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Originally Posted by Nikolai
I actually do believe that an "armed populace" is a check against the expansion of government power. I'm not sure how anyone could make a reasonable argument to the contrary, but I'm interested to hear yours if you have one.?
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I think there's an unexamined second side to this equation, Nik. If we set zero as the perfect amount of government power -- the claim bolstered by the elegant but incorrect maxim "the government governs best which governs least" -- then everything is fine. We should all be armed, the government should never tax anybody, etc.
However, zero is not the perfect amount of government power, as various failed states around the world today show. If I'm a Somali, I may very well have a gun and it may have been decades since anyone from "the government" has been able to travel in my part of the country. It ain't paradise.
So, the question of "how much firepower the citizen should have" and "how much power should the government have" are evidently both conditional and not binary choices -- more below.
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No, I see no reason why the U.S. government "can or should be defeated by bands of gun-owners in small-arms battles". Things are more or less fine now. Could that change within the next 50, 100, 200 years? It's possible. I would posit that the point of an armed populace is to keep things from getting to that point anyway.
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I can't characterize your experience, but I've stayed out of the worst areas of our cities (as places to live) for most (but not all) of my life.
Some in the inner city see themselves as tyrannized by police brutality -- not 50, 100, or 200 years from now, but now.
Recently I posted Ice T's words of wisdom about this. Of course, he's been out of those environments for years. But he's speaking from the point of view of his upbringing. He says what you need guns for is to defend yourself from the police. The NRA, which is just all over the place at the moment, has recently taken up a campaign to better arm African Americans, just in general. To me, it looks like they can be provocative and simultaneously penetrate a market that's less receptive to their product than other populations -- having buried many more, proportionately, than the rest of the country, and having had at least some positive experience from the use of non violence.
This raises a question: who says when the government has become tyrannical? I like Ice T in the things he acts in, and he argues reasonably enough when he's on his soap box. In fact he makes a much more compelling case than the Ted Nugents of the world. But let's consider:
Someone has to decide that the government is tyrannical. What if you disagree with those arguing said point? Was Lebanon freer during its civil war, when you couldn't drive 5 miles without hitting another faction's checkpoint? Is Somalia free? Do you agree with Ice T that we need more guns in inner cities, so the police can be killed if you disagree with their approach to law enforcement? After all, police are trained to strike in such a way to project the expectation of irresistible force: GET DOWN ON THE GROUND DO IT NOW etc. Well, that's rather rude. Should everybody have the right to shoot them?
Wouldn't that seem like tyranny to you, especially if they had the wrong house? Shouldn't they, as Solzhenytsyn said, be in (more) fear of their life when they go to work, and say goodbye to their family when they go out every night?
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Ewwww, now we're getting somewhere. I know I'm not good about follow up, but this requires a far longer response than I have time to type right now. However, I'd like to hear your take on this as well, if you have the time.
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The short form: Seems to be a compromise between the states' rights folk and the federalists, like so much of the constitution. Sort of a continuation of Article I, Section 8, where we seem to bow to militias over a permanent standing army. The Constitution makes it difficult to establish the latter, something the anti-federalists would like. But it also subordinates control of the militia to the Federal government, something the federalists like -- including to call out the militia for purposes of quashing rebellions, by the way, which undercuts the theory that we should have guns for individuals and small bands thereof to fire at agents of the state. Really, it seems to be an argument about whether power should be in the hands of individual states or in the United States, something settled rather conclusively in the 19th century.
The second amendment states its purpose in its first clause: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state...
There may have been those -- more Virginians than others -- who thought "hey, the gubmit should be afraid of the people not vice versa." That's all well and good, but it's certainly
not the letter of the second amendment. That amendment clearly sets out its lower purpose. making sure you can scare up a militia when you need it. Why? The stated higher purpose the security of a free state. You can argue that they meant a free State of Virginia or Georgia or whatever, rather than a free United States. What you can't argue is that the second amendment says "The eventual overthrow or resistance against the State being necessary to the freedom of the state..."
Etc. I'll wait for your reply before wading in too deep.
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I have no issue with reasonable restrictions on access to fully automatic weapons. I don't see the lack of access being a major hindrance to the check on government power. Without getting too much into it, fully automatic weapons have limited uses in combat anyway. In a cruel twist, I might suggest that if Adam Lanza were using a fully automatic weapon, he might not have killed as many people as he did.
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But we do have to think at the very least about larger contingent of the state's troops being sent to quash a righteous rebellion of one sort or another, or just to enforce unjust state edicts. You have to understand you'd need any possible advance in armaments to keep up with good body armor, small hovering drones, and what have you. Whether it's snuffy smith pointing his shootin' iron at the revenooers (or Shay's rebellion, for that matter,) or gangs (and the gang-adjacent) who are sick and tired of police tactics, if we're saying that the individual or the gang must be able to draw the line where and how they see fit, it really seems a
chutzpah to lecture them on tactics.
I'm no expert, but it would seem that a compact maneuverable fully-automatic weapon would be extremely useful against a contingent of state agents within your home. The cops will also have kevlar, so you want to be able to punch through body armor. So we'll need really high muzzle velocity and reliably hard materials for the ammo (e.g. steel core, and I am sure someone can formulate an anti-armor coating for civilians to buy their rounds coated with.) They should be
marketed as Cop Killers, because we have to, either now or some time in the future, be able to resist the state.
I mean... right?
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By nature, any control will restrict access to firearms to the populace. The degree to which such measures infringe on the rights guaranteed in the Second Amendment are the root of the discussion.
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That's why I'm going on about cop killers above. If we believe our right stems from the need to fire at agents of the government, there are people who believe they need that right
now.
So: we have Founders who say "darn right you have to be able to kill your government's guys!" And, you have the actual words of the second amendment, which insists that you can only bear arms because we need your help in making the state more secure. Comparing said tendencies to the actual language they came up with, I like the more sober wording in the actual Constitution and second amendment much better than the sloganeering.
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Look, I'm not one of those types who thinks that we're in an imminent SHTF scenario and that assault rifles are going to save us. In fact, even if those were taken off the table, Americans would have access to them at some point during a "doomsday scenario" anyway. I also have what I want, so I could take the attitude that everyone else can pound sand.
The point is that I cannot support measures that weaken the power of the American people in relation to the government. It's very similar to my objections to the Patriot Act, something which I should favor in the interest of national security.
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But you just
did say you'd favor weakening the power of the individual vis a vis the government, when you accepted that fully auto weapons aren't in individual hands. We could go on to things like rocket launchers, etc., but you get the idea.
The moment the rationale becomes "we need these to resist the state's tyranny," it becomes a very short step to rationalizing
any weapon.
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This is a bit of a rambly response, influenced by fever and flu medicine, so I'll apologize for that.
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Well, I'm the king of rambly, as you can see above. It's Cheka and NKVD on one side, and Mad Max/Somali warlords/Gangsta Paradise on the other.
Given the wisdom of the gun-toting masses in their various recent threats of secession and civil war over health care and election losses...color me Federalist.
PFnV
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