Tit-sucker. Yes, I like that. Nietzsche referred to him as the "last man."
Lawrence
On 10/5/2015 4:41 PM, Edward Farrell wrote:
Re: [lit-ideas] Re: The United Gun Guys of America Thanks for this bit of analysis, Donal. These issues do get a bit twisted.
I'm no scholar of this, but my basic understanding is that the framers of the constitution and the Bill of Rights looked at the right to bear arms in terms of freedom to oppose tyranny from without and within. That is, an armed citizenry could be called to form a militia to oppose an invader, and an armed citizenry would be a strong deterrent to a tyrannical government that sought to impose itself on its citizens. This right to bear arms referred to any and all arms used by a military, and was deliberately not restricted to small arms or hunting implements. Use of arms for self-protection against predatory citizens threatening bodily harm outside of this context is not really addressed, though it is probably safe to assume that such use was considered perfectly legitimate and taken for granted, so long as it was not carried out above and beyond what local laws allowed (i.e. not in the mode of the vigilante).
So far as I know, what the constitution did not address was how these arms are to be regulated, whether in war or in peace. Here I am guessing but I imagine that until fairly recently, the bulk of such regulations existed at the state and local level and differed, perhaps considerably, between jurisdictions. This coupled with the fact that over time a large military bureaucracy arose that had its own laws and regulations that governed the military use of arms, which did not apply to arms held by citizens outside the military. So now we have a world in which the original notion of arms for a militia is practically a historical footnote, and would only conceivably apply in the event the federal government completely collapsed along with its ability to raise and manage a military. On the other hand, the right to bear arms as a deterrence to the tyranny of our own government still applies, at least in theory. But even this notion is eroding as US citizens becomes less and less motivated by a spirit of self reliance and more and more by a spirit of entitlement at the tit of a all-pervasive, maternalistic state. It's the struggle between these opposing spirits that forms the context of the current gun control debates. To remain impartial and even handed, let's call it the struggle of the he-men versus the tit-suckers.
In the US there are many regulations that govern the control of guns. All guns must be registered. Certain people are prohibited from owning them, mostly based on criminal history, mental health, and age. Depending on local jurisdictions, there may be further rules regarding how, or if, they may be carried. Many of these regulations are nothing new. Even in the old wild west, it was ok to carry your gun on the open range, but when you went to Dodge City you might have to leave it with the sheriff when you entered. Though we have many regulations governing guns they are often poorly enforced, and you hear very little in the popular press about efforts or even desires to improve enforcement. What you hear is an unqualified cry of "gun control" as if no controls existed at all, and this is indeed the popular perception. And so when we hear cries of gun control in the aftermath of heinous murders like the recent ones in Roseburg, Oregon, "gun control" really means the more radical next step, which is the removal of all guns from private hands. Not immediately of course, but that is the end game. And the theory is that this will improve public safety by removing lethal instruments form the hands of a citizenry that is becoming strangely prone to random acts of serious mayhem. But why this strange propensity? What's going on here? And have we really become so complacent about the federal government that we would a readily relinquish the principle of a citizenry bearing arms that was so central to the ethos of the US founders, who were preeminently suspicious of anything that might place power into the hands of a government at the expense of its citizens?
Monday, October 5, 2015, 3:31:47 AM, Donal wrote:
>Sure, guns should be restricted to government use only. We can trust the government to do right, and prohibiting guns to law-abiding citizens will drastically reduce the population of gun holders to soldiers, cops, and crooks.>
Sarcasm aside, this raises the point that gun legislation has two broad effects (a) between citizen and citizen (including citizens who are crooks) (b) between citizen and state.
Surely (b) is much more important than (a)? Using guns to resist tyranny by the state is (arguably) a political right (if we are democrats). Legislation, that would remove or restrict a citizen's ability to use arms in exercise of this political right, needs careful scrutiny in the interests of democracy [i.e. the avoidance of tyranny]. Otoh, while the state need not have a monopoly of force, in a democracy the state still needs a preponderance of force - for we should not have a state so weak that it could be overthrown by tyrannical citizens.
There are serious dilemmas here and serious alternatives: a strong democratic ethos within the state and its institutions [underpinned by laws] may be much more important a safeguard than a citizen's right to arms, especially given the preponderance of state force.
Despite this - as per Lawrence's comments - it seems (a) becomes the focus of much of the argument - premised largely on the availability of guns as a method of crime prevention [mere appeal to 'freedom' here strikes me as too weak to justify the carrying of guns in civil society].
These arguments in favour of arms for citizens re (a) strike me as much weaker both in terms of evidence that liberal gun-laws have a greater overall deterent effect on crime (than more restrictive laws) and in terms of the political dangers were we to try to take guns out of the equation of relations between citizens.
Few in Europe who read of these mass killings in the US think it would be an idea to promote a gun-carrying culture here or feel Europeans are less protected against their fellow citizens because of our much more restrictive laws. Quite the reverse.
It also seems that the US debate becomes strangely heated and not evidence-based: for example Lawrence's use of guns as a possible means for fending off rape is highly charged and raises more questions than it answers (including how an armed rapist might be more deadly and difficult to fend off than an unarmed one; how many rapes could feasibly be fended off by a gun; and the scope of self-defence).
D
L
*Edward W. Farrell
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