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I wanted to add something which is rightfully controversial and unpopular because it comes from an entirely different and somewhat naïve era. It's easy for us
by vertexFarm 8y ago
I wanted to add something which is rightfully controversial and unpopular because it comes from an entirely different and somewhat naïve era.
It's easy for us to overlook in this day and age what kind of context they had in 18th-century America. They didn't have much of a concept of a revolutionary dictator, a monstrous autocrat who emerged out of a popular revolution. Back then, dictators and despots already ruled everything through heredity and divine right. The dictators who arose from revolutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were an out-of-context problem at the time. To them, assassination didn't carry connotations of Kennedy or Franz Ferdinand. It was a wilder and more violent age. Probably one that shouldn't be emulated.
But it's astounding how rarely it's acknowledged that the second amendment was meant to act as a violent deterrent against our own government. It isn't to defend against home invaders, or hunt, or whatever. Of course the staunchest supporters of the second are often the very ones voting in the crooks they should be ousting, or at least acting as a deterrent for.
That part of our central legal document exists explicitly to facilitate credible threats of assassination as one of our government's checks and balances, and we like to dance around that ugly fact. At this point it obviously doesn't work the way things did in the 1700s, like most things from three centuries ago. We now know that method doesn't end well, and alternatives should absolutely be pursued until there's no other option.
But today we also live in a time when the most massive and damaging crimes done by those in government--or the pseudo-government of industry--carry no punishment at all except an abstract (and impotent) threat of being voted out of office in a few years. And our absurdly low approval rating / incumbency ratio should show us that there's something deeply wrong with that avenue. I think more people should be concerned about the implications of extremely low approval ratings combined with near-perfect rates of re-election. This casts a doubt about democratic legitimacy that we cannot deny or brush away.
I think at least serious prison time should be on the table. And of course I mean the real prisons that we send normal criminals to. But that is unheard of. We need to acknowledge that checks and balances have already failed in a very fundamental way.
- opportune 8y agoVery good post and I completely agree. What I think this is a result of, is the construction of a very complicated and abstract apparatus - that of wealth, class, media, and all the various laws/regulations/judicial rulings that serve to cement the system and undermine a true democracy. What good is free speech when rich people can simply pay people to espouse and justify views as a full time job? What good is the second amendment with a militarized police force? What good is privacy with the NSA? What good is political free speech with the CIA and FBI? What good is democracy when those with views outside the two party system have essentially no representation?
- geofft 8y agoI don't think it's about assassination - the amendment is clearly about a "militia," which envisions a group of individuals capable of fighting a protracted war - like the Revolutionary War. (I'm not taking a position on what the "militia" language says about how much it guarantees a right for individuals, but it certainly guarantees a right for militias.) Even in the era where it was written, any joker could assassinate an individual politician - see e.g. Spencer Perceval, or honestly the entire idea of duels. The threat of a military attack is a very different one from the threat of assassination; while the Black Hand was (sorta) successful, Lee Harvey Oswald was not, nor were any of the other assassins of any other American president. Assassination usually kills an individual and leaves the system intact; revolution usually changes the system entirely. And popular revolution (unlike assassination) used to carry the implicit authority of democratic legitimacy, back when the people could be reasonably well armed against their own government. You'd win by having more soldiers on your side and the willingness of the people who lived in each city to either aid the soldiers or become soldiers themselves, which would be a way of returning control to the people when confidence was lost that the current system really represented the people. (That doesn't work too well nowadays because Raytheon would just rule the country, of course.) I agree with the rest of what you write, and yes, for all that the Right seems to paint the Left as violent, the Left seems to not really believe in using the Second Amendment for its intended purpose to pursue their goals.