mean wrote:phuqueue wrote:Put down some restrictions now, whatever you can get, and you eventually establish a new normal in which any and all restrictions are not per se "invalid." Then you can eventually move on from there to place yet more and more restrictions, until you get somewhere where you're making a genuine difference.
I appreciate your explicitness, which is not something we're going to get from the legislators because, of course, they understand that this is
precisely what the pro-gun crowd is afraid of, and why the NRA and such continually reject any and all measures. To admit that this was the goal would be a non-starter. Of course, I don't think it is necessarily the goal of everyone supporting the gun control legislation. I'm sure there are many who believe that restrictions on high capacity magazines and "assault rifles" will go a long way to solving the problem; it is that notion I'm extremely skeptical of. It will require far more onerous restrictions--the slippery slope you describe--gun buybacks, mandatory turn-in programs, onerous sales restrictions, and ultimately the obliteration of the second amendment, which is exactly what I said earlier. I don't think the slippery slope you describe is necessarily the best way to go about it in the long term. I'd rather see the second amendment repealed, and let us deal with whatever fallout comes of it and move on, rather than doing this slow, decades long Band-Aid peel with the inevitable court challenges, electoral fallout, etc.. In part this is because there are a not insignificant number of people who feel that at some point along this slope, the legislation becomes actual tyranny, and that they are not only justified but in fact compelled to eradicate it. Better to deal with them all at once rather than piecemeal, each time we reach a particular point along the slope that someone finally feels like they can no longer tolerate it. I guess that's not realpolitik, though.
I think everyone supporting gun legislation has the goal of reducing gun violence -- how you get there is probably inconsequential to the vast majority. You may be right that there are some who think restrictions on magazines and assault weapons will be sufficient, once we get these things passed they can just pack it in. But when it becomes clear that wasn't enough, I think most of those people will favor yet more stringent restrictions, because a) people are far more susceptible to the logic in their own heads than they are to actual facts or statistics (so they'll stick with the "people are getting killed by guns, ergo we should make guns harder to get" line), and b) in any case, the fact that these steps alone didn't "solve" the gun problem doesn't mean further steps would necessarily be ineffective. The slippery slope doesn't require that everyone at all times be aware of it. Not everyone has to understand the long game. It may actually be better that many don't, lest they throw their hands up at the hopelessness of it all and decide not to do anything at all.
Repealing the Second Amendment would be a nice shortcut, but we're many decades away from that, and we only get there at all with a concerted national effort to change attitudes toward weapons in the first place. Constitutional amendment procedures are quite burdensome (with good reason, of course) and if we have trouble even pushing through legislation to mandate criminal background checks of all gun sales, how much further away are we from outright repeal? The big issue here is that the problems guns cause actually
reinforce some people's desire to keep them. The more shooting deaths there are, the more convinced these people become that they need their guns to protect themselves from other shooters. So there is no clear path here, no rational argument that they'll find acceptable. The only alternative is the long, slow grind.
I would say, by way of example, that in hindsight Randy Weaver had a right to defend himself and his family against the illegitimate aggression and illegal Rules of Engagement used in the raid on his home in 1992 by the FBI, ATF, and USMS. Or that, in many instances (Wounded Knee comes to mind), Native Americans had the right to defend themselves against illegitimate aggression and, arguably, attempted genocide. Or, leaving the US for a moment, that Jews in Nazi Germany had a fundamental (if not legally recognized in their country) human right to defend themselves against the illegitimate aggression of the Reich, and homosexuals in Uganda have a fundamental (again, if not legally recognized in their country) human right to defend themselves against aggression from a state that targets them, and may soon implement the death penalty, for their sexual orientation.
To the extent that I would generally agree that deadly force is acceptable to meet deadly force, I would say that you aren't wrong in principle about the right to self-defense, even against a tyrannical government. I don't think examples like the Native Americans or the Jews are especially informative here. The Native Americans were (still are) sovereign nations in their own right. They don't present an example of the US government oppressing its own people. Whether Jews were armed or not, ask Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, the Balkans, etc how much weapons helped them hold off the Wehrmacht -- or resist Nazi rule afterward.
Some probably do, but I think most just want to ensure that they at least have some chance. How many people really believed that a bunch of farmers with guns could defeat the British army? I'm sure it seemed fairly improbable at the time.
A bunch of farmers with guns didn't defeat the British army, a bunch of farmers with guns who teamed up with France and Spain defeated the British army.
Hey, I agree. The government will (at least almost) always have you outgunned. But does that mean you just submit to whatever unjust detention, subjugation, or genocide they might care to subject you to? I mean, really? "Well, I'm gay; gay = death penalty; I can't leave the country; I'm just going to let the government murder me." I might not have the balls myself to go down in a blaze of glory on principle, but that's a very fundamentally and I'd argue timeless American ideal, without which we might be drinking tea and enjoying superior healthcare.
I'll have you know I just finished drinking a cup of tea.
Furthermore, invoking "apocalyptic fantasy" strikes me as a little bit of "it can't happen here" naivety. Yes, right now everything looks to be coming up roses for Americans in America. Fears of being unjustly rounded up and sent off to concentration camps or faced with the prospect of government mandated genocide, or an attack from outside, or a military coup or some other collapse of society all seem exceptionally silly. I get that, but I reject the idea that it's impossible, and I certainly reject the idea that America will necessarily be forever a stable democratic republic incapable of engaging in unjust aggression against its citizens because of... what, magic? American exceptionalism? No, I think instability, corruption, and exploitation--even collapse of entire civilizations--can happen anywhere given the proper circumstances, and I think it is only by virtue of the fact that we've been so fortunate for the entirety of living memory that we are capable of rejecting the notion of such a thing outright. For perspective, our biggest political problem is that only 92% of people have jobs. First world problems indeed!
The question is whether guns can forestall those "proper circumstances" or adequately protect us if those circumstances do come to pass -- and if the answer is yes, the next question is whether that adds enough value to outweigh the considerable cost we incur from gun violence every day, right now. "People have been oppressed before, so we might be too" shouldn't be the end of the inquiry, but for so many gun people, it is. Guns are not cost-free. It's not like, oh, well we should keep them around
just in case. Asbestos is fire retardant, but it's also fucking carcinogenic, so now we make do without asbestos in our buildings. In a cost/benefit analysis, you can't just ignore the cost side.
That said, does resistance being futile negate the validity of the human right to resist?
No, but nor does the human right to resist remote and inchoate "tyranny" validate a resistance that would almost certainly be futile and which imposes real costs on society right now.
