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I don't think that's quite right. I will absolutely defend that the Second Amendment was crafted so the citizens retain the power to take up arms against the st

by geofft 6y ago

I don't think that's quite right. I will absolutely defend that the Second Amendment was crafted so the citizens retain the power to take up arms against the state, but that is a very different thing from "extrajudicial reprisal." The Second Amendment absolutely protects the ability of citizens to declare their government invalid, set up their own, and defend themselves. It does so because citizens already have that right - as argued in the Declaration of Independence ("it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"), and later codified in things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The task of the Second Amendment is not to codify that right; it is to codify a right to a mechanism by which the citizens may protect the right to self-determination of government, which is more fundamental but only theoretical if an unwanted government comes at you with guns. There is no right to extrajudicial reprisals against individual members of the government. The Second Amendment does not recognize one, nor does anything else in the Constitution, nor does any other well-accepted document about rights. There is a right to invoke the structures of the government to redress grievances and to hold judges and other officials responsible for abuse of their office, and there is a right to oppose the government wholesale if they refuse. But that is still a defensive right. If a corrupt judge wants to take your land, and corrupt police try to make it happen, you need a means to defend yourself, sure. But I cannot find any reason to believe that the authors of the Constitution would have said that an appropriate check on government power is the risk that members of the government would have their family members killed in reprisal - the risk that people would be deprived of life (or even liberty or property) without due process of law.

caeril 6y ago
Ordinarily and historically, I'd fully agree, but the antigun refrain of "lol you're going to fire your AR-15s at drones and tanks and A-10 Warthogs?" does have some degree of merit. 2A was written when citizens were not robbed of ~7% of their earnings to fund a standing military machine. In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.
- geofft 6y ago
  That's fair, and we've seen in the last half-century or so that the US military can lose to asymmetric warfare when it can't lose to nuclear powers. But, I don't think that e.g. the guerrillas of Vietnam were morally ambiguous simply because they engaged in asymmetric warfare against the US military. They were fighting against identified soldiers in a declared war; they had the right to engage by the international rules / norms of war. They killed people who had taken up arms against them. (Yes, most of their opponents were forced to take up arms; that doesn't make the opposing force morally ambiguous in its opposition.) They're very different from various terrorists (domestic and foreign) who have attacked the US in recent years, who also reached the conclusion that only asymmetric warfare would work against the US, but chose to attack non-combatants - office workers, children, etc. And they weren't merely casualties of a morally-ambiguous operation; they were direct targets. (As it happens, these terrorists were not particularly effective, either.) So even if we want to grant modern interpretation to the Second Amendment and read in the right to do whatever is effective against the government of the US (instead of talking about what it was crafted to do), it still seems to me like it should be about making sure you have the arms and the training to defend yourself against an illegitimate government and establish your own, perhaps through asymmetric warfare if needed - which is still very different from randomly attacking individual officials whom you have declared corrupt in an otherwise-legitimate government (let alone their family members).

by geofft 6y ago

caeril 6y ago

Ordinarily and historically, I'd fully agree, but the antigun refrain of "lol you're going to fire your AR-15s at drones and tanks and A-10 Warthogs?" does have some degree of merit. 2A was written when citizens were not robbed of ~7% of their earnings to fund a standing military machine. In the modern era, any effective resistance to tyranny is - UNFORTUNATELY - going to be asymmetric, guerrilla, and dirty. Which - again, UNFORTUNATELY - is going to involve morally ambiguous activity.

geofft 6y ago
That's fair, and we've seen in the last half-century or so that the US military can lose to asymmetric warfare when it can't lose to nuclear powers. But, I don't think that e.g. the guerrillas of Vietnam were morally ambiguous simply because they engaged in asymmetric warfare against the US military. They were fighting against identified soldiers in a declared war; they had the right to engage by the international rules / norms of war. They killed people who had taken up arms against them. (Yes, most of their opponents were forced to take up arms; that doesn't make the opposing force morally ambiguous in its opposition.) They're very different from various terrorists (domestic and foreign) who have attacked the US in recent years, who also reached the conclusion that only asymmetric warfare would work against the US, but chose to attack non-combatants - office workers, children, etc. And they weren't merely casualties of a morally-ambiguous operation; they were direct targets. (As it happens, these terrorists were not particularly effective, either.) So even if we want to grant modern interpretation to the Second Amendment and read in the right to do whatever is effective against the government of the US (instead of talking about what it was crafted to do), it still seems to me like it should be about making sure you have the arms and the training to defend yourself against an illegitimate government and establish your own, perhaps through asymmetric warfare if needed - which is still very different from randomly attacking individual officials whom you have declared corrupt in an otherwise-legitimate government (let alone their family members).