Posted on 10/08/2005 11:23:32 AM PDT by Whyarentlibsred
Amendment II: 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.
Upon reading the above, it is clear to me that the first part of the Second Amendment “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,” no longer applies to the situation in America today and should be changed to better reflect valid reasons for allowing citizens to keep guns in the United States. While things may have been different in the 1700s, the days when ordinary citizens armed with light weapons (rifles and handguns) can assemble and defeat a professional military are long over. There is now a vast disparity between the amount of firepower that the average gun owner on one side, and the U.S. military on the other, could bring to a hypothetical fight, and historically even the successful guerilla movements that drove away professional armies possessed more weapons than just long arms. For example, the Afghan guerillas who defeated the Soviets possessed recoilless rifles, RPGs, and Stinger SAMs, all weapons that are banned by law from U.S. citizens today. Besides, the National Guard already fulfills the function of a State Militia, and the existence of the National Guard has almost nothing to do with guaranteeing a citizens right to bear arms. Because of these reasons, it is clear that using a well-regulated militia to defend the state as a reason to allow people to keep guns is outdated.
A much better reason to allow people to keep guns is so they can defend themselves from criminals, as demonstrated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina, it wasn’t the government people were worried about, it was armed gangs of their fellow American citizens looting and raping that were a threat to them. The government has enough checks and balances in place to take care of itself; if some Commie dictator did win the presidency I can’t see the mainly conservative military following any orders to disarm the people or send all conservatives to reeducation camps. However, when it comes to defending his family from the ravages of his fellow citizens, a man has no choice but to rely on his own weapons. The police won’t always be there for you, but as long as concealed carry is legal, your gun will be. I think the Second Amendment should be changed to reflect this fact, that the security of the state is up to the military, but personal security is up to the nation’s individual citizens. I think a better Second Amendment would read “An individual’s ability for self-protection being necessary to a secure society, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Sure, the original intent of the founders may have been to allow citizens to form militia, and to protect against the government, but I think this bit of Constitutional reconstruction to reflect the reality that fellow citizens are more of a threat than the government ever will be is justified.
Alas, the grabbers would then try and incarcerate all men at the age of majority....
Why don't you hang around a while, lurk, and really gain a well-rounded education? I have, and it's been a g_dsend.
It may not be enough to look up the word militia in a modern day dictionary. It is necessary to understand the usage of the word in the 18th century. If you look to the original constitutions of the original states, many of them, including New York, went to the trouble of defining militia - every able-bodied male between the ages of 18 and 60. The Founding Fathers probably just used the word because everybody back then knew what they were referring to. I think the only changes we have to make in it, thanks to feminism, disabled rights and people living longer is call it every person over 18.
Not really. You wouldd be amazed at how easy it is for a well equipped machine shop to build a simple submachine gun out of old car parts. In fact, the component requiring the most work is actually the magazine.
"Also...maybe if Liberals would stop insisting that criminals be treated like ordinary citizens, and stopped treating ordinary citizens like criminals, we wouldn't have half the problems we do today. "
Here is a big part of the problem: Why does America let liberals frame the debate? We have to take back the initiative on these and other crucial social issues.
Liberals need to be shown the door...
I disagree with the premise that citizenry would not have the ability to effectively fight an oppressove, tyrannical government here in the United States if it became necessary. Certainly, such a rebellion would be primarily guerrilla/sniper-style, but it could be done. The column cites the Afghanistan resistance to the Soviet Union, but another example would be the effect that the Viet Cong had in Vietnam.
"What do you have to say about Flight 93? "
Excellent point! The terrorists are not going to attack fortified military targets here at home (US). They are going to attack what they perceive to be "soft" (read "civillian") targets.
The freedom and security of Americans is more secure when its citizens are armed.
P.S. Great tagline...
Please don't leave yet.
Could you give us some more information about your assignment? I'm just curious. For what class is this, and how exactly was the assignment phrased? Were you told to come to this web site in particular or are you using others as well to get different opinions.
Thanks. We look forward to hearing from you.
--- "....and the world will follow our lead into the future!" adolf hitler 1935 ----
I wonder if Norway followed this. My Dad's cousin was part of the Norwegian Resistance. He said the first thing the Germans did was go to the town courthouse and get the gun registration files, then went door to door. (My relative hid under a pile of potatoes in the cellar.)
He is still alive in Norway, and now owns only one old shotgun. Really! ;)
the first thing the Germans did was go to the town courthouse and get the gun registration files, then went door to door. (My relative hid under a pile of potatoes in the cellar.)
the anti-gunners have been trying the same thing here for a long time... i still can't understand 80,000,000 gun owners here & only about 5,000,000 belong to a gun org....
No, things were not different in the 1700s. A trained army even then was more than a match for any militia. That is beside the point. Guns may not be able to stand up to tanks, but without guns, a tyranical government wouldn't even need to use the tanks.
I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.
I challenged Professor Stone on the following. The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place.
There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.
Professor Stone struck me as just another liberal masquerading as an enlightened academic.
He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Back when the Second Amendment was authored, civilians had unfettered access to exactly the same range of weaponry available to the government, all the way up to field artillery and warships. Indeed, the Constitution indirectly endorses this elsewhere, by giving Congress the right to grant letters of marque and reprisal—licenses for privately-owned commerce raiders.
Thanks for the clarifications. I was not fully aware of that perspective. And thanks for your service.
Here is the deal: I don't need to invent a new reason to keep and bear arms when the Constitution has already listed a perfectly good one.
However, you ignore or are ignorant of several points.
First, totalitarian regeimes ALWAYS seek to disarm the people because they know the power of a large armed populace. It happened in Armenia, Russia, WWII Germany, China, Cambodia, and Cuba just to name a few.
Second, any popular revolution must be overthrown by armed troops. In China and the USSR, the armed troops are NEVER locals and often don't even speak the same language as the locals. This makes it easier for officers to get the troops to kill them because the person "is not like them". Here in the US we do not have a non-English speaking military. While Iowa and Nebraska football fans may not like each other, you would be hard pressed to get the Iowa National Guard to fire upon American citizens in Nebraska. Not only that, but most National Guardsmen have families. During a time of civil war, they are not going to leave their families defenseless.
Three: There is the Posse Comitatus Act that specifically prohibits the use of federal troops against private citizens.
Fourth: Your re-write "An individual’s ability for self-protection being necessary to a secure society" leaves it open to all sorts of crap. It could be argued that no one "needs" a high powered rifle because you don't really need one in a defensive situation. The same for a 44 magnum or a 12 guage shotgun (no one "needs" a gun that powerful) or limiting the number a person can own or forcing you to keep the gun locked seperately from the bullets any number of "reasonable" restrictions.
Fifth: There are an estimated 80 million gun owners in the US. Even if only 1 in 10 were willing to take up aarms agains an opressive government, that would equate 8 MILLION armed people hiding in hundreds of thousands of places waiting for a target of opportunity.
Sixth: No, we don't have claymore's, or anti-tank weapons, or heavy machine guns but if the SHTF, we would.
Our founding fathers understood that a gun turns an ordinary farmer into someone that can easily kill a highly trained enemy soldier at 200 yards. Let's leave it that way.
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