have done so for over a century, I’m not overly excited about it…and my WAG is folks around these parts will be ok with it when the Dems get their crack at it in 2020. I also don’t think a minority party can or will remain in power for 30 years, but assuming they do so using the system, then that certainly isn’t a situation where it’s ok to use ‘second amendment solutions’.
Perhaps down the road we will allow the constitution to be eroded to the point where it’s meaningless. Between the left and right, they both certainly seem bound and determined to ax the parts they don’t like and stomp all over it. If that happens, and it’s gradual as you say, then the majority will be going along with it, so perhaps there won’t be any sort of uprising. Personally, I think our system is relatively self correcting, and we’ve certainly been further out of true than we are today in the past, so I don’t foresee the citizens ever really needing to use those arms against the government.
At any rate, you asked and I answered…it’s justified, IMHO, if and when the government steps beyond it’s mandate or attempts to set aside the constitution by fiat.
I wasn’t discussing the historical origins of the U.S. Constitution.
What I said is essentially exactly the same as what you’ve said here: that the idea of incorporating the right to arbitrary violent overthrow of democratic government into the constitution upon which the democracy is based is ludicrous.
The protections of the Constitution are only as strong as the willingness of the government in power to enforce them, and the people appointed to adjudicate them. While “both sides” have engaged in partisan gerrymandering to suit their purposes in local and state elections, one party in particular has used systematic, widespread gerrymandering to essentially exclude participation by entire classes of people, and has applied other measures such as restrictive voter i.d. laws to exclude demographic sections of voters.
The notion that “it can’t happen here” is given iie by the fact that “it”, in the sense of systemic repression and brutality, has often happened here, just to marginalized groups who have been ignored and often practically written out of history books (at least, those that you study in school). People want to treat German fascism and the rise of Adolf Hitler as some special case but he was only one of several fascist leaders in Europe, who had the advantage of gaining control over the German industry and national angst over being set aside by older dominant powers. That we’ve never had a serious challenge by a hyper-nationalist presidential candidate is in large measure a result of having such a diverse and multicultural population where no one group could be readily isolated and scapegoated for all problems although you can see elements of this in blaming inner city blacks for the "crack cocaine epidemic (as if it was inner city blacks who brought the cocaine into the country, or this was unique compared to the methamphetamine or opioid epidemics which were not inner city phenomena). But elements of this kind of intentional, planned social divisiveness go back to Lee Atwater’s infamous “Nigger, nigger” observation about obscuring racial attacks in the guise of state’s rights and economic justifications, or the “Southern Strategy” of Republican realignment in the South by inculcating racial backlash against civil rights.
The response to that, however, isn’t to arm everybody up and let God sort it out at the Pearly Gates; it is to recognize and attack those deliberate inequalities and the motivation behind them, and to engender greater integration and opportunity regardless of socioeconomic background or cultural affiliation.
Stranger
Right. I was basically agreeing with you that when reading the 2nd amendment in the light of the rest of the Constitution and in the context of the mindset of the time, it can’t logically be used to defend a large scale insurrection against the government.
Question from an outsider, for those who think your constitution needs a provision entitling them to use armed resistance/revolt against the government produced by that constitution:
What is it in the constitution that is so faulty as to produce such a government in the first place?
I believe the idea rather is that the Second Amendment would allow the citizenry to use armed resistance/revolt against a government that was acting against or outside of the U.S. Constitution, rather than one actually produced by it.
Sorry for the double post/reply; thinking about it some more, I would also say that a major part of the intent of the Second Amendment was that an “armed citizenry”/militia was a better model for the national defense of a republic (including defense against a foreign invasion or against an illegitimate insurrection) than a professionalized standing army model; “standing armies” were greatly distrusted by many of the founding generation of the American Republic, on the grounds that some ambitious American Caesar could win the loyalty of the troops and seize power, against the will of, and without regard to the interests of, the people as a whole. For that matter, an argument for a militia model of national defense would also be that, the “militia” (being essentially the people as a whole) would be less likely to abuse its power of armed resistance by overthrowing an essentially constitutional government than would be a professional army (being a small portion of the citizenry, or in extreme cases not even part of the citizenry at all–foreign mercenaries, perhaps). The people as a whole would be unlikely to agree that a government is tyrannical unless it really is tyrannical; a professional army might decide that a government is “tyrannical” simply because it decides to cut soldiers’ pay.
A lot of early state constitutional right to keep and bear arms provisions directly relate the right to keep and bear arms with a distrust of standing armies:
“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.” (Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776; this language was later echoed by several other state constitutions.)
Peacetime standing armies (let alone large professionalized military forces) were really not part of the American experience until the eve of World War II (the first system of peacetime conscription in U.S. history was in 1940), and IIRC, even after World War II, the U.S. started to “demobilize”–as it had always done in the past–before the Cold War (and the Korean War) intervened. The U.S. has essentially had a standing army ever since; and since the end of Vietnam it has been a professionalized standing army (not based on even selective conscription, let alone universal service)–which would probably alarm many members of the Revolutionary generation.