04-30-2018, 06:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-30-2018, 07:03 PM by David Horn.)
(04-29-2018, 05:48 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: ... In some ways, the Right to own and carry weapons is the antithesis of the privileged samurai culture. It led in period to human rights and democracy. Did you dare deny those things to an armed populace? Did you expect the elite to confront them successfully? In many ways the Right to Bear Arms is key. The same arguments that led Jim Crow to adapt a legal stance against the underprivileged were used against the labor unions, who were denied the Rights to Assemble and Bear Arms at the same time. Somehow, the Pinkerton men weren't. The suffering and elitist Gilded Age resulted.
This does not address my point at all. My concern is the apparent willingness -- preference in many cases -- to rely on the willing stranger to provide personal security. This has nothing to do with militias, since the only militias we have at present are state sponsored ceremonial ones (Virginia Military Institute is ours), or ad hoc assemblages of the willing, notable for being typically RW extremists (the Michigan Militia, for instance).
If that is the preferred approach, then a warrior class must necessarily provide the service, or it falls to petty despots or self-appointed vigilantes. None of those options appeals to me.
... then Bob Wrote:The reds remember. The reds, given that Washington is as usual awash in elitist privilege, will yield their weapons from cold dead fingers. It is possible to see the Right to Bear Arms as very very American, as the key to all else, the very antithesis of samurai privilege.
I think the blue ought to remember that, with their strange ideas that associate helplessness with strength. Militia culture has not entirely died. It is alive and well in so called fly over country. Alive and well and for good reason.
You are coming close to advocating insurrection here ... or reporting on it at the very least. Nowhere is there a right to rebel, as every attempt in the past has demonstrated. It's odd that the ones so focused on draining the swamp are the ones least likely to use the ballot box to accomplish it. Instead, they prefer a friendly tyrant who will do it for them, or, barring that, to take up arms.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.