Tyranny of the majority. The government sees the people as tyrannical. Working as designed.
It helps if a whole section of the political mass, the one that supposedly wants to protect minorities, didn’t swear off guns.
“swear off” vs “wanting the most basic of testing so mentally unstable people don’t get to browse their local shops like a kid in a candy store”
You: “they are the same picture”
😑
That’s so much a strawman it’s not even worth the time I spent to read it.
allow me to offer a little something unhinged to this old and tired discussion. feel free to disregard it. Just trying it out to see if it makes anyone feel any certain way.
The existence of mentally unstable people should be a motivation to make a society that doesn’t prey on them or make them idealize being active shooters. The existence of mentally unstable people shouldn’t be a preface to talk about which rights and autonomy is okay to take away from people.
You’re right that Healthcare is real problem.
In the context of “taking away rights and autonomy”: Cars are 100x more useful than guns, both during insurgency and peacetime. We still have locks, licensing, inspections, laws against unsafe use, and registration for cars, but not for guns. Wouldn’t it be more liberal to have a right to drive?
Compare your ideal system to systems like Sweden and Switzerland, where citizens own many guns, and are well trained, but gun crime and gun negligence is extremely rare.
That’s true, cars are regulated in ways you’d think would make sense to map onto gun. I’ve live some places though where I would even call auto regulations harmful for people trying to survive there. But you raise a excellent point, I’m as guilty as anyone of contempt for people over a certain age having access to freeway. There’s some deep ageism within me I need to address and there’s an issue societally to examine about how to handle the issue. My gut instinct is to immediately say that’s different from 2a but I can’t think of a compelling reason why it is.
Sweden and Switzerland kind of sound like my personal ideal actually. That’s a good system and I’d be happy seeing combined with an economic setting that made that training available to everyone.
I think that’s a very thoughtful way to look at it.
Not an American here but doesn’t the 2A imply that there is no centralized US army? That’s the whole idea, have an armed militia instead of military or a police force
Yes, that’s correct. A standing army in peacetime was not only something that the founders feared, they explicitly put a two year cap on the appropriations needed to fund it. Obviously that’s been ignored since before the ink dried.
they explicitly put a two year cap on the appropriations needed to fund it.
I’m not sure I understand what that means, my English isn’t perfect. Does it mean that 2 years after the creation of an army, it has to be resolved?
It means it’s only funded for two years, but Congress can keep reauthorizing it when it comes up.
and they always instantly do
I mean at this point it would be pretty amazing move to stop funding it just like that. Since it has been an institution taken for granted for so long it would throw things into chaos
My apologies! The other reply gave the correct answer, but for more detail: “appropriations” is basically just the government word for “budget.” For most appropriations, the Congress can theoretically decide on the budget for many years into the future, but for the military they are supposed to only authorize two years at a time. The bottom line is, during peacetime, the US isn’t supposed to have a standing professional military.
The government also ignores the part in the Second Amendment about how the right to own guns requires gun ownership to be well-regulated and tied to participation in a militia (which is an army made up of people who are trained, armed, and ready to fight in defense of the country, but do a different job when there’s not an active conflict). That’s supposed to be our national defense strategy, not having the largest and most well-funded standing peacetime military the world has ever known.
Now, I don’t know how realistic that model is for the modern state of war. It’s tough to have a militia air force, for instance. But if we had followed the law even just a little bit more, I think the world would be better off.
(Edit: I just noticed that you used the word “militia” in your original question. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound patronizing. Just trying to define potentially unfamiliar terms.)
That is why America has never had any peace time longer than two years, I suppose… 🤔
Actually, technically speaking, the US hasn’t been in a formal war since World War II ended in 1947. Yes, there have been military actions more or less continuously since then, but no declared wars. Which is a stupid distinction to make, but it is a distinction.
Anyway, in case I wasn’t clear: it’s not the declared war that matters, but the two years. There aren’t supposed to be any army appropriations that last longer than two years (with the expectation that no war would last that long anyway, and if it did that congress would be motivated to continue funding it). The idea is that a standing army should be impossible in peacetime. A navy is fine–Article 1, Section 8, Clause 13 allows for a standing navy–but clause 12 prohibits appropriations lasting longer than two years, and clauses 15 & 16 give them the militias of the states as the bulwark against “insurrections” and “invasions.” (Unfortunately, it does also give Congress the right to use the militia in the pursuit of “execut[ing] the laws of the union,” which is terrifying in a lot of ways.)
And actually, I was glib about “since before the ink was dry,” but actually we fought every war of the 19th Century with mostly volunteers. A small army (only about 800 soldiers, at the start) was kept to guard frontier forts and national harbor batteries; in time of war, the militias were called up and formed the army (though the word “militia” fell out of use in favor of “National Guard” after the Civil War). Even after World War I, when the draft had ballooned the Army’s size from 140,000 to almost 2.5 million, the drawdown began shortly after the war ended, and it was back down to near its prewar numbers by 1920. Around that time, our army was 190,000 strong, making it one of the smaller armies in the world; some estimates put it around 19th in size. When Hitler invaded Poland, the US Army was smaller than Portugal’s.
But World War II was the turning point. The US Army grew to over eight million soldiers between 1939 and 1945, and though they were demobilized dramatically quickly (some historians say too quickly), the size of the Army hasn’t dropped much below a half-million since. And that size standing military is tough to justify with just guarding harbor batteries; there aren’t any more frontier forts, so if you maintain appropriations for more than 500,000 active duty soldiers every two years for almost a century, I think the founders would have some issues with that.
The second amendment was written because Patrick Henry was scared of slave rebellions. He was trying to drrail the ratification of the constitution. The argument was that if the federal army was away then nobody would be around to save the slave owners from their deserved fate. Thus Madison creates the second amendment to ensure states have the right to have local militias. The whole idea is for state militias to be in addition to the federal army.
I am an American “person of color” who owns firearms (at home; I live in the Netherlands currently).
Here’s the exact verbiage of the 2nd Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Interpret that as thou wilt; we’ve been arguing about it since about 1791.
For what it’s worth, I’d amend the amendment to include this snippet from Marx, just to confuse us all even more:
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
Nope. That’s not what it meant and that’s not what the courts have determined that it meant.
What’s more, my state constitution explicitly grants gun ownership for self defense while simultaneously and explicitly banning membership in any private militia.
So no militia for me. Nice try though.
I think it was more that if both the populace and the military have muskets it’d be hard to oppress the populace through force. Doesn’t really hold up though when the populace has small arms and the military can press a button and delete your city block.
US citizens have always had equal or better weapons than our infantry.
I don’t know this guy, and I hate the title, but he’s on point with his facts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dIsy3sZI2Y
In any case, there has been precious few incidents where the local or federal forces went balls out on us. Yeah, I can name a few, I get it, grew up in Tulsa, I get it, but they’re not busting down our doors and putting us on trains because we are armed.
There’s a Navy base in my backyard, they train helicopter pilots. Think those men and women will STFU, follow orders and drop on their neighbors? I’d like to think better of them.
If I’m wrong? I am armed as well as they are.
That strategy played out so well in the middle east /s
There’s a pretty big difference between taking up arms to defend against an invading nation and taking up arms against your own country doing incrementalism. Before you could start doing any kind of meaningful organizing the fbi would be at your door
Masked men show up on my porch, or molest my brown immigrant wife in public, I am instantly weapons free. No questions or hesitation. I am unloading.
That’s not macho talk. I have thought long and hard on this, got a dog in this fight. I have the weapons and practice to, at the least, unleash hell. Catch me anywhere, there’s a gun nearby. I’ll end up dead. I know this. I have made my fucking decision. Bring. It.
Yeah, guns don’t do a thing while you’re waiting for the front line of fascism to roll over you and your country.
They are convenient once you’re well and truly in enemy territory, though.
The cannibal is still hungry, and now the circumstances push him more than ever to eat himself limb by limb.
That was the idea but these federalists man, they keep giving power to the central government and then complain about dictatorship, autocracy and other centralized government problems.
You realize that the public works inspectors and school teachers and sanitation workers and waste water reclamation engineers none of whom carry weapons and keep shit running so you can shitpost? They all government officials and they ain’t empowered to kill nobody.
they’re not officials
Those people aren’t the lowest except in pay. Those people are the engineers, the teachers, and the administrators. They execute actual functions that directly benefit society. These are the people that prevent crime through their support of the community. It’s like calling the foundation of a building the lowest function of a building. That may be true on the surface, but the metaphor quickly breaks down.
There is another lowest of the low in government that does little in the way of support, unless you’re one of the elite. The lowest rung of the government ladder are the people whose job it is to punitively punish people for breaking the laws. They do not prevent any crimes, and the courts have ruled that they are shielded from any responsibility in that regard. They protect inequity between the rich and the poor. They are trained to discriminate and profile. Their very fraternity is rooted in tribal exclusion, us vs. them. They even desecrate the national flag as a symbol of that fraternity. Sometimes that insult even gets worn as part of their official uniform. They restrict and opress rights granted by the law at the whim of politics and oligarchs. They are licensed to murder, with immunity from responsibility. They are encouraged to remain ignorant of the laws that they are tasked with enforcing and they wear that ignorance as a legal shield against consequence and accountability. And yet these gangs of murderous thugs are routinely paid better than any of the others. They are called heroes when they do the bare minimum. They are applauded for showing the bare minimum of humanity.
If this government were a family with the state and federal administration as the parents, then the teachers/engineers/administrators would be the older siblings, aunts, and uncles. The police would rule that house through fear like a toddler on a sugar high with a gun. Occasionally that toddler may shit itself, steal from the cookie jar, or murder a loved one. But all is quickly forgiven because after all they are a only toddler.
If they didn’t take arms when Alabama banned abortion and Tump started locking kids up in cages it is when I completely lost faith in their shit.
We need more green plumbers.
Your lowest government officials are allowed to kill you if they think you have a gun.
or if they are willing to insist that they thought so, and testify to it in court.
testi-lie*
that’s their term
Problem with gun ownership, is that the oligarchs have created two parties to distract us: the far-right party to tell racist white people to get armed and that minorities are the enemy, and the center-right party telling the people who are left-of-center that only bad people get guns and brainwashing them to voluntarily disarm, and even making laws restricting guns (but guess what, gun control laws only apply where most minorities live, aint that convienient 🧐)
So here we are, people center to center left are disarmed while the nazis be roaming around with guns.
Do not fall for the center-right party’s propaganda. Armed minorities are harder to oppress.
“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.” -Karl Marx
(And if you disagree with guns: Gun debate in the US happened in 1789, now its far too late.)
