You give me little credit Mr. Trucha.
Why give you credit, Frau Shape? You’re arguing against credit in the other thread.
And if you think what Trump and his enablers are doing isn’t the greatest threat the US has ever faced, you’re fooling yourself.
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In case this isn’t explicit enough:
The 2nd amendment’s primary purpose was to enforce tyranny.
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In a system with only good intentions I could not agree with you more, the issue is that history has shiwn us that it is almost always abused to the detriment of the petitioner.
That old chessnut.
When Alexander Hammilton wrote in Federalist 28 that “if the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense,” a right which he declared to be “paramount.” he was not talking about slaves.
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Sure. On the other hand there’s Mao’s quote “political power grows from the barrel of a gun”. It should absolutely say something like “the party” for the authoritarian left. And making fine distinctions between guns directed by the party and those directed by the state is not worth doing.
This is vague nonsense.
If you think the only check on bureaucratic abuse is a deadline for processing requests, you have no model for explaining why an official wouldn’t simply deny a request they don’t like before the deadline. And in that case, the only means to prevent inscrutable bureaucratic abuses would be to not have a system at all.
Luckily, that’s not the case. The reason requests aren’t simply arbitrarily denied now is that there is oversight, and an actual documented procedure. Changing that procedure to provisionally deny applications that cannot be positively cleared in time doesn’t open the system up to even one iota more potential for bureaucratic abuse. The reason for denial is still just as fully document-able, and, since it is provisional, appeal-able.
No, he was talking about states serving as a check on the federal government, and the federal government serving as a check on states. And throughout, he’s dissing the ability of individual citizens or small militias to do anything especially useful. E.g.,
“The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair.”
Note “to arms”, and yet he still doesn’t think they stand much chance without the organization provided by a state.
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I don’t see us making any progress in this conversation so I’m out.
Well, I’m not familiar with the context, but that’s a little ambiguous: if you think power comes from the barrel of a gun, that might be exactly why you do not want your citizens armed.
But, yeah, there’s an unseen dimension with regard to how universally distributed the guns are, which roughly, but not exactly tracks the authoritarian axis. The Soviets allowed party members to have guns. The Nazis had pretty liberal gun laws – if you were a loyal Aryan. US fascists and authoritarians are happy for the police and white people to have plenty of guns, but not so much the ‘other’. Etc.
And then I’m not sure even that axis is enough to plot, say, a system of mandatory militia service where all weapons are state-issued.
Then there’s an axis for whether you actually want a gun or not. The title is “what do you need guns to protect”, but what it really means is “if you want a gun, what excuse would you cite depending on your political orientation”. There are groups of various size on every corner who might well argue that they prefer to protect their stuff through other, institutional or nonviolent, means, that the police are enough – or even that the police themselves shouldn’t be armed.
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Some people lack the courage of their convictions.
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That, or some people’s convictions lack coherency. 
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Which is the natural outcome when gun control has been successful.
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Not a bad idea even preceding that.
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Yes, we all read that article out several years ago. Yes some militias in the south were used to round up escaped slaves or put down slave revolts. You can even say it may have been a factor for the formation of the 2nd Amendment. But no, that is not the primary reason for the 2nd Amendment. There isn’t a single reason for it.
The enumerated reason for it is to have a well armed pool of citizens to pull from to form a militia. But that is not dependent upon the right.
It also wasn’t solely put in there to dispose of the new government if it became tyrannical, but it was mentioned as a possible necessity in some of the Founding Fathers’ writing. There are also writings about mans’ right to defend themselves.
Actually, yes they were. The original idea was to have a very small standing military and only call the Militia up when times of war required it. You can read the militia laws of the late 1700s and see what gear one was expected to have in order to join a militia as well as what training they were supposed to go through. (Militia Acts of 1792 - Wikipedia)
This was first put to the test in the War of 1812,with wikiepedia listing these stats:
U.S. Army:
7,000 (at war’s star
35,800 (at war’s end)
Rangers: 3,049
Militia: 458,463 (* Some militias operated in only their own regions.)
So, yes, actually, the militia was expected to handle nation-state armies.
Now the War of 1812 didn’t start out so well, and they made some revisions to the structure of state militias, but they were the main source of soldiers until the formation of the modern National Guard in 1903. That is why all the various units you read about in Civil War history are mostly attached to specific states, they were part of the state militias.
It was only after fighting two World Wars where US policy switched from being reactive, to proactive, with a standing army at the ready at all times (on two fronts, none the less.)
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It’s hardly a single article. There are a number of legal articles going back decades, even entire books about the subject. Inasmuch as there probably would not have been a federal second amendment without the impetus from southern slave states to demand one – and a Southern slave holder to pen it, just in time for the Virginia’s ratification debate – it is certainly the primary reason there is a 2nd Amendment. Unlike vague assertions to the contrary, there’s evidence for that.
Both the Northern and Southern colonies fielded militias as a matter of course – to skirmish with French raiders, put down Native American resistance, etc. Gun ownership and self-armed militias would have existed – and continued to exist – regardless of the existence of the 2A. (As indeed they did, for centuries prior to the Bill of Rights.)
It was only the South who pushed for it as an enumerated right. Number one, because they felt a particularly keen daily and nightly dread of the people they enslaved rising up – which was, indeed, a regular occurrence – and number two, because there was further paranoia that this was a weakness in the system that the North might exploit if it were ever to get serious about eliminating slavery in the union. In particular, they were leery that the clause granting Congress control over militias might be used to disarm their own.
Citation needed. We all saw how the last one went.
The idea was to not have a standing army at all, but to form one when the need required.
Militias were used as a stopgap, and in roles in which they could be useful – against small revolts, similarly situated irregular enemy forces, etc.
I don’t say that no-one in the founding generation thought that a self-equipped militia force could take on regular troops – there are idiots and armchair generals in every generation – but if they did, they were fools.
George Washington, who might be expected to be somewhat of an authority on the matter, wrote:
To place any dependence on the Militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestic life; unaccustomed to the din of Arms; totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves, when opposed to Troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge and superior in Arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows … if I was called upon to declare upon Oath, whether the Militia have been most serviceable or hurtful upon the whole, I should subscribe to the latter.
Another highly selective citation.
If you look at the column across from that, you can see that British and Canadian forces were very similar – to the US regular army numbers.
If militias were a match for professional troops, the British would have been outnumbered ~10 to 1. Even allowing for the fact that some of the militias “operated in their own regions” (cough couldn’t be sent up to remotest Canada, because then the local enslaved people might get ideas cough) the war should have been a cake walk.
But then there are juicy quotes in the paragraph right across from that like,
However, the state militias were poorly trained, armed, and led. The British Army soundly defeated the Maryland and Virginia militias in the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814, and President Madison commented, “I could never have believed so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force, if I had not witnessed the scenes of this day.”
Which I don’t necessarily think indicates Madison expected they would have been entirely equal – just that he was still shocked by how unequal.
No, they weren’t state militias. The actual militias were called up at the beginning of the Civil War – they did very poorly at the First Battle of Bull Run – but most of the state regiments I expect you’re talking about – like the “7th New Jersey Volunteers” or whatever – were different. More like the modern national guard, maybe.
They were recruited at the state level, equipped by the state with standard issue weapons and equipment – not with guns brought from home – then paid (by the federal government) and put directly under federal officers from the regular army for training and command.
Even so, they were not as well trained or equipped as the core of professional regular army soldiers. (But that didn’t matter: the other side was in roughly the same boat.)
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Give me a break. I have conceded that militias to keep slaves under control was one of the concerns of the time and one of the reasons for the militias.
It was not the impetus for the creation of the 2nd Amendment (though I will concede it was a factor).
The idea of the right to bear arms is not unique to the US Constitution, and the 2nd Amendment. Both were derivative of the English Bill of Rights of 1682 which allowed Protestants to have arms for their defence among other rights enumerated in our laws.
But let’s just say for a minute you are 100% correct and the main reason for the 2nd Amendment is to allow the formation of militias to quell slave revolts. How does that relate at all to today and the conversation? What is your point?
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Mister44, allow me to introduce Gestalt:
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You could, but I’d disagree.
Firstly, as events in Iraq for example show, civilians armed with assault rifles lose horribly if they try to take on actual military forces in a fight, as the military also has assault rifles, plus armored transports, heavy machine guns, artillery, drones, ground attack planes, tanks, etc., not to mention a vast advantage in training, cooperation, leadership, and morale.
Secondly, the political events in the US in the recent years have shown that an awful lot of the people making the most noise about “deterring governmental tyranny” are absolutely fine with governmental tyranny, as long as it’s aimed at the black people, or the Hispanics, or the gays, or those cosmopolitan elite East Coast liberals.
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