Re: You'll get my contribution when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers

On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 01:49:01PM -0700, Michael Zara wrote:

> Nor do I call even Heston and DeLay's good faith arguments "rantings," since
> they are good faith beliefs and arguments.  LaPierre is another story, but
> not because of his arguments, only his tactics.

As a matter of objective fact, Tom DeLay is a mentally diseased,
dangerous fruit loop. But I digress...

> The usual argument for the right to "keep and bear" is that the 2d amendment
> is there to protect the people from an oppressive gov't by giving them the
> means to overthrow the gov't.  You'd think that the oppression feared would
> be something other than deprivation of guns, which are only the means of
> preventing oppression -- i.e., no need for the guns unless there's some
> other, substantive oppression.

And of course the right has all sorts of substantive oppressions it
pisses and moans endlessly about; all of which I've always found both
completely unconvincing and, more interestingly, deliciously ironic,
since it's these very same political forces which have always denied
the patterns of fact that constitute racial oppression and concomitant
raical privilege.

> But if the loss of the guns, itself, is reason enough for armed revolution
> ("another Civil War") then the keeping of guns itself is an end, now, no
> longer a means.  Gun control advocates are thus pretty justified in thinking
> that the anti-control crowd is just plain into guns, with few
> philosophically-higher interests, i.e., the unfortunate appellation "gun
> nuts."

I've always found the idea that, no matter what kind or quantity, any
personal firearm stocks would be sufficient to 'overthrow a despotic
government' to be totally crazed. In other words, in addition to your
fine analysis, Mike, there is the simple point that, even as means,
personal gun ownership is *absolutely* ineffectual against a modern
military. (Surely no one believes that the "patriot right" would or
could actually engage in the kind of guerilla warfare the Vietnamese
employed against the U.S., which resulted in nearly incalculable human
loss.)

> In any event, the idea that the right to keep and bear is some provision for
> overthrowing the gov't if necessary is pretty inconsistent with the whole
> Constitutional scheme.  The Const. provides for that kind of overthrow, or
> plotting for same, as being punishable treason.  So it's inconsistent to
> posit that the same document calls it treason in one place, but protects the
> right to do it in another place.  

Inconsistent if your reading strategy demands that you read the
document so as to make it come out internally coherent, of course. The
more I learn about it and its interpretive tradition, however, the
less reason I have for thinking *that*.

  It is also intellectually and politically
> schizophrenic to invoke a protection of the system to overthrow that same
> system.

Yes. The whole 'overthrow the gubmint' ploy is a very thin reed, to
put it more politely than I think it deserves. The impulse to gun
ownership *as node of political organization and action* has, I think,
vastly more to do with patriarchal culture and white supremacist
'fears of a black planet' than with resisting gov't oppression.

Kendall