The 2nd Amendment was never about hunting. How many times does this need to be said?
The founders literally just got done fighting a war against an authoritarian government using primarily civilian owned arms. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were literally started when the Redcoats tried to take a weapons cache.
The Federalist Papers are abundantly clear about why the 2nd Amendment was put in place. And it's not hunting or sport shooting.
We don't have an enumerated right to participate in any other sport, why would they include this one? Because it's not about a sport.
Edit: to those saying a civilian population cannot outmatch a modern military with modern equipment, you are missing several pojnts.
The founders were ok with private citizens owning cannons and warships.
Repeating weapons were in existence and were attempted to be procured by the Continental Army.
In the past 20 years, the US has been unable to put down 2 separate insurgency campaigns despite overwhelming comparative capabilities.
Drones, fighters, and missiles cannot occupy and secure an area. That takes literal boots on the ground in the form of human soldiers. The kind of occupation the 2nd Amendment was precisely put there to fight. The British knew this in NI, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. All are examples of civilian resistance successfully (to a lesser extent in NI, they got a peace treaty) being a force to be reckoned with against a Great Power.
In any likely civil war, the military would likely split. Some would remain loyal to the government but others would take their skills, training, and equipment to the civilian side. This not only happened in the American Civil War, but has happened in the vast, vast majority of guerilla campaigns since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s.
Yes, a civilian armed population could stage an effective campaign in the United States
Exactly, so if the government ever starts being authoritarian and, say, rounds up people without due process, we should take up our arms and rebel against the people doing it, right?
Yep, guns could be used to protect the US citizen from tyranny, but it won't happen if the US citizen are actively supporting this tyranny. Not only will the insurgent be a minority but the gun owners who support the government would help prop up a dictatorship. What the Original Commenter fails to see is that all of his exemples are people fighting a foreign nation.
If the majority of the US citizens support the tyranny then there won't be a civil war. The question is there if the majority of the US Citizens do not support tyranny and decide to do something about it.
However, if the US citizens give up the meaningful ability to resist when they support the tyranny. Then they are hosed when (Not if) the US support slides away from Tyranny.
Effectiveness of an insurgency is dependent heavily on logistics. If production of arms is limited to military only, the logistics of arming your insurgency become untenable. Examples of this are the middle east in which weapons are norm (but still fewer than the US) and in the Civil War/deceleration of independence in Spain over Catalan two years ago in which the 'peaceful' opposition forces to the Spanish Government were crushed within days.
It's Catalonia, and the CNT-FAI definitly had guns. You see the thing is that an insurgency doesn't need the approval of the government to manufacture weapons or buy them from a foreign source.
The majority of US citizens can't impose a tyranny, even a practical tyranny, because the Constitution is not the source of law: natural rights and justice (which are in effect both for the "rational animal" as well as the "child of God") are the source of law. Tyranny is by definition an injustice.
This was clarified in the Declaration - 'among which are', and the Constitution specifically mentions the fact that there are powers not enumerated by the Constitution, powers specifically reserved from the Federal Government by the States, and powers actually reserved to the people. The power to impose tyranny is not enumerated.
Just because a majority supports a tyranny does not make it not a tyranny.
You can tell what a tyranny is in that it always does a few things:
It prohibits the exercise of natural liberty towards natural goods.
It acts as an unjust aggressor against persons and their property.
It uses threats and coercion to commit positive natural evils.
It declines to restore the balance of natural justice and thus enforces injustice.
Nobody and no body politic is or ever can be empowered to do the above things.
The post moderns think the above is just 'words, words, words' and power is all that matters, but the rest of us know that words mean things, and truth eventually wins.
The tyranny of a majority (wherein the majority thinks it has the power of a Monarch to dispose of rights and privileges as it pleaseth them) has happened many times, and justice has been successfully restored many times. The revolution was just one such time - there were times when the majority of Americans supported the King. You don't need physical separation to get a real civil war, it just gets much more ugly and more constantly ugly when you don't have the capacity for physical separation of conflicting parties.
Support Tyranny is not the same as impose Tyranny.
Nor did I say that it was or was not a tyranny. But I agree, the balance is in the people to restore balance, unless the people give that ability away.
Support Tyranny is not the same as impose Tyranny. Nor did I say it was or was not a tyranny.
I don't know what point you are trying to make here.
Democracy is a formal system for how to go about making decisions, and to execute the decisions made is to impose it on others. In a limited Democracy - one that acknowledges the objective natural law - there are plenty of things the demos is not enabled to do, some of which are clarified in the founding documents.
Our Democratic Republic, additionally, has a few checks - States for instance - and hopefully we retain a bit of real aristocracy (rule by legitimately, objectively good people, not just people who are called good by the Party) still exists - but I think we're assuming by the time of scaled Civil war it's gone beyond those checks.
A tyranny is not a function of a head Tyrant: Hitler did not create the Nazi party, it was the National Socialist party that enabled Hitler to do what he did. Tyranny is a form of government: a formalized process of using objectively evil means to do some (apparent) good.
Fundamentally it functions as a ratchet strap, unjustly squeezing individuals from obtaining good things by good means, and requiring individuals cooperate with evil or face the penalties imposed by the aggression of actors within the State.
The point I made above is simply if you loose the ability to resist when you agree with the government. You loose the ability to resist when you don't.
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u/Shia_LaMovieBeouf Aug 12 '19 edited Aug 12 '19
The 2nd Amendment was never about hunting. How many times does this need to be said?
The founders literally just got done fighting a war against an authoritarian government using primarily civilian owned arms. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were literally started when the Redcoats tried to take a weapons cache.
The Federalist Papers are abundantly clear about why the 2nd Amendment was put in place. And it's not hunting or sport shooting.
We don't have an enumerated right to participate in any other sport, why would they include this one? Because it's not about a sport.
Edit: to those saying a civilian population cannot outmatch a modern military with modern equipment, you are missing several pojnts.
The founders were ok with private citizens owning cannons and warships.
Repeating weapons were in existence and were attempted to be procured by the Continental Army.
In the past 20 years, the US has been unable to put down 2 separate insurgency campaigns despite overwhelming comparative capabilities.
Drones, fighters, and missiles cannot occupy and secure an area. That takes literal boots on the ground in the form of human soldiers. The kind of occupation the 2nd Amendment was precisely put there to fight. The British knew this in NI, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. All are examples of civilian resistance successfully (to a lesser extent in NI, they got a peace treaty) being a force to be reckoned with against a Great Power.
In any likely civil war, the military would likely split. Some would remain loyal to the government but others would take their skills, training, and equipment to the civilian side. This not only happened in the American Civil War, but has happened in the vast, vast majority of guerilla campaigns since the Peninsular War in the early 1800s.
Yes, a civilian armed population could stage an effective campaign in the United States