hazlnut
Gold Member
- Sep 18, 2012
- 12,387
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REMINDER: Most Tea Partiers and Gun Cultists Misread 2nd Amendment
LINK TO MUST READ ARTICLE EXPOSING HOW RUBES MISREAD LAW
LINK TO MUST READ ARTICLE EXPOSING HOW RUBES MISREAD LAW
Misreading the Right to Bear Arms
The Second Amendment reads in full: "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." The popular phrasing, "the right to bear arms," is a clear signal of how political fundamentalism replaces the nuance of principles.
First, the context of gun ownership is clearly established in the rightthe need for a "well regulated militia." In the eighteenth century, in the wake of the Revolution, the American mind recognized the essential, and not just symbolic, role of guns in the lives and freedom of people.
Guns were essential for food, in many circumstances, but guns were the mechanism for some degree of equality between the ruler and the ruled. During the late 1700s, then, guns and human autonomy and liberation were literally equal. The thing and the principle were blurred, and the founding documents show that fact in the carefully detailed language of the Second Amendment.
Historically, however, the U.S. has codified and embraced in the popular psyche that gun ownership itself (independent of the principles that ownership represents"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state") is the right we must defendand by making this transition, and ignoring the principle for the thing, twenty-first century America is a society trapped in political fundamentalism.
I happen to harbor no fear of the U.S. collapsing into a military state or police state; thus, I find the idea that each American needs to own a gun in order to form a militia if either a military or police action comes to fruition to take away our liberties to be baseless.