The Second Amendment needs to go. It serves no purpose in society except to make us more prone to violence, to see violence as a reasonable solution to any problem faced by anyone, and there is absolutely no actual, rational justification for its continued existence, whatsoever. This is not hyperbole — all arguments regarding about maintaining gun rights are massively and insanely flawed, and they stem entirely from the premise of the 2nd amendment itself. What do I mean? Let’s start.
“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.” Okay, that’s actually a lot, and none of it actually makes sense, at all. Let’s start with the last part: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This statement is pure and utter nonsense, and I know no one who actually, genuinely, believes this is a reasonable statement, and I include in this list every NRA member I know. Why do I say this? Very simply, because chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear arms are just that — arms, as are swords, daggers, tasers, truncheons, collapsible batons, switchblades, IEDs, suicide vests, and whatever nasty way I can come up with to harm someone in the future that we just haven’t built yet. However, I have yet to meet someone who will outright state that it is absolutely reasonable, and not at all insane, to allow “the people: to maintain weaponized VX, sarin, and anthrax in their basements, let alone things like kiloton nuclear devices, dirty bombs and other nastiness that man can conceive. If we allow for their outright ban among the civilian population, then we are agreeing that it is absolutely justifiable, even with the 2nd amendment in effect, to restrict and ban the ownership of weapons based solely on their lethality and ease of use against a mass population. Once we have done that, we have already agreed that the fundamental premise behind banning all semiautomatic firearms with detachable magazines is not only sound, but reasonable and desirable, and thus the 2nd amendment serves no purpose in the discussion of gun control as a matter of public policy.
“But wait!” you implore desperately, “The purpose of the amendment is to prevent a tyrannical government from abusing the people!” To which I respond, “No, it isn’t. It has never been used as such, it was not intended as such, the militia is defined under the Constitution to be under authority of the government, actual private militias have been used more to terrorize people out of actual protected rights, and militias that have been formed to protect actually oppressed people are widely hated and despised among the people who claim to love the 2nd amendment. What’s more, the notion that this makes any sort of inherent sense, or is at all coherent, is laughable, and ensconces absolutely destructive tendencies within the population, and gives the people the tools to create an oppressive regime far more than it does to protect us from such a thing.” That’s a lot to unpack, so I’ll begin with the first part: it’s not there to protect us from tyranny at all.
The constitution says this about the militia: “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;” That’s right, the US constitution explicitly puts control of the militias, alleged to protect us from a tyrannical congress under the control and direction of Congress itself. To even suggest that militias described by the constitution then, exist to protect us from Congress borders on patent dishonesty, just from the fact of the Constitution itself. To continue on this, the militia has been called up by no less a person than George Washington himself to put down a rebellion against perceived tyranny. We can go a tad further, and see the Civil War play out, and the sordid history of militias there. Even leading up to it, militias flooded border areas voting on the right to own slaves, using violence and the threat thereof to alter the political discourse. Murder and intimidation were absolutely acceptable tools in Bleeding Kansas, and rather than seeing this as a forerunner to the violent intimidation and private armies of the early 20th century fascist movements, we kind of celebrate this — violent struggle as an inherent, and almost desirable, part of political discourse, and an acceptable means of pushing the political agenda.
Past the Civil War, we see the formation of white militias to oppress and terrorize the black population, and keep them from exercising their rights. The militia wasn’t protecting anyone — it was a non-governmental form of oppression, and when the government decided to actively oppress the population, the militia aided and abetted the government. Militias were part of the problem. Going into the 20th century, we see the formation of a militia to protect an oppressed and marginalized people. However, the Black Panther Party was called a gang of criminals and worse, and is not at all fondly remembered by any gun aficionado that I have spoke with. Maybe they do exist, but I have yet to see significant evidence of actual support of militias that have actually supported actually oppressed people.
Continuing on from here, populaces overturning governments on revolt don’t have a track record to be envied. In the last 200 or so years, we can look at the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Civil War, the “fun” of the Arab Spring, the Taliban, Iran, Iraq… I can go on. Violent revolt doesn’t end well, because it doesn’t happen in an organized fashion very often. The US looks at its very unusual history, and assumes that it is the norm, rather than the obvious outlier that it is.
But let’s go on, because of course I must. If we still insist that militias are there to protect us from oppression, we have to ask: who gets to decide what constitutes oppression? We can’t let the government make that decision; they’re the alleged oppressors here, so the courts are out here. We can’t let the non-oppressed people make that decision, since they’re not the ones doing the oppressing (just look at the struggles that everyone who is not a straight white male has had to go through to get to where they are, and the resistance they’ve been met with the whole way). That leaves the people who claim oppression. But that’s not a good metric for allowing for violent upheaval, because it allows for a religious minority to decide that their lack of theocratic control over the government constitutes oppression, and gives them the right to engage in a violent struggle for control.
So, going back to the unrestricted right to bear arms (which does not actually exist within the 2nd amendment), when combined with a religious sect seeking theocracy, we’d be protecting the right for a crazy religious cult to engage in a campaign of terrorism using chemical weapons against a recalcitrant civilian population in order to secure theocratic control over the government. That’s ridiculous, but it’s absolutely in line with everything that gun fetishists insist the 2nd amendment is about when they rail against any sort of gun control legislation — shall not infringe and protect from tyranny.
The 2nd amendment does absolutely nothing to protect us from tyranny (and has indeed been part of tyranny), no one actually is unwilling to restrict the rights to any sort of arms that aren’t firearms (I don’t get to carry a small sword in public, but firearms are apparently okay), and it doesn’t serve any purpose in public discourse but to obstruct and prevent any sort of conversation from happening in regards to one category of arms. It’s time for it to go.
Good summary!
