04-30-2018, 10:44 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-30-2018, 10:53 PM by Eric the Green.)
(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.
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.
It's a curious myth that has grown up in Red America, and nowhere else. Flyover country lends itself to people hanging on to outdated, parochial, provincial beliefs.
The right to have arms did not lead to human rights and democracy. The Enlightenment and liberal ideology did that. The right to bear arms in America was a device to protect slaveowners. It was not that they wanted to keep arms out of the hands of rebellious slaves, but to keep them in the hands of the slaveholders. And in a wild country like the USA was, with no organized police or national guard, the well-regulated militia was the only alternative to protect against criminals and pirates. But this Second Amendment provision was soon rendered out of date, as police and armed forces were developed, and the power and business of guns soon outstripped the intent of the amendment. The right to bear arms is now the leading threat to the security of our free state.
Th Gilded Age of course resulted of course from the same laissez faire philosophy that the Republicans have restored today. Such a philosophy insists that non-whites and labor should have no rights. The LAST thing that reds remember today is the rights and values of the underprivileged and the workers.
Quote: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.
The helplessness is confidence that society protects, educates and elevates the people so that criminals are not running rampant and people respect the law. States with virtual militias because of lax gun laws are the least safe states to live in, and red flyover states are the least rational in every way. Because arming more people with powerful weapons means that more of those people might turn into criminals, or be criminals to start with because of lax checks on purchases, and that criminals might steal their weapons.