The second amendment was put forth as a means to mollify the Southern states, to allay their concerns that an anti-slavery northern-biased government would take control of law enforcement nationwide and end up freeing all the slaves. The militias mentioned, well regulated by the state governments, would allow the Southern states to patrol their territories and keep the slaves in check, prevent them from revolting, at minimal cost to the proprietors. The article provides substantial documentation to support its premise.
Which is to say that, if one could fairly consider slavery in itself as a localized form of tyranny, the effect of the second amendment was exactly the opposite as a hedge there-against. If T. Jeff made statements to suggest that the second amendment was a means of “watering the tree of liberty”, it would appear that his argument was little more than the ex post facto rationalization of a slave holder.
Ah yes, a post using ‘gundamentalists’ and ‘not be able to read because of all the LW bias and graphics’ on a site called the Smirking Chimp…why would anyone question such solid evidence?
[QUOTE=For You]
The second amendment was put forth as a means to mollify the Southern states, to allay their concerns that an anti-slavery northern-biased government would take control of law enforcement nationwide and end up freeing all the slaves. The militias mentioned, well regulated by the state governments, would allow the Southern states to patrol their territories and keep the slaves in check, prevent them from revolting, at minimal cost to the proprietors. The article provides substantial documentation to support its premise.
[/QUOTE]
Reputable as I’m sure anything on the Smirking Chimp would be, I have to point out that 2nd Amendment was adopted in 1791…years before the South was seriously concerned with the Northern abolitionist movement and needed to be supposedly placated by something like the 2nd (not that this argument even makes nebulous sense in any case).
Perusing the article, I’m not seeing ‘substantial documentation to support its premise’…I’m seeing a few quotes with no context and a lot of handwaving. All of which seems pointless, since, again, we actually HAVE Madison’s thoughts on exactly why and what the 2nd was about. I honestly don’t get why that is so hard to grasp, or why all of this effort is expended on ignoring that plain fact. I mean, I can get the argument that says basically who cares what the original authors meant since this stuff was meant to be living documents that changed with the times, and since times have changed we can and should interpret it in the light of those changes, instead of clinging to the original intent.
They didn’t need to rationalize anything, since slavery was perfect fine under the original Constitution, and many of the FF’s actually owned slaves…including TJ. Again, I think there is some temporal confusion going on here. No doubt the Smirking Chimp is merely confused as to the progress of events and timelines…I’m certain that such a fine publication is normally spot on and punctiliously factual in everything they do and say.
This guy has his head so far up the left side of his ass that he can’t even keep his boogeymen straight. What the fuck does corporate personhood have to do with gun violence? Is he saying that guns are fine as long as they’re not manufactured by the evil corporations?
“I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.”
“The non-violent Negro is seeking to create the beloved community. He directs his attack on the forces of evil rather than on individuals. The tensions are not between the races, but between the forces of justice and injustice; between the forces of light and darkness.”
“But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way.”
Let’s remember how we got into this. Some people claim that it is important to keep guns in order to prevent a tyrant from taking over from within. I have not heard the claim that it is important to keep guns because we can’t trust the Armed Forces to protect us from invasion - though I’m sure some fruitcake out there is saying exactly that.
The Warsaw Ghetto example is reacting to an invasion. (Or the aftermath of one.) If this was 1939 Poland, which got overrun on a regular basis, we’d be in a different situation. But we are in a country with the world’s strongest military and protected by oceans from everyone except Canada and Mexico. So only the analogy of Germans - Jews and others - has any relevance to a gun debate.
As for where to get the guns, the obvious place would be from members of the military who would melt into the woods with all the heavy weaponry they could carry. Or are you saying that we all should be holding military grade weaponry just in case? Today especially you’d need things like rocket launchers - should we be stockpiling those in our garages? We’d also need to make IEDs - should we stockpile explosives?
The impression that I get from hearing these people is that they think it would all be a video game, where they would gun down hordes of enemy soldiers with no harm to themselves.
Get back to me when there is a real threat. At the moment the probability of using their guns to turn back an invasion from without or within is much less than the probability that the gun will be turned on them by a wife who is tired of their bullshit.
Seems that some tribes of people are just keeping true to their original character before ever coming to the New World. No wonder the British upper classes found them to be such useful soldiers.
OKFine, I get it. Now, please show me some other credible explanation for the presence of the “… well regulated militia …” clause. This particular one looks more convincing to me than any other I have seen to date – oh, wait, I have not seen any other explanation, just a kind of oh, we just ignore that bit.
You haven’t looked very hard if you can’t find anyone to explain what ‘well regulated militia’ means and why it’s in there. It means basically ‘duly constituted’. But since searching the internet is so hard, how about this from some guy named Cecil Adam’s:
Basically, the entire argument in your cite is a crock of at best half truths or out and out fabrications. You really should have realized that anything on a site called the Smirking Chimp isn’t going to be well researched or thought through, nor are they going to worry about such minor things as historical or legal accuracy…a site like that is going to be spouting non-sense for the faithful and telling them what they want to hear. There are countless right-wing sites that do exactly the same thing. Go take a look at Fox’s web site some time, especially the opinion pieces.
Yeah, seems to me I had looked over Cecil’s sage wisdom at some time in the past, and I have heard “well regulated” interpreted as meaning trained-up. The problem is, no one up to this point has offered any compelling explanation as to why the authors felt it necessary to include the entire lead clause. Thom Hartmann, who is certainly no idiot, offers a very plausible explanation for why the clause is there and for why it differs from the first draft. It may be incorrect, but it surely is a lot more substantive than all the other hand-waving vagueness that has been put forth.
Left or right, a lot of Americans see America in fantastical terms, which distort history to make persons and institutions appear to be on the sides their story imagines for them.
The USA and its history makes a lot more sense if you realize some things that get swept under the rug:[ul]
[li]The USA was founded as a racist, imperialist, expansionist enterprise at core, and has indoctrinated people to serve such ends while thinking they serve something enlightened and angelic. A lot of one’s political posture comes back to how aware you are of all that and how you respond to it.[/li][li]The conflict between the South as we think of it and the forces of Yankee progress was not resolved in the Civil War–that only smashed the antebellum Southern order. The Jim Crow South won the next big war, when they ended Reconstruction. The significance of this is downplayed by many, but Jim Crow endured, keeping the South in poverty and a bit of terror, for generations.[/li][li]One strain of “Conservatism” today seeks a resurgence of sanctioned white privilege which has been disparaged since LBJ. Its adherents can reasonably find sympathy in much of US history. The left understandably spends a lot of time reacting to that strain. This insults “conservatives” who are focused on other things but in the coalition of the right.[/li][li]Indeed modern idealistic liberalism resorts to revisionist history to make its egalitarian idealism seem, well, conservative (ahem) and continuous with the likes of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.[/li][*]And modern anti-statism resorts to revisionist history in the same way, but its right-wing manifestation somehow sees there as being a great theft of the country at some point in the modern era. It’s unclear when this was…[/ul]
There’s no reason to think they did find it necessary.
The political purpose of the Bill of Rights was to gain the ratification of the Constitution by holdout states Rhode Island and North Carolina. For this purpose, it was nice that the our Bill of Rights be a good one, but since no one apparently expected it to be enforced other than by public opinion, there was little need to agonize over the wording.
Does anyone know what proportion of the congressmen were packing heat when they voted for the Bill of Rights? I think this might hint at what side they might be on in today’s gun debates.
As for political paranoia, I think the belief that George III was out to enslave white Americans ranks pretty high. Whether it was left wing or right wing paranoia, I’m not sure.
Look at the LA riots and the Korean store owners defending their stores.
For an example of better have and not need,than need and not have. That is not paranoia that,s just being ready just in case
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I don’t even know what this means, but I’m pretty sure it’s probably moronic.
Fanatics always like to rewrite history in their favor. It lends credibility if they can align their beliefs with what they claim to be those of the Founding Fathers.
Having a gun for protection is reasonable. Believing the government (or whoever) is going to sweep in and take all your guns so they can enslave you is paranoia.
I’m not sure that core can even be identified. And, if it can be identified, the core was what the revolutionaries were against (the British), not what they were for.
In the Declaration of Independence, there’s nothing you can find, without reading a good deal into the text, about how King George III was stopping Americans from stealing Indian land. And there’s nothing at all about King George III being a threat to African-American enslavement.
If racism was the core, then the New England blacks who fought in the American Revolution were race traitors. This seems implausible.
Its mostly because the Left is really the center and they have to real use for the Left except as a canary in the coal mine or as sentry to give us advance notice of things we MIGHT want to pay attention to.
+1 I am a gun owner and the response I have heard to that exact question is that fire extinguishers don’t have the externalities that firearms have. The other answer I have heard basically anthropomorphizes guns and imbues them with evil intent.
Do you have a cite for the notion that the gap disappears?
Slavery and the Native American holocaust. I say we tilt the playing field until blacks and American Indians achieve parity with whites, then level the playing field again and even if these two groups drift back to the same place they are right now then we’ve extinguished our moral obligation and need do no more.
I wasn’t advocating this theory, in fact I also think its bullshit because of the language in the articles of confederation and the historical context of militias.
however I think that a state could effectively call their entire citizenry “the militia” and give them the right to bear arms. If a state did this, I don’t think the federal government could regulate the state’s citizens any more than they could regulate the state.
+1
And when the police are driving right through your neighborhood past rioters and arsonists on their way to forming a human shield around beverly hills, what fireams would you prevent me from owning?
I don’t buy the government tyranny theories right now but who knows how things will look in 50 years.
Debaser, I’m a card-carrying liberal. Also a Christian, specifically Catholic.
Look, some people in this thread are putting words in your mouth and knocking over strawmen. But you’re not helping yourself, either.
By no stretch of the imagination are Christians of any stripe persecuted in this country. It’s jut not happening. Some pain-in-the-ass atheist making a big deal out of a nativity display in front of the town hall hardly amounts to persecution. The government refusing to establish your faith as the national cult is not persecution. The government not endorsing your faith is not persecution.
Look, we live in a nation were nobody can get elected to high office, and certainly not to the Presidency, without proclaiming his or her Christian faith to the high heavens. You think a black man getting elected as President was a big deal? OK, I guess it was. But you and I, and our children, will all be in our graves before a Jew ever sits in the Oval Office. Even a Mormon (and I’m not getting into a debate over whether or not Mormons are Christians) had to downplay his religion.
Christians are doing fine here in the United States. There is no persecution of Christians. Nobody is being denied employment, or housing, because of his or her Christianity. Nobody is not getting into college. Nobody is being turned away at a hotel or restaurant. It just isn’t happening.
You will encounter people who do not share your faith. Some of them will be actively hostile towards it. Believe me, I know. I am the only religious person in my circle of friends and acquaintances. Many of them take a very dim view indeed of the Catholic Church, and have definitely not been shy about letting me know this. But that’s not persecution.
You may even live in a place where your government does things that your faith says are wrong and sinful. Like, for instance, legalize same-sex marriage. That’s not persecution, either.
You know what persecution is? Having your church (synagogue, mosque, temple, whatever) burned down while the fire and police departments stand by and chat with the arsonists. That’s persecution. Persecution is getting your ass kicked, badly, or even killed, because you wear a turban, and some moron thinks that means you’re a Muslim. Persecution is having to flee your country because your country makes you declare your religion on your national ID card, and every time you have to show that card, you’re taking your life in your hands, to the point where you have to flee your own country (read up on the Ahmedis of Pakistan, if you want to know what persecution is in our own time).
Drop it. This bit of silliness lets everyone off the hook when it comes to taking seriously the things you say that are actually worth taking seriously and giving some thought (even if we don’t ultimately agree with you).
Yes; in fact separation-of-church-and-state lawsuits against school prayer and such are much more often from some put-upon religious minority, not atheists. The religious who want to tear down the wall between church and state tend to be the ones who are sure that a religion pushed by the state would be their religion. They tend to be horrified when they get some pro-religion, “faith based” law passed and horror of horrors, somebody like the Muslims takes advantage of it instead of just Christians.
