A comment recently argued that the Second Amendment was vague and therefore open to an interpretation that would prevent people from owning handguns. He likely got this interpretation from the writer Garry Wills who has made a good living attacking conservative ideals over the past couple of decades.
The reason for the language in the Second Amendment is that those at the time worked within an Anglo-American tradition that needed no explanation. Just as today, we would say "the dream of Dr. King" and no one would ask "what dream" or "who is Dr. King?" those of the 1790s were children of a centuries old tradition.
King Henry II helped to build this tradition with the Assize of Arms, requiring that every male citizen own some sort of weapon. Although Alfred the Great in his time had ordered the creation of a fyrd, or militia, Henry's assize was much more specific. This enabled him to get by without a standing army because all were required to help defend the realm. However, an armed citizenry meant that Henry also had to take steps to make sure those people were happy. He traveled his kingdom to make sure he was aware of the people's needs. Later it became more convenient for kings to call representatives to the capital. The partnership between ruler and ruled, cemented by an armed people, put England on the road towards democracy. A good government has nothing to fear from an armed population, but the armed population is the best insurance policy against tyranny. And don't bring up the argument about modern weapons. The experiences and/or writings of Giap, Che Guavara, Max Boot and others about guerilla warfare bely the notion that people with their own arms are powerless in modern warfare.
In the 1600s Britain knew tyranny from both power hungry kings and Oliver Cromell's dictatorship. The natural rights of life, liberty, and property were unsafe in the hands of such a government. By the 1700s British Whigs spoke openly about the need for an armed population to protect itself from tyranny. Our forefathers, according to noted American historian Bernard Bailyn, absorbed these principles like mother's milk. It was part of the justification for the Revolution itself. Meanwhile, the Indian chief King Phillip's war of genocide against New England spurred Americans on the frontier to understand that every good citizen must be armed to defend his community. Add to these historical antecedents the natural right of people to protect themselves and their property and you have the Second Amendment.
But let's imagine for a second that guns would magically vanish. Would we be safer? Maybe the strongest of us would be. I am 6'2, 250, and fairly young. I could handle a baseball bat pretty well to defend myself and my property. What if I were elderly and frail? My grandmother until she died at age eighty kept a handgun under her bed. Her husband who died in 1973 taught her how to use it and she kept it for security. She lived far from possible police protection. If there were no guns, home invaders could easily have harmed her with bats or axes. The possibility of getting shot deters a lot of these predators. Who is anyone to deny the right of the elderly or the disabled to defend themselves? How about the young woman trying to break away from a much stronger and abusive man who has promised to kill her if she ever leaves? Who is anyone to take away her right to protect herself? The intruder will think twice before entering a home if there is a possibility of the resident shooting him or her to death.
The Second Amendment's guarantee of gun rights is meant to help assist in the national defense, give property owners the ability to defend themselves and their families, and insure against a tyrannical government. Thomas Jefferson, who has been described as James Madison's collaborator to the point that one historian claimed they by the early 1790s almost shared the same mind, described the Second Amendment as his favorite because it helped protect against tyranny. This gives an important clue as to the mindset of the author, James Madison. No one at that time would have fathomed that people's right to defend their persons with deadly force would ever be questioned. It would be like questioning your right to eat whatever you wanted.
The violent will be violent, governments at some point will seek too much authority, and at some point we will face a serious attack on our territory. The first measure taken to prepare any nation for dictatorship is the removal of the citizens' guns. We must never allow ourselves to be in that position as a nation or as individuals, vulnerable to whatever strong force seeks to violate us.
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ReplyDeleteI re-read some of my last comment and some of the sentences were just thrown together haphazardly. This post should make more sense:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scotusblog.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/07-290_amicus_linguists1.pdf
This is where I found the ambiguity of of the second amendment to be of particular interest. I am a linguist, it's what I do. The grammatical constructions employed in the constitution are inherently vague. And a further linguistic analysis shows that they do not in fact protect the rights of an individual to privately stock guns, but rather the purpose of the amendment is contingent entirely upon a "Well Regulated" militia. Unless you can provide a better grammatical account of how our constitution is laid out, I would suggest abandoning this argument as it pertains specifically to this amendment.
The dream of Martin Luther King is a very clear and well defined point. No one would argue it because his dream is embedded in a series of clauses and conjunctions that muck up the language. Again, let's not use unquestioned "common sense" as a guiding principle, ever.
"But let's imagine for a second that guns would magically vanish. " You and I and every reader who reads this blog (including everyone who knows even the slightest bit about science) knows that the odds, better yet the sheer possibility, of such a thing happening is impossible. As I pointed out and provided evidence for in my comments with Gary Howell, Australia is a good example of what happens when you systematically and carefully remove handguns from a populous, while still allowing permits for such contingencies as owning large amounts of property far away from city limits. But again, these contingencies are mostly for pest control. The facts are there; guns have disappeared and so has all butt a fraction of the gun violence. The statistics can be manipulated when compared in extremely narrow scopes, but anyone who is open to the idea can clearly see that attempts at such a manipulation are thinly veiled attempts at supporting one's own agenda through a corrupt and public-threatening bastardization of rhetoric.
This type of argument you propose is not one based in reality (yes, the same reality you reference in other posts concerning practical energy solutions) but rather a hypothetical predicated on fear. What evidence is there? A narrative hardly constitutes evidence. Old and/or defenseless women should not be the rationale for why guns are legal. Do you honestly think any man in one of these hypotheticals, assuming he is hell bent on another person's destruction, is going to merely not attack based on fear of getting shot? No, he would just go out and get a gun.
The clarity of the 2nd amendment is a moot point. The constituency the GOP appeals to love gun ownership and it is given, in America, that if you support any one of the number of issues the GOP supports (or the Democratic Party for that matter) you must accept this point by association. However, the claim that a nation that allows gun ownership is going to prevent more crime than it creates through such ownership is a ludicrous assertion. You really cannot expect anyone to accept such a paradox.
Another point, why do these propagandistic narratives always involved a person from a rural community? Is it because the likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime is much higher in a rural setting than an urban one? No, actually the opposite is true. Must the hypothetical victim of such an attack live in an area where the police can't respond to in time? This notion is equally ludicrous as anyone who has ever lived in a poor community of an urban area (urban in this sense meaning as small of a city as Huntington) will tell you that the police are equally slow to respond to high crime areas, not for reasons of having to drive long distances but rather just for fear of having to be involved in conflict.
Ultimately the victim of this hypothetical attack, for narrative purpose, must be a member of rural society, for that is the area in which we find isolated, sparsely populated communities of people that have so little interaction with cultures other than their own. They grow to fear any humanity that doesn't look or talk exactly like them. We need to work on getting these pockets (most of WV and most of the mid-west) interfacing with other cultures, domestically and internationally. Why support their arming themselves to the teeth and fortifying their homes when we know this fueled more on irrational fear (how many people have any of you had to shoot) than statistical probability?
I would even as far here to say that the problem presented with retaining our guns privately, based on the notion that it makes for a safer society, is as paradoxical as the arms race of the Cold War. We have two sides presented in the majority of arguments supporting the rights for an individual to own a gun (those who use guns for protection and those who use them for crime). Now, in a highly standoffish way, this makes sense. Recall the typical prisoner's dilemma scenario of base level game theory. Much like the Cold War, we have two parties and neither side accepts the notion of disarming.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the situation is completely changed when both of the entities in question are supposed to be ruled by the same body, in this case the government. Going with game theory, we can't put our guns down because we have no way of knowing that our potential assailants will not attack us. But this view must be abandoned if we can find an example of successful disarmament. We have. As I pointed out in the debate with Gary, the long-term numbers don't lie. We need to place trust in the government to regulate this and base such regulation on tested methods.
Now the fear of government argument is unavoidable. Well, we've come to such an age where the difference between the arms of the governing body and the arms of the private individual is no longer merely a question of barrel size. We can all agree that the military industrial complex (worst case scenario) would flatten any and all opposition made by handguns. Even a more mild than my hypothetical example of this would be something like the Waco incident in which we see how we can no longer be expected to physically protect ourselves from out government.
I just don't see the little pay-off of having a gun based hobby or a small piece of mind in security (the assailant if he has any foresight is probably going to be more armed than you, and if you get into an arms race you'll end up entering the aforementioned cycle of armament) when the greater good will clearly benefit in the long run from such a move on behalf of the US gov't.
Your Australian comments were flawed an not supported by data from official Australian government sources. That data was provided in another posting.
ReplyDeleteThe "old woman" scenario was not hypothetical. It was my grandmother who lived in a hollow thirty minutes from police protection. If they had no gun, a burglar could use an axe or a bat and she would be vulnerable without a gun. You do not give an alternative to people who deserve security. It spoke to the right we all have to defend ourselves. Some of my most staunch defenders of the Second Amendment are inner city dwellers. In their case, the cop does not come at all. What about the woman moving away from her abusive husband. My good friend used to advise women in such a situation. She encouraged them to get guns and take care of themselves, especially if they lived far from home.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be an English major rather than a constitutional expert. Get to know the figures behind the Constitution and you will better understand where they come from.
The right to protect oneself and property is natural and eternal. Government has no business restraining people's right to their own security.