supreme court

[Al_U_Card]

It's beyond me from which "political philosophy" it follows that people should be allowed to own guns.

the one that says that the greatest fear a citizen should have is of his own government... i don't think that fear is overstated, and i'm sure you'll agree that history teaches that lesson

LOL.

Even if that were true, a more useful protection than giving me a gun would be to punish those who assisted in illegal spying by the government on its citizens, and to impeach/punish those who initiated it.

illegal spying

 

No longer illegal as they passed laws to allow it....immoral and unfair and unwise....definitely.

[mike777]

Truly unfortunate that the "I need a handgun to protect me from the government who is taking away my liberty" philosophy has died

How is that supposed to work? This is not a rhetoric question, I really don't get it. Suppose I am victim of some kind of government abuse. I can think of some ways I could defend myself. Some would require a lawyer, some involve using the internet. But a gun? How could a gun be useful for defending citizens against the government?

Fair question.

 

One wonders if there were 300 hundred million handguns and rifles as there are in the USA in homes in Darfur or Mozambique if that might act as a deterrent against an abusive govenment.

 

If STalin's secret police knock on the door they face not only men who carry and know how to shoot but women and children. Yes believe it or not it is legal in the USA and common for women and children to go hunting with rifles and kill.

 

 

The point is not so much they would defeat an army but that they would not lose. See the Vietnam war or even present day Iraq. Yes handguns or rifles are not a match for atomic weapons but that does not mean you lose the war. But it may convince some in the Armed forces to come over to your side, to steal bigger weapons, the otherside to compromise for a better government or face an endless rebellion. That is the thinking anyway on "how it would work".

[luke warm]

If anyone wants to appeal to history, the least they can do is read some B)

yes, i guess it might help... here are some quotes from some of the founders:

Benjamin Franklin: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Nov 11 1755, from the Pennsylvania Assembly's reply to the Governor of Pennsylvania.)

Thomas Jefferson: "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined or determined to commit crimes. Such laws only make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assassins; they serve to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." (1764 Letter and speech from T. Jefferson quoting with approval an essay by Cesare Beccari)

John Adams: "Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion in private self defense." (A defense of the Constitution of the US)

George Washington: "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the people's liberty teeth (and) keystone... the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable... more than 99% of them [guns] by their silence indicate that they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference [crime]. When firearms go, all goes, we need them every hour." (Address to 1st session of Congress)

George Mason: "To disarm the people is the most effectual way to enslave them." (3 Elliot, Debates at 380)

Noah Webster: "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe." (1787, Pamphlets on the Constitution of the US)

George Washington: "A free people ought to be armed." (Jan 14 1790, Boston Independent Chronicle.)

Thomas Jefferson: "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." (T. Jefferson papers, 334, C.J. Boyd, Ed. 1950)

James Madison: "Americans have the right and advantage of being armed, unlike the people of other countries, whose people are afraid to trust them with arms." (Federalist Paper #46)

four of our first presidents are in that list... your disagreement isn't with me, only... and i was a bit surprised to see you gloss over the centralized governments of nazi germany and stalinist russia... also, you put up a straw man when you mentioned democratically elected governments only

I also reject the "Guns are needed to protect us from a tyrannical government" argument although from a simpler and less learned approach.

i'm not saying the founders were the end all of wisdom, ken, or that people posting in this forum are without the necessary intelligence, will, and fortitude to start a country... just that they, for the most part, disagreed with you

[mikeh]

I don't doubt, for a moment, that the majority, and perhaps all, of the framers of the US constitution believed, passionately, in the right of all men (so long as they were white, of course) to bear firearms. My point was not that they believed in gun control... how could they not, as creatures of their own time? My point was that I would argue that the brightest of them might well, today, argue that different circumstances call for different measures. Just as Jefferson owned slaves and virtually all educated white men believed women to be inferior, and races of man to be ranked according to colour, they believed in the right to bear arms. Would they all still be (by our lights) racist, sexist bigots if alive today?

 

Back then, the worst that a man could do would be to carry a brace of pistols and a musket or two... and muskets were very heavy and cumbersome. Pistols had limited range and stopping power, and muskets were not very accurate. Neither was capable of more than one shot at a time, and reloading was time consuming, and exposed the shooter to attack while both defenceless and in an awkward posture due to reloading.

 

Organized policing did not exist, at least not in any sense that we would find familiar.

 

Self-help, including the help of fellow citizens, was the best recourse. Duelling, while illegal, was often condoned.

 

Population densities were much lower than today.

 

The ability of a single person to inflict multiple injuries, and fatalities, was virtually non-existent.

 

Today, with modern policing methods and almost instant communication, there is less need for self-help or vigilante tactics.

 

Today, with a combination of ready access to illegal drugs, limited economic opportunity for many millions of Americans who are still constantly bombarded with consumer advertising calculated to make people envious of each other, and ready availability of guns, the streets of the US inner cities are far more dangerous than they were in the 1780s, when pickpockets and drunks were probably the biggest threat.

 

As for private gun ownership being a deterrent: ask yourself this question. How does the crime rate in the US compare to the crime rate in other industrialized countries with no significant private gun ownership?

 

If gun ownership were an effective deterrent, we'd see that the US has a low burglary rate, a low mugging rate, a low rape rate and so on. We don't. Explain that.

 

As for gun ownership being a guard against government tyranny, I did not gloss over Hitler or Stalin.

 

If you are interested in Stalin, read A People's Tragedy, a history of Russia from the late 1800s to Lenin's death in (I think) 1927, written by an Oxbridge history professor with unprecedented access to communist party archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. You will then understand that the communist takeover was not of anything resembling a democracy.

 

As for Hitler, again, I point out that he ascended to power enjoying the support of the majority of the people in Germany at the time. His party won the most seats in the last election before he arranged for the torching of the Reichstag, and thereafter was able to stage manage an increasingly popular reign until the war went sideways on him.

 

If and to the extent that this was a democracy turned into a tyranny, it should be pointed out that the democracy was imposed on the state by its enemies, only 14 years before it collapsed. The state was hardly a strong central government: far from it, it was virtually powerless to stop armed street combat between supporters of right wing groups, including the Nazis, and left wing groups, including the communists. And those groups had ready access to the millions of weapons left over from the recently ended WWI. Had there in fact been a strong, stable central government, able to control the rabbles and thugs, Hitler may well never have been elected!

 

It is this kind of point I was trying to make when I suggested reading history. It is one thing to parrot the right-wing line about needing guns to resist a government, it is entirely another thing to say that history teaches us the importance and validity of this argument.

 

BTW, LW, I am still awaiting word of exactly which democratic government was turned into a dictatorship, and which one was preserved from that fate by private gun ownership?

 

Chile in 1972? Nope, that was the CIA engineering the defeat of a democratic government by use of tanks and death squads.

 

Iran in 1959? Nope, that was the CIA installing a foreigner as Shah, complete with secret police.

 

Afghanistan in the late 1980s? Nope, that was the CIA and other US intelligence agencies supplying equipment and money to fundamentalist muslims.

 

Somalia in the 1990s?

 

Rwanda? Nope, that was genocide made possible by ready access to weapons, and prompted by power-hungry politicians.

 

While I wait, I note no response to the examples I pointed to of democracies that grew from dictatorships in which private gun ownership was prohibited.

 

Surely if we need guns to keep an honest government honest, we must need guns even more to overthrow a dishonest, tyrannical government?

 

Yet real history, as opposed to slogans, shows many examples in recent years of democratic government coming about through non-violent demonstrations.

 

How do you reconcile that reality with the notion that we need the ability to kill our fellow citizens in order to protect our freedoms?

[jtfanclub]

How do you reconcile that reality with the notion that we need the ability to kill our fellow citizens in order to protect our freedoms?

Because our government controls people through crime.

 

Let's say that my fair city decides that an apartment complex is an eyesore, and they want to force the owners to sell it to some developer friends of theirs. Pretty soon, people notice that 911 calls to this area aren't being answered very quickly- whereas if I (10 blocks away, and further away from the city center) call, the police will be at my door in about 10 minutes, it takes them over an hour to respond to the apartment complex. It doesn't take long for the criminals to notice, and the innocent people to move out. In a short matter of time, the criminals control that area, and the owners end up with a ruined, abandoned complex.

 

There's nothing keeping the government from doing this to anybody, anywhere. What right to freedom of speech do you have when you're dodging bullets? What right to property when the local government can, with the stroke of a pen, turn your property into a smoking ruin?

 

The right to fight crime (ie., carry a gun and shoot in self-defense) isn't so much a right to fight criminals. It's a right to fight the police when the police give a wink and a nudge to the criminals because you're doing something they don't like.

 

Meanwhile, I get to live 10 blocks from a free fire zone. Yippee.

[luke warm]

look what's happening in america now, mike... would you not say that tyranny of a sort is being imposed? i would... does that mean that armed americans will revolt? i doubt it, but i'm not positive... but being armed, they could do so... i believe you are wrong when you attribute the beliefs of the founders to the times in which they live, rather than a deep-rooted political philosophy... they actually believed that gov't was a necessary evil, and that the more powerful it became the more evil it became... i don't see that history teaches they were wrong... you keep harping on democratically elected governments, which has nothing to do with what i'm saying... i don't care whether the gov't in question was democratically elected or not, i'm speaking of a central gov't that amasses more and more power unto itself

 

you gave some examples of the differences between then and now... denser populations, better police methods, etc, aimed, i suppose, at showing why the right of a law-abiding citizen to keep (and bear) arms is no longer needed... the most liberal state in the union viz gun-carry laws is vermont... no permit is needed, no waiting period... compare its crime rates to that of the states with the strictest laws (washington d.c. being one of those)... now i'm not about to attribute violence to the curtailing of that right only, i know there are sociological, economical, population demographics, and cultural issues in play also...

 

this idea of 'central' gov't isn't limited to the federal, it's meant to be from bottom to top... there are central city, county, and state gov'ts... the more a neighborhood, city, county, state, country can trust its citizens, the more those citizens can handle their unique problems... i'm not speaking of vigilantes, i'm speaking of people exercising rights they (supposedly) already have... and i'm speaking of law-abiding citizens, not those who have a penchant for illegal activities

 

your examples of poland, romania, east germany made it seem that unarmed populaces imposed their collective wills on central gov'ts, but there were other forces at work that (imo) had more to do with results... in any case, i was not speaking of elected governments (only), i was speaking of centralized governments... how they came about isn't the point, how their citizens can change them, if that is their desire, is

 

most posts i've seen where america is mentioned have been negative, with a lot of those pointing to things the federal gov't has done (although 'bush' is used as the scapegoat - bush could be prevented from doing anything at all by congress and/or the courts)... things like gitmo, the patriot act, illegal wars (or 'armed conflicts')... this is, imo, a direct result of a central gov't becoming more and more powerful, like a black hole whose gravitational field grows stronger and stronger... the cure isn't to change the people running it, unless that change results in going back to the principles of liberty and more state control... changing the people won't slow down the growth and power of the gov't, you'll just end up with a different brand of control... yet some of the same people who decry america's role in today's world think this will change depending on who is elected president... the cure is to know who we are, what we were meant to be when founded, what rights the gov't had and what rights are reserved for the people, and return to that

 

anyway, that's my opinion on the matter

[Al_U_Card]

Because our government controls people through crime.

Especially their own.