Nazism, the Second Amendment, and the NRA:
Stephen Halbrook's excellent new article in Texas Review of Law and Politics is now on-line, in PDF.
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What happens if the dictator and the people with guns have the same views? Wouldn't it be in his or her own interest to allow the people to now only own guns, but use them to keep the populace under control, thereby being much more efficient than any militia?
One need only think of a few instances: When we were attacked after 9/11, a lot of people bought guns to protect themselves. It would not have taken much for G. Bush to say that all muslims must be rounded up and taken to camps, and would 'the people' with all the guns help out? I'm sure a lot at that time would have had no problem violating a citizen's OTHER rights in the belief that this would keep us safe.
Or pick any other unpopular minority. Blacks, gays, jews, muslims, whatever. It doesn't take too much to whip up some hysteria against a group and blame them for all societies ills. It still happens today in many parts of the world against these very groups. (Such as Zimbabwe) Having guns in the hands of the citizenry could make things a lot easier for nefarious leaders.
I mean, of course the Nazis wanted a monopoly of armed force. That just doesn't prove a whole lot about our own gun laws.
The Nazis also thought smoking could kill you -- is that reason enough to smoke?
No, it doesn't. It makes no difference because the nefarious leaders can always arm their allies.
For some reason, nefarious leaders don't seem interested in arming their opponents.
An armed citizenry doesn't guarantee that the citizenry will make the correct decision or that they will win. Arms merely give them the means to substantively resist govt forces.
I note that nothing guarantees correct decisions or winning, so alternatives can't be better on those points. However, said alternatives don't provide any resistance capability and being armed is completely compatible with said alternatives. (An armed citizenry can peacefully assemble and petition. The difference is that they can do something else if that fails.)
Then the country is screwed no matter what the present state of gun legislation is.
And, well, that's sorta depressing, for some reason.....
there are no certainties in this kind of thing.
Then it's a dictatorship in name only if the dictator is "imposing" on the country policies that the people want anyway.
However, when he decides to force the people to quarter soldiers, to allow him and his officers first conjugal rights whenever a subject marries, to round up and exterminate a large segment of the population, then the distribution of weapons will come into play.
Franco tried to round up the eligible men and impress or draft them as quick as possible. The Anarchists were the citizens and workers who first stood against him and bought the other groups significant time to arrive and raise arms against the facist.
Usually the first acts of a revolution like Franco is to round up those guns and remove them from the issue. As others said, he can get armaments to his supporters.
This also has the beneficial side effect of knowing exactly WHO has the guns (only those to were issued them).
As much as I disagree with the NRA tactics and see how handgun violence has shaped our society in a negative manner - sometimes the only thing left standing between an autocracy and democracy might be those hicks in the hinterlands and the gangs in the cities. The military could fracture one way or another, depending on who the leader was.
Isn't that the reason why Truman fired MacArthur??
So as long as "the people" agree with what the leader is doing, it's not a dictatorship?
People like you definitely shouldn't be allowed to own a gun.
Except, nowadays military weapons are so powerful compared to what is available to the civilians that an armed citizenry really doesn't stand a chance. Look what the modestly equipped Ethiopian Army was able to do against the battle hardened Somalis. Add one AC130 to the mix and there is no contest. It might be a nice fantasy (Red Dawn anyone?) but get real.
Ok, so can we please see a show of hands of who thinks allowing anybody who wants, say, a SAM to own one is a good idea?
I'll go first. I live in Michigan. I know people who (used to) elong to the "Michigan Militia"
Hell, the Iraq war is teaching us it isn't really guns that keeps the big powers off footing(they have a role), but it is explosives which are doing the real damage.
I saw a special in Afghanistan where a local smith crafts handmade AK47 parts with homemade molds and a basic forge setup...
The Anarchists in Spain were fighting regular army troops with homegrown weapons or hunting rifles that couldn't shoot straight during their civil war. Now, they didn't win, but they sure as hell got to stand up and fight for their own survival. They did not go quietly into the night. I think that is all they are asking with the 2nd amendment rights. Not the right to recoiless rifles and 50 cals on the back of my Scion, but a little less is all I'm asking.
I'm being only a little facetious here.
Depends on the citizenry, doesn't it? The kind of citizens who can't be allowed weapons certainly shouldn't be allowed to vote; guns are dangerous but a government in the hands of an irresponsible electorate is deadly. They could even impose mob rule.
Thus, a well-armed citizenry probably cannot defeat a well-armed and well-trained military force on the battlefield - now, or in the 18th century - whether that force is wielded by domestic or foreign foes. But the existence of a well-armed citizenry can inflict quite a bit of pain on an occupying force , making it more difficult (i.e. costly) for foreign occupiers or domestic would-be dictators to enforce their will. As such, a well-armed militia may not in every case be able to prevent the rise and triumph of a dictator (the sort who typically comes to power as a direct or indirect result of his own well-armed supporters) but it may make that triumph harder to obtain and it would certainly make the achievement of the tyrant's more excessive desires more costly to him (and, economics being what it is, the prospect of such costs may convince the tyrant not to pursue at least some of his objectives, thereby potentially blunting the worst excesses).
On the contrary, a completely-unarmed populace much rely entirely on hope in the tyrant's good nature and benign intentions, and on the words of sophists and lawyers, to blunt the tyranny. Whenever the lawyers' words fail them, and where the tyrant is not benign, the unarmed populace has no choice but to remain docile and endure the tyranny.
The main sources we looked at were the Police Battalions in Poland, where a small group of middle aged married men killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews with little or no remorse and very little imposed authority. Browning used this example in his book, Ordinary Men, to assert that ordinary people were very much capable of killing thousands of people as long as the necessary peer pressure was there, and extends this example to make the statement that all people are capable of carrying out genocide.
This parallels with examples like the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's experiment into authority where normal people beat up fellow students, and "killed" experiment subjects when goaded on by an authority figure. If you believe that these historical and psychological experiments have any bearing (and there are those who disagree: Goldberg, Hitler's Willing Executioners), then it has interesting and possibly worrying results if a dictatorship was to take hold in America where guns are legal and carried by a large proportion of the citizens.
If the people in a country like America (i.e. in a country with citizens that carry guns) were in league with the dictatorship, then the prospects for a genocide on a scale many times greater than any other aren't hard to imagine.
I think you seriously discount the effectiveness of semi automatic rifles.
In this fantasy world where our military is willing to take on an armed and angry citizenry we have to consider that even though better armed, the military is seriously outnumbered. There are something like 50 million gun owners in this county, against a military of say, 500,000?
And the military doesn't want to fight American civilians any more than we want to fight them, so just having this "army in being" is enough to prevent the evil dictatorship type situation that we're, you know, trying to prevent here.
(I know this has all been said before, but there are always those who assume, even in the face of what's going on in Iraq, that our army could easily subjugate the population based on the quality of their weapons alone, thus negating the need for an armed populace)
Again, you'll have to explain how having guns when the dictator ascends changes the situation, since the dictator could easily arm his supporters if they were not already, as the very article in the OP suggested. Changes, that is, except for that the minority would have guns too.
The thing is if all the people had guns the muslims wouldn't be "rounded up" they would presumably use their guns to protect themselves and 'the people' would need to decide if they wanted to participate in a civil war instead of a simple roundup.
I go to a lot of gunshows (I'm a collector with an 03 FFL) and am routinely amazed at how much Nazi paraphenalia is on display there; moreover, much of it consists of modern reproductions that are aimed (IMHO) more at the "Nazi enthusiast" than the militaria collector.
There is room for debate here. We are talking about items and symbols that simultaneously have (a) historical significance to normal people, including of course veterans who fought Hitler's forces, and (b) symbolic meaning to some modern a-holes.
Walking past a table full of Nazi paraphenalia for sale at a gunshow is, therefore, sort of like eating spicy food -- some people never like it, some people can get used to a little of it, and some people like a whole bottle of tabasco at every meal.
But I will go out on a limb and say this: in my opinion there is enough Nazi paraphenalia for sale, at enough gunshows, to make an average person wonder what on earth is really going on here.
Over time I have concluded that there IS in fact some non-random amount of overlap between (a) the set of firearms enthusiasts who attend gunshows and (b) the set of truly creepy people who like Nazi imagery. I think that's just an unfortunate fact. Of course I can't prove it.
I don't think any of this has much to do with whether the Nazi regime teaches us anything about gun control. And I'm pretty firmly with Halbrook on the basic debate.
Again, you'll have to explain how having guns when the dictator ascends changes the situation, since the dictator could easily arm his supporters if they were not already, as the very article in the OP suggested. Changes, that is, except for that the minority would have guns too."
It changes the situation because it makes the prospect of encounters by ordinary people with the "out group" much more serious. Think of how much worse the Krystalnacht could have been were every single German that took part was armed.
Frankly, I think this whole debate proves that citizens possessing weapons is a bad idea. The sheer number of possible scenarios of a facist regime taking hold in a country full of armed citizens raises a multitude of new variables that wouldn't be there otherwise. Guns would add yet another unstable element to any case where a dictator takes over, and that means more killing, more suffering, and more power vacuums.
This is an excellent question -- after all, the Second Amendment says "arms," not rifles or handguns, and it pretty clearly was designed to ensure that an armed populace (of white men at least....) could battle back a tyrannical government, and do so at a time when the armed populace and the government would have roughly equal firepower.
But now we have a Second Amendment in a world in which very few rational people would support private ownership of weapons equal to those possessed by the government (combat aircraft? anti-aircraft missiles? nukes?)
Proponents of the right to keep and bear arms generally do a very bad job of addressing and resolving this issue. The fact is that the 2nd Amendment has to be subject to some reasonable limitations, just like the 1st Amendment is -- but most gun-rightsers don't want to identify those limits, probably for fear that the slippery slope will begin.
But in the end I don't think it's that complicated. The "civilian" firearms in private hands in most states today certainly are not sufficient to arm a military force that could defeat our military in a pitched battle for, say, DC. But they are, in my view, more than sufficient to operate as a significant impediment to the creation and operation of a tyrannical regime. I think that's awfully close to what the founders had in mind, and I can live with that.
It would not have taken much for G. Bush to say that all muslims must be rounded up and taken to camps, and would 'the people' with all the guns help out?
It does not take much to say things. Or to wildly fantasize about your political enemies either.
I'm sure a lot at that time would have had no problem violating a citizen's OTHER rights in the belief that this would keep us safe.
Allow me to engage in a Volokh commenter's favorite form of argumentation: I'm sure a lot of liberals at all times would have no problem violating another citizen's rights in the belief that this would keep us safe. Right?
Or pick any other unpopular minority. Blacks, gays, jews, muslims, whatever. It doesn't take too much to whip up some hysteria against a group and blame them for all societies ills. It still happens today in many parts of the world against these very groups.
Wait, are you for or against private gun ownership? If you truly believe the the majority/gov't/the MAN is racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, etc. and genocidal (shot out to that Brit at Hull), you would, choose one: (1) arm yourself and go Rambo; or (2) b!tch out and disarm your friends and children?
I've never understood the thought process that ran from "they're out to get me" to "so I should get them to disarm me." Shouldn't it be "they're out to get me, so I'm keeping granddad's 12 gauge, so when they try, I'm going to ruin their day with repeated applications of gunpowder diplomacy."?
(Such as Zimbabwe) Having guns in the hands of the citizenry could make things a lot easier for nefarious leaders.
Why isn't it "Having guns in the hands of the citizenry could make things a lot harder for nefarious leaders."? Would Mugabe get away with what he gets away with if there were a substantial number of armed white farmers who resist Mugabe's pillagers?
I disagree. See, e.g., Baghdad.
Think how much better the Krystalnacht could have been had every single Jew the mobs tried to terrorize been armed. Mobs are notoriously gunshy (no pun intended) if they _know_ they'll face serious resistance.
What do you call a war in which only one side is armed and capable of fighting? Genocide.
I've seen the Nazi stuff at gun shows. It's nearly as un-nerving as the beany baby displays.
A majority of violence related to handguns is also related to gangs and drugs. I'm not ready to alter policy or amend rights based on those fairly limited issues nor does disarming or differently arming law-abiding citizens make sense.
Most gun control laws were initially racist in nature and to some extent still are, witness the most restrictive laws in large metro areas with large minority population centers.
Any arms that would be effective against the Govenment.
And NO NBC weapons are NOT effective against a Government, they are effective against the citizens.
Since the Constitution says that Letters of Marque can be issued, the Constitution ASSUMES that there are CIVILIAN OWNED WARSHIPS. You don't give Letters of Marque to anyone else.
Cannon, machine guns, etc are effective in fighting the Government. The NFA is unconstitutional on it's face. You CANNOT tax a right. See Poll Tax. Many people who are against people owning such weapons have NO IDEA what is actually out there.
BTW you want to shoot down a AC-130 talk to the people making rockets and shooting them off. Add some electronics and what do you have a anti-aircraft missle. Might be a little crude and not work all the time but how offen does it have to?
Or take a model airplane. Add some GPS stuff and something to go bang and you have a Cruse Missle substitute. Or a radio controlled plane. Then you have a cheep RPV that goes BANG. It's not hard. Well maybe for Liberals but the rest of us could come up with a lot of fun toys if we were really pissed off.
No Military has EVER tried to occupy a technologically advanced country. I pity the first military to try. Just with hobby lathes and such, imagine what people could build or convert. Would YOU want to be in that military?
Can you expand on that? What aspect of the Baghdad situation leads you to disagree with my (obviously utterly indisputable) points?
- civilian owned warships
- cannons
- machine guns and small arms of all types
- anti-aircraft missiles (homemade and "store-bought"?)
- cruise missiles (homemade and "store-bought"?)
While ownership of the following would not be included:
- nuclear
- biological
- chemical
Have I got this right?
Where would you come out on:
- anti-tank weapons (e.g. TOW missiles)
- armored vehicles (tanks, APCs)
- fighter aircraft (e.g. an armed L-39)
- armed submarines
- surface-to-surface missiles
- land mines
- thermobaric weapons
The black citizens understood immediately what was happening. Many prominent black leaders assembled and petitioned the US Congress to step in and protect their Second Amendment rights: "We, the colored people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, . . . ask that, inasmuch as the Constitution of the United States explicitly declares that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed . . . that the late efforts of the Legislature of this State to pass an act to deprive of us [of] arms be forbidden as a plain violation of the Constitution." (From The Bill of Rights, by Akhil Amar)
What was so apparent to black citizens in 1865, an extremely vulnerable minority group, should be apparent to us today - an armed populace is a check against oppressive governments.
Please provide a credible citation that Iraq under Saddam had an almost 100% rate of household gun ownership.
Anti-Tank - Out there as Class Three
Armored Vehicles - Out there as Class Three, Patton tank, Halftrack with 8in mortar, I have seen more.
Fighter Aircraft - already legal, the arms are class 3
Surface to surface - already legal if no warhead.
land mines - get real these are just to easy to make.
thermobaric weapons - I would have to study up but if you are talking about fuel/air bombs. You realy think that these are to hard to build.
Look them up, see how they are made. Might take a few tries but if at first you don't succeed try try again.
Ahhh... the dark specter of fascism is forever descending upon America - but somehow manages to always land in Europe.
But seriously: In a disarmed country only the dictatorship and its allies have the guns. Ordinary individuals have no means to resist. In Rwanda, the vast majority of the butchery was carried out with machetes, a weapon useful to those with physical strength and who assemble in numbers.
Firearms change the equation because they are an equalizer. An individual armed with a gun can extract a great price
from his attackers - even if they are also armed with guns, and even if the individual dies in the end. Every genocidal attacker who is killed decreases the pool of genocidal attackers by one, and deters the others who lose their stomach very quickly when it appears that they may face deadly resistance. If individuals assemble into small groups, with discipline and cohesion, they can hold off far larger numbers of attackers, particularly if they are on their home ground.
Anybody else want to line up with Dan on this?
Genocide, on the other hand is an entirely different matter. When life itself is threatened, every weapon that is available becomes important to the individual and will be acquired or used.
When private gun ownership is widespread and commonplace before the genocide, many people have guns, have training in how to use them and are more able to resist their extermination. The fact that they are able to resist with deadly force is in itself a deterrent to the butchers.
When private gun ownership has been reduced to a negligible level, individuals are reduced to defending themselves with their hands, edged weapons and other inadequate defenses against the guns that are always possessed by the government butchers.
Sorry for being coy. You said:
The "civilian" firearms in private hands in most states today certainly are not sufficient to arm a military force that could defeat our military in a pitched battle for, say, DC.
I say the war in Iraq provides evidence that lightly armed civilians might be more than a "significant impediment" to the U.S. military. Marines might take D.C. in a cakewalk, but could they hold it?
Ummm, the Germans who took part in the Kristallnacht were mostly SA storm troopers obeying specific instructions from the government to destroy Jewish property and arrest Jewish men and avoid taking Jewish life. Which is exactly what they proceeded to do, without encountering any kind of armed resistance.
Better to let the dictator murder quietly without unpredictable variables and unstable elements, no? It's sad that the UK has reduced its population to this level - a country with virtually no gun control a hundred years ago has reached a state of unbelievable mental and physical disarmament.
1. The population is disarmed, so no one, either members of group X or sympathizers, can resist the Federal Extermination Police rounding up group X and killing them. Group X dies.
2. The population is heavily armed, but none of those with guns decide are members of group X, or are concerned about extermination of group X, and they fail to intervene. Group X dies.
3. The population is heavily armed, and overwhelmingly decides to assist the Federal Extermination Police in implementing the Group X Extermination Act of 2008. Group X dies.
4. The population is heavily armed, and some significant fraction of that armed population fights back against the Federal Extermination Police. Civil war results, and the guys who work for the Federal Extermination Police have to decide whether their paycheck is worth getting killed for.
In alternatives 1, 2, and 3, I am hard pressed to see how an armed population makes the problem worse, unless the dictatorship decides not to fund the Federal Extermination Police adequately to do their jobs. In alternative 4, it might well bring down the dictatorship.
Here's the point that worshippers of unlimited government need to think about. If the commander of the Federal Extermination Police orders his men to murder members of group X, and group X or friends are unarmed, then members of the FEP have to decide: do I want to be courtmartialed for refusing an order because my conscience bothers me? Bad conscience is a bad thing, but compared to being sent to prison or executed, that's not so bad.
What if group X or friends are able to shoot back? Now members of the FEP have to decide: would I rather be courtmartialed, and perhaps be sent to prison or a firing squad, or be shot and killed by group X or friends? This changes the equation substantially. If you are not comfortable with genocide, and your choices are death doing something you don't like, or death being on the right side, at least some FEP members are going to be on the right side.
J.F. Thomas, whose knowledge of history is profoundly limited, needs to read about the Railroad Strikes of 1877. In a number of cases, National Guard units were ordered to fire on strikers who were at that point no threat to anyone. In some cases, those units refused their orders. In some cases, when they were confronting armed strikers, those units changed sides. I suspect that their sympathies with the strikers played some role, but also the realization that they might get shot made it easier to refuse their orders.
I think we are talking past each other. I know some of these weapons are out there and/or can be made, but the fact is that they are in many cases very heavily regulated, despite the Second Amendment.
In your view these regulations (e.g. the ones defining "class III" firearms) are unconstitutional though, correct?
The Fordham Law Review's web page has little useful information.
I don't think we disagree much. Certainly the Marines could take a city if opposed by rifle-wielding militia types; however I think they could also hold it, although they'd drive around getting blown up all the time. Which does sound familiar.
"The main sources we looked at were the Police Battalions in Poland, where a small group of middle aged married men killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews"
How were the Jews armed?
"Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's experiment into authority where normal people beat up fellow students, and "killed" experiment subjects when goaded on by an authority figure."
Did the "normal people" believe the victims to be armed or unarmed?
I just can't see these examples as supportive of helplessness in the face of violence. I don't understand why your analysis arrived at this conclusion. Of course, I was raised in the US, I'm sure this affects my perspective.
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I live in the gun culture and have yet to encounter anyone who claims that the Nazis supported gun rights (!), much less a bonafide Nazi. William Pierce, to the extent that anyone has heard of him, lives on the fringe. I'd be interested if others will read between the ellipses and see the same implications.
What those experiments showed is that ordinary citizens, even well armed ones, will submit to authority figures. So when the "well regulated militia" is asked by the government to choose between order and chaos and asked to put down or disarm those troublemaking Arabs, Jews, Blacks, or whoever, they are going to do the "right and patriotic thing" and do as they are told.
One thing I've never seen discussed, picking up on J.F. Thomas's point, is that only in recent years has there been a significant difference (artillery aside) between military and civilian firearms. (Incidentally, is there any early history of regulating private ownership of cannons?) Even here in NYC, I can legally outfit myself with an arsenal every bit as deadly (grenades aside) as the one my uncle was outfitted with in WWII and my father was outfitted with during the Korean War. Neither of them was issued full-auto weapons, then the province of specialists, and I can't have one either. But now the basic grunt soldier routinely carries one.
It is a routine misconception that all modern soldiers carry fully-automatic weapons. The current generation of US Army Service Weapon, the M-16/A4, does not have a fully-automatic mode. It fires either semi-automatically (one shot per trigger pull) or three-round bursts.
Link;
In general, people with little first-hand knowledge of firearms tend to greatly overestimate the efficacy of fully-automatic fire. There are very few battlefield situations where fully-automatic fire from personal rifles has any use, simply because such fire uses ammunition at a prodigious rate and the effective range for such fire is very, very low because of aiming difficulty.
Obviously, guerrilla-type forces cannot win a fixed engagement with a modern army because the modern army will have artillery, crew-served machine guns, air support, etc.
But saying a modern guerrilla/irregular soldier has no chance against a similar soldier from a modern army because the army soldier has automatic weapons is ludicrous.
Even assuming for a minute that this is true, what makes you think that it would be a better situation if the Arabs, Jews or Blacks or whoever were unarmed to begin with?
The government will always have the resources and manpower that it needs to do what it would like to do. Why give job security to its people?
Here’s what I found regarding Pierce’s claims that Nazis supported gun rights. He posts what he claims are the highlights of the 1938 Law on Firearms and Ammunition. To spare people the burden of going to the website, in essence his argument is that the major restrictions on firearms ownership occurred in 1928 before the Nazis took control and that the net effect of the 1938 changes enacted by the Nazi regime were to actually liberalize Germany’s firearms laws – particularly in lowering the age at which a person may purchase a gun from 20 to 18 and dropping the permit requirement for long guns. Pierce also claims that the permit requirements (which are probably the requirement most distrusted by gun rights supporters) were actually just carried over from the 1928 Act rather than something created by the Nazis (although it’s not clear from his article if they made any changes to them).
If someone has a link to the 1928 and 1938 acts (as well as any that were not mentioned in Pierce’s article) we can do a more detailed comparision.
Unlike the Federal Extermination Police?
Of course, if the groups that are to be "put down" or disarmed are also armed (as is the case in America, in spite of your best efforts otherwise), then it makes it less of a turkey shoot, and more of something to make you think long and hard: "Why are these guys so troublesome that I need to risk getting killed to suppress them?"
This isn't a thought experiment, Mr. Thomas. We've done this before. My book For the Defense of Themselves and the State (Praeger Press, 1994) has many examples of where the willingness of labor unionists to fight back against state militias meant that the government backed down--realizing that the costs in bloodshed would be too high. They clearly would not have done so if liberal utopia had been achieved, and the workers had been disarmed.
Oh, for our English reader from Hull: you know nothing of the radical MP who represented your district in 1919. Let me quote from an article that I wrote some years ago, concerning the Firearms Act 1920:
- if you think the general public (here, American public) is an easily led mob of vengeful and racist morons, then you want to keep guns out of the hands of the public. Just like you don't give a Red Ryder BB gun to your slow child lest he put an eye out.
OR
- if you think the government is inherently dangerous and itching to steal your land, you want the public to have guns. Just like you teach your child to stand up to a bully rather than become a tattle tail or submit in the hopes of being left alone.
Having lived in multiple countries, I actually have faith in the intelligence of the average American, especially when compared to the populations of Europe. So that definitely means I'm not a Democrat.
John Wilkes Booth, Charles J. Guiteau, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others were able to do serious damage to the government with just handguns and rifles.
Waldensian raises an important question. My new book, Armed America: The Story of How and Why Guns Became As American As Apple Pie points out that cannons were in private hands at the time the Constitution was written, and I reproduce an ad from a Philadelphia paper offering cannon and "hand grenadoes" for sale. (Considering what was in them, these would be roughly equivalent to a pipe bomb today.) In addition, Boston city ordinances of the period have some fire safety regulations concerning loaded weapons that show that mortars, grenades, cannon, and other such weaponry were legitimate stuff for private citizens to own.
The term "arms" in the context of the Second Amendment seems to refer to what we would call "small arms" today: that which you can pick up and carry. While there were privately owned cannon (especially on merchant vessels), it is not obviously clear that this was intended to be protected.
However: military small arms clearly were. The governments, both state and federal, mandated private persons buy such weapons, and keep them at home. They weren't requiring a hunting gun; it was precisely because too many Americans had used a fowling piece to meet their militia duty obligations at the start of the Revolution that the government demanded that Americans own muskets (the 18th century's equivalent of a service rifle today).
In practice, machine guns are legal in most states, although the paperwork requirements tend to discourage ownership. I'm not persuaded that the National Firearms Act of either 1934 or 1968 was Constitutional, when you consider what the Framers intended the Second Amendment to do.
I am also not persuaded that the type of small arm much matters from the standpoint of public safety. Which is more dangerous? A sane, law-abiding adult with no criminal history owning a full auto weapon? Or a convicted murderer with a .22 rifle? The type of the small arm is less worrisome than the type of person who owns it.
I think it is also worth considering the relative lethality of weapon systems then and now. There's no question that an M-16 is more deadly than a musket, but how much more? Remember that medical care has improved dramatically. A single bullet in the abdomen back then was likely to kill you from peritonitis; today, it would be painful and probably have you hospitalized for a week or two, but the risk of death from that today is relatively small. A modern firearm might be two orders of magnitude more deadly than an 18th century firearm.
Comparing a nuclear weapon to the most fearsome weapon system of the 18th century--a man of war--shows a far greater disparity. A man of war, had it attacked a coastal city, might cause hundreds of deaths from cannon fire. A nuclear weapon, even a small one, in New York City, would kill well over 100,000 people either immediately or through radiation exposure. That's several orders of magnitude larger. A nuclear weapon is also far more flexible in its application. The inability of naval vessels to inflict force inland is part of why the Constitution limits army funding to two years, but has no similar limit for navy funding.
Don't be too sure. The jews of Europe did very few things to protect themselves from being rounded up in WWII. Many thought that if they just cooperate, somehow it won't be so bad. Perhaps others would think the same thing.
I recall any addressing my original point, which is this: Can we be sure that just because you own a gun, you won't side with a fascist government? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I'm pretty sure that that the mood of the country after 9/11 was that many patriotic citizens, gunowner or not, would have been happy to round up muslims and put them in camps. Heck, there was an outbreak of violence against innocent muslims in the months after 9/11 anyway, *without* any fascism, and some people were actually killed.
And in fact, we DID round up muslims and put them in camps. They are there today, in Gitmo, and even now, there are plenty of people who support their confinement, regardless of whether they are innocent or not. I have yet to see a single gun owner defend their ANY of their rights. (Not to mention the fact that we rounded up Japanese in WWII. Again, they didn't fight, but quietly went along. And virtually no Americans stood for their defense, certainly no gun owners. Maybe it was because they didn't own guns, but can we be sure that NONE of the Japanese owned any arms at all?)
On the other hand, the Pullman strikes of the 1890s were very violent because the strikers were fired upon by the company hacks, and the strikers fought back. Of course, this was not an action of gov't, but of private enterprise. Perhaps corporations benefit most from disarming people!
My point? We have some evidence to show that just because you own a gun, it doesn't mean that you are always going to defend the Constitution, or actually fight against a dictatorship or any sort of facsist measures. It MAY happen, but not necessarily.
But let's imagine something far more likely. Let's suppose that the War on Terror takes a bad turn for us. Radical Islamists start bombing american cities and cause death and confusion everywhere. The public is furious over these attacks. The government orders all people of middle eastern descent who are muslim to detention camps. Let's assume that this is completely in violation of their Constitutional rights.
How many gun owners are going to rise up and stop the gov't from violating their basic rights? I suspect most would *support* the gov't, not oppose it. Let's suppose these same muslims fight back with guns -- would the American people be more or less sympathic to their cause once they start killing American soldiers?
Tyranny rarely starts with a bang, but often starts out small against an unpopular minority. Isn't that how the Nazis got their foothold? Remember: the majority of Germans supported Hitler and his goals.
Citation, please.
As I recall, something like this happened on Sept 11, 2001 and thousands of Americans died.
But this didn't happen:
So since we're playing with predicting the future without the benefit of a well regulated crystal ball, I predict that your base fears won't come true either:
Trust your fellow citizens at some point - you have to share a country with them.
"But this didn't happen." Well, *of course* it didn't! I am offering a hypo. But it did happen in WWII, so there is at least a possibility that it could happen in the future. I'm sure the Japanese-Americans (who were mostly US citizens) trusted in their fellow citizens. And we failed them. The Korematzu case didn't declare their detained inconstitutional until many years after the fact, and reparations didn't come until fairly recently.
And the whole of this post is not about trusting anyone, but quite the opposite -- using arms to protect yourself.
What we can be sure of is that you will have a choice.
Your fixation on the virtues of helplessness drives me nuts.
Not wanting to "defend the rights" of enemies captured on the battlefield who made war against the United States and violated the laws of warfare... gee, can't imagine why not everyone is bemoaning the "violation" of their "rights".
It's very interesting that you would read that into my posts. I have said nothing of the kind. I have not advocated disarmanent of the citizens at all, nor did have I suggested that minorities should meekly submit to whatever they are subjected to. Nor have I said there is any virtue in it.
I am merely saying that gun owners may not herocally come to the defense of their own or others' constitutional rights. And in fact, they often have not. You may not like that -- perhaps I don't either. But you haven't presented any facts which suggest otherwise.
But to say that gun owners will protect us from a fascist government is a romantic notion unsupported by much in the way of facts.
On other comments, the one that pointed out urban areas greatly limit the effectiveness of modern weaponry and thus greatly reduces the disparity in firepower made what I feel is a key point. Also, as warfare has moved away--since Desert Storm--from conventional large scale fighting to insurgency activities, the availability of firepower is often less determinant of success than the availability of actionable intelligence, which a numerous but lightly armed population can readily restrict access to--ambush patrols, assasinate collaborators, etc.
And I personally have no problems with private citizens owning tanks, ATGMs or other weaponry, as long as its storage poses no threat to fellow citizens--no artillery ammo dumps in suburbia so no Ikejas.
And people that can afford stuff like that have a significant interest in maintaining the peace that allowed them to accrue those resources.
Don't be too sure. The jews of Europe did very few things to protect themselves from being rounded up in WWII.
Excuse me, but THE JEWS DIDN'T HAVE GUNS. That is the whole point of gun rights so people can't be rounded up like the gun-less peoples in other palces at other times. Do you not get it?
With no gun rights you get genocide.
With gun rights you get either civil war or a standoff.
It's your choice.
Not surprisingly, over several centuries, Eastern European Jews had developed what was in practice a near-pacifist way of dealing with attacks. Now they were confronting an enemy that would not be angry for a few days, but that intended utter extermination. It took a long time for that to sink in.
I would hope, with the example of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Khmer Rouge, the Armenian genocide, that few people would suffer from this delusion that wearing out your enemy by letting them beat you to a pulp, still makes sense. (There are people, many of whom post here, who do think that--hence leftist policy with respect to Islamofascism--but I am talking about sensible people.)
1) Arming a populace against a hostile government is all well and good - provided they have something to shoot back at when the time comes. If the target populace is concentrated in, say, a certain city, or section thereof, a government could dispense with extermination squads and simply carpet-bomb the area, or drop a chemical weapon over it. The only soldiers you'd need would be a few stationed along the perimeter of the area being gassed or reduced to a parking lot, to shoot down anyone who tries to flee. But most of the people targeted in this manner would probably die without so much as seeing the faces of their killers, much less being able to fire back.
2) Even if this isn't an option (because the target population is too scattered, or the potential for collateral damage is too great), there are still any number of ways a government bent on genocide can try to break an armed resistance. My "favorite" (for lack of a better term) is to give your targets a choice between a quick and somewhat merciful and dignified death as long as no one resists, or being subjected to any manner of unspeakable atrocities before being killed if anyone does put up a fight, to be inflicted upon the entire target populace until the resisters surrender, at which point the more merciful killings would resume. This way, even in certain death your victims have something to lose by not cooperating.
Sorry, that's not a citation. Please provide it.
Nazis tried brutality and even brought back the Roman practice of decimation (killing every tenth, verbatim). Never quelled partisan guerillas in Ukraine and Belorussia.
This is where my strong support for the RKBA sharply parts ways with (some) libertarians. I just don't want to live in a world where private citizens have ready access -- protected by the 2nd Amendment, unencumbered by the NFA etc -- to fully armed tanks, air-to-ground missiles, or other "major" weapons.
Imagine a drunk and/or deranged guy in a tank rather than a car. And keep in mind that this tank has a working cannon and machine gun. Imagine his neighbors emerging from their houses to defend themselves, not with handguns or shotguns, but with their own Javelin missiles or rocket-propelled grenades.
In other words, imagine the TV show "Cops" where everybody is armed like the military, rather than like the typical gun-owning American.
From time to time I hear libertarians say that they want to live in this world, and that this world is actually our birthright because of the 2nd Amendment. I guess I'll take these people at their word.
But assuming they are serious, I think they're just plain nuts.
This arguement assumes that the Federal government is not willing to kill every other man woman and child in Iraq or Serbia or other country, but will willingly and joyfully exterminate it's own citizens en mass.
Just google Clinton Martial Law.
"An armed population doesn't stand a chance against a modern military force" We don't have a modern military force in Iraq. We have the army that we have, not the one we wish we had. And perhaps if Bush &Co. knew that Saddam let the population have guns, he would have indeed taken the advice of the NRA enthusiasts and realized this would be a quagmire.
In 1927, if I remember the year correctly, the NC state Supreme Court ruled that submarines were constitutionally protected. So yes, warships are definitely on the table. It is instructive to note that, at that time, the submarine was a new-ish invention and considered the most terrifying device of war. This argues strongly that, all things being equal, WMD are constitutionally protected. Not that I support the wisdom of WMD; just that the fear surrounding a weapon is not sufficient to restrict it.
In US v. Miller (1939) SCOTUS ruled that a sawed off shotgun could be restricted because it was not militarily useful. So military small-arms are protected. Further, and ironically, the sawed-off shotgun was known as a "trench sweeper" in the trench warfare of WWI. Moreover every device is militarily useful -- even a kitchen knife -- so the argument was deficient reasoning on its face. So far as I know this case was the last to deal directly with the issue.
A reasonably common theme throughout the comments is that there needs to be "reasonable" restrictions on ownership of weapons. This seems mostly reasoned from an a priori restriction on what kinds of weapons are allowed. It's an interesting line of argument. For example I could argue that an a reasonable a priori restriction on religion should also be entertained. Or that a criminal should be enjoined from practicing that religion as a reasonable restriction of their Rights. Say, Judaism. Any takers?
The WorldNet Daily article of 1999 is here.
I read through the whole thing and it does not support your claim that:
Rather, the article is about the legal basis for the executive powers of the President to use the military to intervene in law enforcement.
I could keep asking you to provide a credible citation, but I grow weary of this. Please carry on with your nostalgic memories of right wing nuts crazy about Clinton.
You can't be sure of anyone, but it's an irrelevant question because fascist govts arm their supporters.
The interesting question is whether opponents of fascist govts should be armed. Does Randy R believe that anti-fascists should be unarmed? If they should be unarmed, should that be legally mandated or should they voluntarily refrain?
If some opponents should be armed, the question becomes "when should they acquire arms?" It's unlikely that a fascist govt will assist them and will likely work to disarm them.
If fascism is the worry that Randy R suggests, shouldn't he be working to arm potential opponents? Since the fascist govt will arm its supporters, why does he bother with them?
There is a guy in California that ownes 5in Naval guns and ammo for them. Also a FLAK 88 and ammo. He shouldn't have to putup with the NFA but he does. It is just not worth it to be the test case.
The cost of all this stuff is high and I m not saying that people shouldn't have to go through a NIC's check. The stuff is out there now. If you have the money anywhere in the world you can buy it from the blackmarket.
As long as it is not NBC and you pass the NIC's check you should be able to buy it.
If they want to have other laws as long as they are Constitutional fine. But the NFA of 34 and 68 aren't Constitutional.
Okay, so you fit in my first category: those who think the American public is an easily led mob of racist morons. Congratulations, and welcome to the Democratic Party, Randy! The fact that you view the American public with such disgust and distrust, and would think this is "far more likely" than right wing gun nuts acting as a deterrent to martial law is ... exactly why there are right wing gun nuts in the first place.
The American Indians were decimated during the Trail of Tears during their forced relocation. Thousands died. Not a single gun owner did anything to stop their relocation, and the American public, if anything, supported this obvious violation of their constitutional rights. This was as close to genocide as the US gov't ever came.
I don't know if that makes the american public "an easily led mob of racist morons" or not, nor do I know if the Democratic Party believes that or not. Cerrtainly no members of the Rebpulican party argued for their rights. The facts speak for themselves, interprete them as you wish. (I may be mistaken, but didn't the Indians have guns?)
If you can provide counter examples from our history where gun owners have actually defended the constitutional rights of a minority, or stopped a potential genocide, then please provide them. Otherwise, you are merely name calling and attributing ideas that I have not advocated. I guess when you have no actual argument, you just call people a Democrat, or someone who hates America, and think that will shut me up.
I have said it repeatedly: There is a notion that gun owners protect against tyanny. Perhaps that is true, I will admit. But I don't take that as a iron clad law, especially when the facts are clearly contrary to that. For just raising this argument, I am called all sorts of names. Since dissent and discussion is the hallmark of democracy, I wonder whether people like you really want a democracy, because you obviously do not like to have cherish myths debated. the suppression of dissent, the marginalizing of unpopular people and viewpoints, ironically, is often the first step towards facisicm.
Am I calling you a facist? No -- but what I am saying is that the rise and support of tyranny, fasicism, genocide and so on is complex and not easily explained. Calling peoples names doesn't advance the dialogue. People have been trying to figure out for decades why ordinary Germans looked the other way while people were led to slaughter and Hitler led them into a war. There is no clear answer, and I offer none. But that is precisely why I am very skeptical of trite comments about complex subjects.
PS. The Weekly Standard online will only allow me to search back to 2001, unless you are a subscriber, which I am not. So I can't verify their comments about Clinton. Sorry.
Why do you consider there is any obligation whatsoever to come to the defense of other people's constitutional rights? Give them access to arms and let them make their own decisions. I'm not taking up arms for anyone else's life or liberty but my own, and I don't demand that anyone else fight for me.
I just don't want to live in a world where private citizens have ready access -- protected by the 2nd Amendment, unencumbered by the NFA etc -- to fully armed tanks, air-to-ground missiles, or other "major" weapons.
I can't believe how much hyperventilating about this there has been in this thread. Even with "ready access", major weapons cost major bucks. How many people have $5 million to drop on a tank (and that's sans ammo and gas, and believe me, the mileage is not good)? How many people want to own and shoot ATGM or SAMs at several hundred thou a pop? Nobody, so let's stop fretting about this absurd "problem".
Well gee, at the time, the public generally thought that the detention of the Japanese was Constitutional, and they were a little preoccupied with other minor problems like fighting Germany and Japan (anyone with a mind to fight for freedom was signing up for that fight).
If you can provide counter examples from our history where gun owners have actually defended the constitutional rights of a minority,
Southerners during the Civil War. =)
You still miss the point. It's not that gun owners are supposed to protect a minority group, but rather that the minority group should be gun owners to protect themselves. Gun ownership is an attribute of individualism and independence from a nanny-state.
But if you want an example, here's one that popped right in my head:
See, guns helped keep this distinct minority group alive, when the police refused to stop the rampage and violence of another minority group. THAT is why I want to be armed. Not because I think Nancy Pelosi is going to send some brown-shirts (or whatever color shirts they may have in SF) after me, but rather that Pelosi will be more than willing to sacrifice my family's safety so as not to offend the sensibilities of some other rioting minority group.
You could argue that, but your proposed restrictions are of course manifestly unreasonable, so they sound crazy to us.
But of course we already have reasonable restrictions on the practice of religion, and the exercise of free speech rights, despite the First Amendment. You can't, for example, practice a religion in which child-killing is a sacrament. To use a more likely example, if your religion involves the use of marijuana, we aren't likely to let you practice it while in prison, if at all.
Many rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are already subject to reasonable limitations, and most of us are perfectly okay with this state of affairs. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you can shout "fire" in a crowded theater. Etc.
The 2nd Amendment shouldn't be different.
In fact: note that even Dan Hamilton -- of the "can't tax a right, see poll tax" view -- apparently SUPPORTS a requirement of criminal background checks on gun (or perhaps cannon?) owners. THAT is an example of a reasonable restriction. In my experience gun buyers generally pay a small fee to cover the cost of this background check. So I guess you can tax a right after all.
Do you disagree with this? To take an easy example -- and whether or not you believe the various currently applicable statutes are constitutional -- do you believe that machine guns should be freely available to convicted felons? The mentally ill? Children? If not, then you believe in reasonable restrictions on the 2nd Amendment.
Now the debate becomes: what should those restrictions be. I'm against unregulated private ownership of fully functional tanks or anti-tank missiles. How about you?
The arguments here of 'what if the majority has guns and abets the dictator' are completely neutralized by the previously made observation that, "this is not a dictatorship". The un-stated, and necessary conclusion to this statement is: "and it is prima facie evidence of your own moral corruption as a society." Basically, at that point we have bigger problems than 'technicals' (google with 'Somalia').
The entire point of the 2d amendment is to present any aspiring tyrant with no situation where the abuse of power produces a profitable outcome. Unfortunately, the only way to do that conclusively is to enable their impending victims to impose symmetric costs on him, rather than engaging in ultimately ineffectual rhapsodization about means of 'capping' the potential profit.
The best encapsulation of this is that all government ought to be constrained from action without thinking twice and asking nice.
Agreed. Although the reason why I brought that up in the first place is because one person stated that gun ownership is the best protection of our rights. But the Japanese-Americans had every right to own guns, but chose to not use them to prevent their relocation. Ditto the American Indians in the late 19th century. And had they used them, what would have been the likely result? More bloodshed, and the gov't would still have won in the end.
Furthermore, of course the public was distracted by the war in Europe -- that's exactly how dictators work! What better time to violate a minorities rights than when the public couldn't care less about that group of people. (I was responding to the person who called me a racist moron for suggesting such a thing.)
The Koreatown incident is a good one. Thanks -- I didn't think about that, although it's a little off topic. It was dealing with a riot, rather than a fascist government trying to abrogate civil rights. Yes of course, a gun is useful if a criminal is trying to burn your house down or steal from you.
And as for gun owners protecting themsevles, not some other minority -- yes, I agree completely. That's exactly why I offered the hypo regarding muslims after 9/11. If the gov't decided to round them up, in violation of their constitutional rights, I DON"T expect gun owners from across the country trying to stop it. Instead, they will sit idly by while everyone else's rights are trampled on. (Hey, I probably would to, so this is not a slam against them). (But for acknowledging this simple fact, we are called racist morons.) BUT, that is exactly when our civil liberties are most in danger -- when the public sits idly by watching other people lose their rights, or worse, when they support it. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany.
The bottomline: Having guns is all well and good. It might very well protect you from criminals, or an angry mob. If the gov't comes after you for any reason, you might be able to fight back. You might even be able to escape to the countryside and lead a life in the wilderness.
But the odds are that 1) the gov't will first do everything it can to slander you and your views to make you as unpopular with the people as is possible so that 2) few others will come to support you, except for the handful that are in the same boat, and 3) the gov't will have better odds at killing you. If not you, then most people that it is targeting. Fighting with a gun no doubt gives you better odds, but it's still a gamble, not a sure thing.
Saddam's chemical-weapon attacks against Iraqi Kurds during the Al-Anfal Campaign in the late 1980s is a prime example of #1 (that is, mass murder conducted from out of your targets' firing range). If Saddam could do it, then a U.S. government (whose military has had a love affair with "remote-control" warfare for some time now) gone bad certainly could.
As for #2 (offering a relatively merciful death as a "reward" for non-resistance), "neutral" above tried to give an example, even though he does seem to miss my point:
Nazis tried brutality and even brought back the Roman practice of decimation (killing every tenth, verbatim). Never quelled partisan guerillas in Ukraine and Belorussia.
First of all, every war and every attempt at genocide is unique. Just because this sort of thing didn't work for Tyrant A against Victim B 60 years ago, doesn't mean it won't work for Tyrant X against Victim Y five, or ten, or however many years from now. The only way for Tyrant X to find out is to try it for himself.
More to my point, the real goal of this tactic is not to quell resistance that's already going on, but to prevent it from starting in the first place. Peer pressure is the key - the government is trying to get the community they're planning to exterminate to tell the would-be resisters among them, "Look, we know we're all going to be killed, but we don't want to be raped, tortured, vivisected or whatever on top of that, so do us all a favor and don't bother trying to be a hero."
Granted, as "neutral" pointed out, this may not always work as hoped by the tyrant government. But if said government has no compunctions about wiping these people out in the first place, they'll certainly have no compunctions about going about it as ruthlessly as needed to demoralize any resistance. Firearms mean nothing if you're too afraid of what might happen to your wife, children and neighbors if you dare use them.
Finally, the greater point of my whole thought exercise was to show that tyrant governments are just as capable of adapting their tactics to neutralize an armed populace as individual criminals are capable of adapting their M.O. to account for armed would-be victims. I've posed two possibilities, but I'm sure the world's despots will eventually come up with many more. This is the real reason why I find the Second Amendment obsolete as written.
These are truly banal observations. Large-scale armed resistance to the Federal government is rare, only desperate people would try it, and it is unlikely to succeed. Wow, thanks for stating the obvious. Do any of these observations invalidate gun ownership, or the argument that guns represent a means of last-ditch resistance against dictatorship? No. If you're going to be on the receiving end of genocide or mass repression, better to be armed than not, no matter how low your chances of success.
The first problem is that you pretend to speak for the majority, a not so uncommon occurrence when discussing politics.
The second problem is that you misunderstand the argument. In the US a "reasonable" restriction on Rights held by the populus only occurs on the expression of that Right.
Expression. We reasonably restrict Free Speech by punishing those that *use* Free Speech to incite a panic or riot. We reasonably restrict the Right of Abortion; not in its concept but in its acuatation.
All our "reasonable" restrictions are based on the *use* of a Right -- not the existence thereof. Regardless of your pretense to argue for the group, the point is the same. If we are allowed to, a priori, restrict one Right on the basis of the harm it may cause then we are fully allowed to make the same argument against other Rights. In this instance we are discussing restricting Judaism due the certain civil unrest (eg. pogroms) that comes from allowing practitioners of this particular religion to reside within a national border.
Certainly we can look upon history and see that Judaism has resulted in strife where ever it has taken root and spread. In this congruence one may reasonably restrict Judaism as a religion due its disruptive nature.
This is same, same; whether you like it or not. In an a priori construction we cannot deny Jews their religion any more than we can deny all -- Jews too -- the ability to own militarily useful weapons on the basis of the fear that they may cause a disruption to existing society.
Simply put, if one wants do restrict firearms on their historical basis then one must also allow restricting Jews on their historical basis; that of possibly disturbing the existing social order.
Taking any other stand simply exposes the rank simplicity of your mind.
There are no sure things, so it is absurd to damn guns for not being one.
If you're going to be in a fight, you're better off armed. A gun gives you options. When using is better than non-use, it puts you ahead of where you'd be without. When non-use is better, you can do that too. Theater is the only place where a gun must be used.
BTW - The 50s civil rights movement survived in large part because it was armed. See Cottrol's work. Kates also has relevant materials.