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> The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. I'm sorry, it's hard not to be a little snarky here. Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules

• pg314 9y ago
  > the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. That is an appeal to authority. Those guys were not handed down the word of god from heaven. They wrote down what they thought was best at the time. They were not infallible (see the amendments), what they wrote down was not unambiguous (or the supreme court wouldn't be necessary), and society and technology has changed in the intervening 200+ years. Do you think they would come up with exactly the same text if they were alive today, with the benefit of hindsight?
  • leereeves 9y ago
    > Those guys were not handed down the word of god from heaven. No, they wrote down rules to prevent the forms of oppression and protect the means of opposition that they knew from experience. Has society changed so much in 200 years that armed opposition to the government has become impossible? The US govs failure to control Afghanistan would argue: no.
    • pg314 9y ago
      > Has society changed so much in 200 years that armed opposition to the government has become impossible? The US govs failure to control Afghanistan would argue: no. As your Afghanistan example illustrates, you don't need a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution, nor 101 guns per 100 inhabitants as in the US. Afghanistan has an estimated 4.6 guns per 100 inhabitants. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...
      • leereeves 9y ago
        > you don't need a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution, nor 101 guns per 100 inhabitants as in the US You need armed people, however you get them.
  • 0x445442 9y ago
    > Do you think they would come up with exactly the same text if they were alive today, with the benefit of hindsight? With respect to property rights and a citizen's right to arms, yep pretty close.
  • phil21 9y ago
    > That is an appeal to authority. Isn't that kind of required if we are to live under rule of law? There must be an end-all authority, and in this land it tends to be the constitution and it's assorted related documents. I have no problem with that appeal to authority. It may be the sole legitimate time to use it. The rules were written down and hard to change precisely because of threads like this. If parts need to be updated, there is a mechanism to do so. Therefore, appealing to the Constitution as the ultimate authority of the land sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Perfect? Of course not. But the founding fathers certainly were prescient about the whole "slippery slope" slow erosion of rights - the entire last 100 years (at least) has been a story of the slow erosion of personal liberty. I imagine that would have gone much faster without such hard to change "final rules" of the land.
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. The Articles of Confederation were the original rules of the country. The base Constitution which replaced them as the rules for the country also didn't include anything about that. The package of 12 amendments to the Constitution formally proposed after the Constitution was ratified did mention it, but only the third through twelfth of those were ratified fairly quickly by the states. So, it wasn't part of the original rules or the original replacement, and the drafters of the package known as the Bill of Rights put it fourth behind the right to minimal levels of representation in Congress, the right to a Congress without the power to raise its own salary between elections, and freedom of expression, not second behind freedom of expression. So, aside from being a fallacious appeal to authority, your argument is grounded in falsehoods.
  • mratzloff 9y ago
    In George Mason's original onjections to the Constitution, from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, the right to bear arms was seventeenth! 17. That the People have a Right to keep and to bear Arms; that a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free State; that Standing Armies in Time of Peace are dangerous to Liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided as far as the Circumstances and Protection of the Community will admit; and that in all Cases, the military should be under strict Subordination to, and governed by the Civil Power.
    • ScottBurson 9y ago
      That is a fascinating quote which I don't think I've seen before. Although I appreciate the desire, on the part of the authors of the Bill of Rights, to boil each amendment down to its essence, in this case I wish they had kept more of the original context. The vision presented in this statement -- of "a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms" -- is very different from what we've wound up with. There's nothing resembling a trained militia organized by the states, nor do most gun owners seem to feel any duty to engage in such organized training if it existed (of course, many do engage in individual training, but not all). The exceptions are private right-wing militias whose presence probably doesn't contribute to the overall security of the community, and, of course, organized crime, which is destructive to that security. And then on the other hand, we do have a standing army, indeed an entire military-industrial complex, which is evidently necessary, at least to some extent, in this modern world with its machines of war that were unimaginable to the Framers. The one part of this article that has worked out more-or-less as Mason envisioned is the last clause: the military has indeed remained under civilian control. To me, all this adds to the difficulty faced by those who want to disregard the opening clause of the Second Amendment ("A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, ..."). It's all about collective self-defense; there's nothing here about individual self-defense. While I agree that individuals have a right to defend themselves when necessary, I believe that defending citizens from one another is primarily the responsibility of the State; only when the State is clearly failing in this duty do citizens have the right to take that defense upon themselves. Allowing individuals to arm themselves in the absence of such necessity — for sporting purposes, for example — is a choice a community might make, but is not a right.