On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Dean Forster wrote:
>
> I follow what you're saying but I think you're going
> too deep into the events of the time and ya, maybe a
> bit too cynical. =) I think the most logical way to
> read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is to
> take them as a whole and extract the edicts as a list
> of similar items. It's a list of freedoms for people,
> it's just not very complicated. I hate to sound like
> a broken record, and I do appreciate your well thought
> out views.
And I'm not saying your reading has no validity at all...as I've said
elsehwere, I just can't bring myself to attribute to the Great Comma the
significance which Dan does. On the other hand, I think you have to
ignore half of the amendment to think that its purpose is to insure
personal, as opposed to state & national, self-defense.
And I don't think I'm being particularly cynical. I think that we tend to
understimate the genuine trepidation with which many states entered the
federal union in the first place. It's not that the representatives
negotiating the Bill of Rights were focused on states rather than people,
it's that those negotiators were focused on the interests of *their*
states' people. The way they did this structurally (IMO) was to focus on
preserving the rights of state governments in particular where the 2nd
amendment is concerned. After all, if gun ownership were a sacred
personal right all on its own, then it could have been placed in the 1st
amendment.
> People see what they're looking for. Really, what
> would a person who has no idea of the significance of
> the Bill of Rights think when they read the 2nd?
I think they would wonder, what's a militia? What's the social structure
that supports such a means of national self defense? Does the word
"state" refer to the federal state or the individual states? Does "the
people's right" mean that individuals have in uninfringible right to arms
as such, or does it mean that arms must be available to the community in
general in case of attack, but the distribution of them may be controlled
by the states?
> And I wonder what the framers would think today if
> they knew fed vs. state was going strong? Did they
> intend it as a check/balance system like the congress,
> judiciary, and executive or did they want the states
> to keep the fed weak? Though it would seem the states
> get strongarmed more and more often now- highway funds
> come to mind.
It would depend on which framer you asked. Hamilton, for instance, would
have wanted the fed to be very strong compared to the states. Others
wanted the fed to be as weak as possible.
> Well, I certainly never was comparing us to anyone
> else. Let me reiterate that taking responsibility for
> one's own safety is pretty much where personal
> responsibility starts.
I would say, "taking responsibility for one's own *conduct* and safety."
> People might as well do it,
> the police are not charged with protecting individual
> citizens.
Of course they are! There aren't enough of them to be personal
bodyguards, no, but they are the threat of deterrence by which all are
meant to be protected. We try to get a balance: sufficient police to
make crime rare, but not so many as to be intrusive into our daily lives.
> I'm honestly curious, what gun laws need more laws to
> allow enforcement?
I guess it would be more a matter of appropriations bills than altogether
new laws. It's just that the cliche is so common, "We need to better
enforce the laws we have!" that I wonder what anybody is *doing* to better
enforce those laws. One must assume that better enforcement must imply
either more people or better tools, either of which will cost money, which
must be approved by a legislative process....
> If violence is fundamental to human nature, what
> better way to ensure justice than to level the playing
> field?
The field is levelled not by giving everybody a gun, which returns us to a
more heavily-armed "state of nature" so to speak, but by establishing rule
of law, democracy, an accountable police, and all those other institutions
that make personal violence undesirable and unnecessary.
One of the issues America has is such a deep suspicion of government as
such that we don't trust ourselves to self-govern justly, and we feel we
must keep the option of violence in reserve at all times. We view our
institutions so much as tyrants-in-waiting that we often forget to use
them as the means towards consensus which they ought to be (witness our
ridiculously low political participation per capita), which has the effect
of abandoning our institutions to the use of those who are powerful and
willing to use those institutions to their own narrow ends. We make a
self-fulfilling prophecy that way.
This reminds me of that scene in SW:ESB where Yoda sends Luke into the
evil cave, and the only evil he finds is what he takes with him.
> Every able bodied citizen is part of the militia in the US.
?? This is news to me.
> I fail to see the correlation,
Took me a moment to remember the point I was trying to make. I guess it's
this: every society must decide what violence's place is. This is not to
say that we desire violence, but we take for granted that sometimes people
will need to be coerced to behave a certain "proper" way. We believe it's
appropriate to use violence against people who use drugs in even the
safest of ways, but not to shoot our politicians, say. On the other hand,
we have a nearly libertarian believe in the rights of privacy and personal
choice, and we believe that we must be vigilant and prepared to use force
to topple the government if it should become tyrranous.
I guess my point is that, as a society, we are very confused about what
constitutes freedom and about what place violence should have in the order
of things, and that confusion adds to our social and legislative problems,
including the issue of gun regulation.
> though smoking pot is
> very much a victimless crime. Tobacco pushed that
> through way back when, you could say that they nipped
> it in the bud.
Except nobody goes to jail for lighting or selling a Marlboro....
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
