I heard a short comedy clip on The Daily Show and it proposed a great question in one of its skits. Are the First and Second Amendments Equal? I had never thought that much about it, but its plaguing my mind.
I have a feeling that the people on The SDMB might be a bit partial to the first, as I am, but I’m wondering whether people think its more important to own a gun than have free speech.
What’s the point of having freedom of speech unless you got a gun to protect it with? The Government can’t take away our freedom of speech, but they can take away our guns. So I says The Second Amendment is more important. And guns never hurt anyone, 'cept those who got in the way, and shouldn’t have been there anyways. Meddlers. Like the Pinkies and Commies and Homos who wants to take away our God-given rights.
I actually agree with about 90% of this.
Real answer- they are equally important. The First represents the Idea of Freedom we should have. The Second represents the last-ditch line of defense against threats to that Freedom.
I would say that the first is more valuable than the second, but only slightly so (and from a comparative perspective via-a-vis other countries constitutions that enshrine similar rights).
However, that being said, I feel that the 2nd amendment is an extremely valuable one, one in which, in essence, safeguards the potential infringement of those rights enshrined by the first (and other) amendments.
The first is absolutely critical, the second completely unnecessary. Somehow the Brits and Canadians have managed to keep their freedoms without a gun lobby.
Even the NRA doesn’t value the Second Amendment- they’re in favor of The Second Half of the Second Amendment.
Given that the Second Amendment is pretty well unique to the US, and that most democratic countries have something equivalent to the First Amendment (except perhaps Australia), the empirical evidence is that the First Amendment does not depend on the Second.
And while the vigilante enforcement that some see implied in the Second Amendment might protect the rights of those bearing the arms, it’s not going to protect the rights of those who (for whatever reason) aren’t bearing arms.
What protects individual freedoms is a combinatioon of two things: some formal recognition in the law of those freedoms, and a general respect of those freedoms by law-enforcers and by the general population. Of those, the second is more important. Various communist dictatorships have had formal recognition of rights in their constitutions, but in practice not protected the rights of dissenters. Contrawise, as I said, Australia does not have any formal constitutional protection of freedom of speech, but in practice the right is recognised by all, from the High Court down to your average cop on the beat and your average citizen.
But to go back a bit in US history: how did the Second Amendment protect those people in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s against government oppression? Did Martin Luther King, and the rest, achieve what they did by bearing arms and conducting militia actions against governments? Hardly – they got it by changing public opinion, not by force of arms.
Look at revolutions throughout the world:
Unarmed revolutions in Russia, Poland, East Germany, and several others gave rise to democratic states.
Armed revolutions in Cuba and China gave rise to totalitarian governements.
Conclusion: Bearing arms and democratic governments are unrelated.
A view held only by the “Pinkies and Commies” that Roger Thornhill mentioned.
:rolleyes: Ever heard of the USA?
It’s a rare thing when the 2nd amendment comes up in Supreme Court cases (the latest one cited by Wikipedia is 1939). The first amendment, on the other hand, is probably one of the most frequently cited parts of the constitution in court rulings. So at least by the deffinition of “which gets used more” the 1st is far more important then the 2nd.
Also, as has been stated by others, the first part of the 2nd amendment has long been made moot, as no state has an armed militia of the type the Founding Father’s invisioned. I don’t think we’ve allowed any part of the 1st amendment to become unused, however.
In my day to day life I certainly exercise the rights protected by the 1st Amendment far more often then I do those protected by the 2nd Amendment. I’m hard pressed to say one is more important then the other though. I suppose this sounds like a cop out but to me your question might as well be "Which is more important, the 5th or 6th Amendment?
I don’t think it’s more important for people to own a gun then to have free speech but I do think it’s just as important that the people have the right to bear arms as those right protected by the 1st. What good is my right to free association or to practice my religion as I see fit if I am denied the means to effectively defend myself against threats to life or limb?
Marc
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly vs. right to bear arms… This doesn’t require more than an instant of thought.
The freedoms exercised under the First Amendment are exercised countless times each moment to keep our government from turning into a tyranny. I can’t really think of any time that the arms guaranteed to the American people by the Second Amendment have been used to foil a tyranny in the United States. If anyone knows of any times when armed Americans have successfully defended their freedom from the government through force of arms, let me know, but I am at a loss.
There is no question whatsoever that the First Amendment is far more critical than the Second, by a similar margin that the Second Amendment is far more important than the Third. Without the Second, we’d be a society without guns. Without the First, we’d most likely be a society with a recognized state religion and without a doubt people could be thrown in jail for unpopular views, or expression thereof.
The Second Amendment would be wonderful and spectacularly central to my rights and freedoms if it granted me the right to own and maintain my own silo of tactical nuclear weapons and delivery systems and other components of an arsenal sufficient to ensure that neither my own government nor any hypothetical conquering power could simply push me around easily by use of military power.
(Or it would if I could also afford all that stuff and the square footage of storage space etc etc)
Instead, it mostly only grants me the right to own and bear roughly the same level of firepower than it granted the citizens to which it first applied. (OK, rifled barrels and some degree of automated loading and empty-shell ejecting and not having to manually tamp my own black powder, I’ll grant you that. But the corresponding increase in firepower and tactical equipment available to the local police, let alone the National Guard and the regular Army and whatnot, completely wipes out those gains to the point they scarcely register on the graph).
If the government goes astray and rolls out legislation that would strip me of my house (umm, let’s say by expanding eminent domain, or establishing that people accused but not tried or convicted of some undefined “terrorist activities” can have their land and house seized and auctioned off), my possession of the full range of weapons duly permitted to a US citizen under the 2nd Amendment isn’t really going to make me a “force to be reckoned with” or provide me with the ability to remind them that the government rules only with the consent of the governed. Nope, if they don’t mind looking a bit heavy-handed and draconian on the evening news, they can get me out of there without sustaining any damages themselves.
In light of that, I’d have to say the 1st Amendment is more valuable to me.
It does give you these rights, at least literally. That’s what my NRA member friend tells me. The real purpose of the 2nd amendment is to allow people to protect themselves against governments. And you can’t do that unless you have weapons at least as robust as theirs.
Of course, once you have these weapons, you really don’t need an amendment giving you these rights. So, really, the 2nd Amendment is worthless.
Well, the Russians needed a do-over.
In addition to the USA, how does France fit into this equation?
Do you really think that Martin Luther King would have gotten as far without the understanding that the eventual alternative was Malcolm X, or someone even more radical?
Interesting question. Both armed revolutions led to democratic governments, in one case much more directly than the other. But these were centuries ago. Today, armed citizenry would have no chance against modern militaries. Whether Joe Sixpack has a six shooter or not isn’t going to make much of a difference against a modern army.
That depends. If you’re a lone nut supported only by a few other lone nuts, then, yes, the government will squash you like a bug. If you have the support, at least tacitly, of a significant percentage of the population… well, let’s see how all that “military power” of the US Government is working out against guys with personal firearms and scrounged homebrew explosives over in Iraq…
While I tend to agree that the 1st is more important, let’s also take note of how modern interpretations of that amendment also ignores the qualifier attached to the rights listed (my emphasis):
Since that has been expanded way beyond it’s original meaning, why should you object that the “militia” part of the 2nd amendment seems to have been expanded as well? I thought that as long as we interpreted the constitution to give us MORE rights or freedoms, that was OK. Or is it only OK when it aligns with a a policy with which you agree?
I don’t mean to snarky, Bob, but to call for a strict, literal interpretation of the text in one istance but not in another instance doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.