We have a whole bunch of rights in this country, and by and large, that’s a good thing. But just because you have a right, that doesn’t mean you should always choose to exercise it. You shouldn’t go up to random passersby on the street and insult them, for example, even though you have the right to free speech. With rights come the responsibility to use those rights in a sane and sensible manner.
One of those things that we used to agree on was that you shouldn’t bring a loaded gun to a political debate. Oh, perhaps you have the legal right to — you may have all the proper permits to carry a concealed weapon, or you may have the right under your state’s law to openly carry a weapon. But like standing outside a funeral and telling people their loved ones are burning in Hell, it’s an irresponsible use of your rights.
Or, if you’re Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., it’s a perfectly cromulent thing to do.
Now, just as we can’t arrest Fred Phelps and the Pips for preaching anti-gay, anti-military, anti-human hatred, nor can we arrest those people who are blinkered enough to think it’s a good idea to carry a gun to an anti-government protest. But that doesn’t mean we should embrace it. That doesn’t mean we should encourage it. That doesn’t mean we should say that rights are rights, and any exercise of those rights is a good thing. Because sometimes exercising those rights is the wrong thing to do.
Look, I’m a radical civil libertarian, and even with regards to guns, I’m mostly agnostic. But carrying a gun to a town hall meeting or an anti-government protest is, if not illegal, then deeply immoral. And it’s not anti-liberty to say so, any more than it’s anti-liberty to condemn Fred Phelps. Indeed, there was a time when conservatives could be counted on to defend social order and the responsible use of rights. But of course, modern conservatives are radicals in all but name; they bear as much relationship to the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt as they do to the Socialist Workers Party.
Now, just as we can’t arrest Fred Phelps and the Pips for preaching anti-gay, anti-military, anti-human hatred…
You can’t?
This may be a tangent, but as an unashamed Canadian I’m actually rather alarmed to realize America doesn’t have hate speech laws. Up here I expect we’d have arrested him years ago.
Up there you have politically-motivated “human rights” boards conducting partisan witchhunts against people whose politics they don’t like. The cost of Canadian-style civility is freedom of expression; mostly, we have decided down here that it makes more sense to pay the different set of costs.
We have to let Fred Phelps yawp, but we are pretty much free to yawp about our own craziness. It’s a tradeoff.
Alan — you probably would have. But the First Amendment (unlike the Second) is extremely clear, and is a general prohibition on any major restriction on free speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion. Generally speaking, free speech restrictions are limited to time/manner/place restrictions — i.e., I can’t march a demonstration down Interstate 35 just because I have freedom of speech — and restrictions on direct threats. But those restrictions are supposed to be content-neutral. Excepting child pornography, pretty much everything else is legal.
This is one where I actually agree with Robert — I’m a free speech absolutist. I think it’s good that Fred Phelps is able to spew his bile. Yes, he’s a horrible human being who shows the naked hatred many feel toward GLBTQQs. That’s a feature, not a bug; Phelps is the best argument against intolerance that has ever existed.
If those of us who believe in tolerance are right — and we are — we can’t be afraid of staring down the bigots. Indeed, history has shown that bigotry doesn’t go away when we try to outlaw speech — it just goes underground, where it becomes even more virulent and twisted. No, I’d rather have the haters right out in the open where we can keep an eye on ’em.
And see, any type of confrontation over this is going to turn into “OBAMA’S TAKING OUR GUNS.” There’s no winning with them, but keeping them from killing anyone would be a victory.
Maybe it’s because I’m, like Alan, not an American, but a New Zealander, and the fact that America doesn’t have hate speech laws seems like a count against its being fully civilised as a nation.
All the other developed nations in the world have some variety of hate speech laws, and none of us are descending into totalitarianism at all. In fact, we seem less on that path than the US does.
All absolutist free speech laws do is degrade speech absolutely, not to mention being a tad lazy, as mature civilised nations are perfectly able to decide for themselves that speech dehumanising whole groups of disempowered minorities is a worthy curtail of speech.
This isn’t about being scared or any of that bull … this is about recognising the power of language to destroy and having the strength to realise that sometimes the effects at the collective level trump those at the individual. That takes guts and thinking the hard thoughts about where the line is drawn. Toleration of intolerance is an oxymoron.
Toleration of intolerance is not an oxymoron, it’s essential to being a free people. The proper remedy for free speech that you don’t like is to offer free speech you do like.
This shoves the groups being defamed into the “powerless victim” box. That’s what dehumanizes them, not the speech that defames them. Any group can speak up for itself – no one is powerless to do that. Not in America, anyway. Seizing one’s rights and exercising them is what makes people recognize you as fully human and accord you the respect you deserve. Paternalistic State action to “protect” you is what causes people to see you as infantile. Suppression of speech by the State makes people think that there must be some validity to it that the State is afraid of and wishes to stop in order for it to protect it’s power and status. An applicable cliche is that “the best disinfectant is sunlight.”
I beg to differ. Let me cite these examples
And not just hate speech laws, either. Here’s an example of how anti-discrimination and human rights laws are used in Canada:
I must, then, disagree with your statement. My viewpoint is that suppression of opinion and forcing individuals to account for their thoughts in hearings closed to the public are the hallmarks of totalitarianism. You’re not there yet. But this is a fine start.
It is not the proper place of government to decide what is acceptable in public discourse and what is not. That is a right, and it belongs to the people alone. It is far too great a power to entrust to any government.
It also make sure that we all know who the assholes are.
As an unashamed American I’m alarmed to see how “hate speech” laws have been accepted in what I had heretofore understood to be free countries. The number of countries that one can consider to be composed of free people seems to be diminishing. The worst thing is that given that these laws are being promulgated by what I take to be freely elected representatives, the people are voluntarily surrendering their liberty. Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest of Americans, was right – those who surrender essential liberties for momentary security eventually will have neither.
The problem, Sarah, is what happens when the potentially-totalitarian power you’ve given your governments falls into the hands of people who don’t have any particular commitment to liberal values. Not to go all Godwin on you, but Hitler was elected to office – it thus behooves everyone thinking about giving the state some new power or authority to think “you know, what would Hitler do with this power?” Because one day he will have it. Half the US Constitution is designed to minimize the impact of some future Hitler.
I agree that the countries that have “hate speech” legislation don’t show any marked trend towards totalitarianism at this point in time. Yet, free speech untrammeled by government power is one of the key elements in *preventing* such slides towards the authoritarian side of the scale. Your kids are on the edge of a cliff, and you’re saying that the removal of the guardrails doesn’t matter because right now the kids aren’t trying to jump off or play close to the edge.
So, Jeff, to the comments you made:
Illinois has pretty much the most restrictive anti-Second Amendment laws in the country. But even if it was legal, you wouldn’t catch ME openly carrying a gun to a town-hall meeting. I think it’s politically a bad idea if nothing else. But tell me – on what basis do you hold that it’s immoral?
And yet you’re the country torturing people, holding people without trial, etc. Stopping people from dehumanising and oppressing groups is NOTHING compared to that. It’s called protecting people from those with power that would use that power to advocate, based on nothing more than their feelings, that groups are less than human.
You seem to have a rather simplistic view of power, one where if one has some basic protections under the law then one has no power at all. Realising that the playing field is not level, and putting in place structural solutions to such, is the intellectual, intelligent, and recognising-of-complexity, solution.
I’ve already read all of your so-called ‘examples’ before … all those laws are doing is not preventing anyone from believing as they will, they’re just prevented from being able to impose those beliefs on others via discrimination and bigotry. Religion is no defence against prejudice in a modern secular society.
Those examples you cite I would see as examples of this all functioning AS IT SHOULD. The rest of the developed world has recognised such, and are comfortable with it … the US clings to it’s childlike absolutist thinking … time to grow up and realise the world is a complex place.
Totalitarianism is, in part, the protection of those with the power in society via the suppression of those without … using the law to make sure those that don’t have power have a space in the public sphere of society is the complete opposite of such. Blinkering oneself to thinking that just because everyone can say anything that everyone has equal ability to access public debate is naive at best, and dangerous.
Oh, and yes, the right to decide what is public discourse and what is not is the right and place of the people … who the hell do you think the government is? Maybe the fact that you all seem intent on stamping your foot and pretending that they aren’t the same thing is the reason you’re all fucking up government and not having the people represented in such.
I disagree Robert … I’d say you all are the ones removing the guardrails because you’re not recognising the danger of having your public space descend into screaming matches of clichés, oversimplifications, and stereotypes, without protections for those that have always been left out of the public space.
Yes, we haven’t proven that we aren’t going to slide into Totalitarianism … but that question is like being asked when one stopped beating one’s wife; one can’t prove a negative. But the risk is so small (and the evidence is mounting of such being small) that I, and our nations, have decided to run such, and it seems to be worth it so far. You all in the US, however, I would argue as I do above, have moved considerably closer.
And I don’t really see any real debate on that happening here, for all your ‘free speech’ laws. Equating all speech just results in all speech being lowered to it’s base lowest disgusting level.
But tell me – on what basis do you hold that it’s immoral?
I can’t speak for Jeff, but the regularity with which people are showing up to these things armed seems to me to contribute to a climate of fear and intimidation around a public policy debate. And I think you could argue that it is immoral to introduce that element into a policy debate, particularly when the topic is health care reform. Kind of interesting, given that the supposed idea behind the Second Amendment is that an armed people is a free people, that you didn’t see people showing up to debates on the Patriot Act with their guns.
Sarah,
I think you’re drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between our free speech protections and our political culture that is not particularly justified.
Sarah,
I think this discussion might be more fruitful if you avoided the assumption that First Amendment law is not carefully crafted and thought out, but instead must be based on immature, childlike, unintelligent, un-intellectual simple-mindedness. I assure you that quite a few intelligent adults have put a great deal of intellectual firepower behind delineating the First Amendment law we have today. The fact that you disagree with the outcome does not mean that the outcome wasn’t reached by intelligent people.
I’ve already read all of your so-called ‘examples’ before … all those laws are doing is not preventing anyone from believing as they will, they’re just prevented from being able to impose those beliefs on others via discrimination and bigotry. Religion is no defence against prejudice in a modern secular society.
You may not be aware of this, but in fact U.S. federal law does prohibit discrimination by both the state and private actors on the basis of sex, race, religion, national origin, disability, etc., and many state laws go further to prohibition discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender expression, family status and more. What you are asking for the U.S. to do is that people not only be forbidden to discriminate in their actions, but also in their beliefs and purely verbal expression of those beliefs in the public square. (Expressing bigoted ideas about African Americans, women, Muslims et al. in a school, workplace or accommodation open to the public constitutes a hostile environment and violates anti-discrimination law.)
You don’t just want Robert to be forbidden to actually discriminate against Muslims in his actions (U.S. law has done this since 1964, much longer, I believe, than most Western nations); you want him to be forbidden to voice any negative opinion of Islam at all, and if he is suspected of having voiced such an opinion, to be subject to legal processes where he must ‘fess up his beliefs.
I disagree Robert … I’d say you all are the ones removing the guardrails because you’re not recognising the danger of having your public space descend into screaming matches of clichés, oversimplifications, and stereotypes, without protections for those that have always been left out of the public space.
Who are “those that have always been left out of the public space”? I would say Mormons have been pretty marginalized in American political discourse, with non-Mormons going so far as to prevent Utah’s admission as a state until Mormons conformed their practices to those approved by the Protestant majority. Does that mean I mustn’t criticize Mormons who supported CA’s ban on same-sex marriage as being hateful, homophobic bigots who had no business coming from out of state to interfere and whose role on Prop. 8 is especially perverse given their history of polygamy? (I don’t actually take this view of Mormons, but God knows I’ve heard it many times in the last year.)
There are lots of groups who have been marginalized in the U.S., but the nice thing about freedom of speech is that they are free to say what they want to say as well.
Do federal level elected officials (U.S. Representatives and Senators) have the right to ban guns at functions they hold in their home state? Certainly it is illegal to carry guns into federal facilities, including the officials’ DC offices and the Capital building. Are local police obliged to uphold the US Rep’s or Sen’s wish to ban guns from their public appearances in-state?
Oceania has no right to lecture the US about being civilized in race relations. Perhaps the Aborigines, Maori and Lebanese immigrants can add something to that.
Since the “fully civilised” countries admit that they oppress and marginalize groups of people, they are not success stories of equality and reconciliation, but can only claim to be works in progress. So how much of a work in progress did they have to become to claim admittance into the “fully civilised” fold?
Does the qualification for being “fully civilised as a nation” rest upon the legislative gesture of hate speech criminalization or actual amelioration of race relations? If the latter, the “civility” of the “fully civilised” may be up for some debate. We’ll see how long it takes for the next Oldham, Bradford, Palm Island, Redfern, Clichy-sous-Bois or Cronulla to occur.
We are “a” country engaging in these crimes, not “the” country. Incidentally, your country and your neighbor in the land down under happened to provide some victims for the American dungeon.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2712026/Kiwi-troops-in-war-crimes-row
http://www.amnesty.org.au/hrs/comments/20599/
And unfortunately, I would guess that a good number of the members of the “fully civilised” club have anti-terrorism laws which delay or suspend rights of the detained.
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.1/frenchlaw
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201361_pf.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Anti-Terrorism_Act_2005
NancyP,
In certain states, the laws mandate that people be allowed to carry guns into the venues where these town halls are being held. I’m pretty sure those laws would supersede a federal official’s individual request, although some people have come up with creative solutions.
Arizona in particular (where this latest incident occurred) has very broad open-carry laws. I believe that if a local jurisdiction (like, say, a city council) wants to ban guns from public buildings, they must provide a gun safe and a person to staff it. If they don’t, the person must be permitted to bring their gun in. This past year, the legislature tried to pass a law allowing guns in bars. I’m quite certain state law in Arizona allows people simply standing on the street to have their gun with them at all times so long as it is visible. The only exception I can think of is parks. I think parks can be declared gun-free zones.
I find it helpful when analyzing a law, to consider whether I would support it if it were being enforced by someone I don’t like. That’s part of why I am such a fierce free speech advocate, and also why I generally disfavor laws which empower individuals with significant discretion.
In the U.S., we have constitutional regulations which prohibit certain suppression of speech: in other words, they keep the government entirely out of that class of regulation. We can’t bar hate speech, true. But then again, if Jeb Bush becomes president and Congress goes all republican… well, they can’t bar pro-union speech, or anti-government speech, or the like.
To put it in a more general sense: if you are going to give the government the power to regulate within a class, it seems beyond the pale to assume that the government–and by extension, the choice of any particular regulation–will always conveniently match your personal views. So you either need to accept that the majority wins whatever the outcome, or you need to come up with some extremely reliable basis to explain why the evil you seek to suppress can never, ever, become the majority.
Sarah, which class are you? Would you still be arguing for this government power if you were in the minority? Or are you of the mind that your position is so strong, you will never lose? It’s good to know what will come out of Pandora’s box.
What regularity? How many town halls have been held? How many people have attended? How many people have actually shown up armed? I’ve seen exactly two stories involving 13 people (one at the first one, and reportedly about a dozen in the other). Seems to me that it’s been highly irregular, not regular at all.
That’s not the supposed idea – it is the idea. The central concept to understanding the Second Amendment is that the right to be armed gives the people the ultimate insurance against government oppression.
As far as the Patriot Act goes, I don’t remember any particular number or emphasis of “town halls” being held to debate it.
Fear and intimidation? Hm. Well, the government SHOULD fear the electorate. But then when I see a citizen openly carrying a gun in this context I see someone prepared to defend themselves against threats, not someone preparing to threaten others. Of course, I know a number of gun owners and have used handguns, shotguns and rifles a number of times myself. So my viewpoint may well be different from yours. If I saw someone like this at a rally I wouldn’t feel fear and intimidation – I’d probably walk up to them and start asking them questions about the make and model of the firearm and why they chose that particular one over the alternatives.
And let’s remember that no one actually attending the meetings has been armed. Nobody with a gun has been anywhere near the President or near the people actually engaged in the debate.
Again – I don’t advocate this course of action myself. I feel it distracts from the main point. But I do understand that there are a number of people who think that our President is anti-gun ownership and that the policies that he proposes represent government interference in our lives and can lead to government oppression. I’m sure you don’t agree (at least with the latter). But that seems to be their viewpoint as far as I can understand it – I don’t presume to speak for them, of course.
But I do understand that there are a number of people who think that our President is anti-gun ownership and that the policies that he proposes represent government interference in our lives and can lead to government oppression.
And therefore the proper way to protest his policies or explain why those policies are bad is to carry a firearm in his vicinity (if not necessarily being allowed to carry it into the same room)? This seems about as sound as protesting a war by burning a U.S. flag on your lawn as a veterans’ parade goes by your house — sure, you have a First Amendment right to do it, but you’re going to turn off a lot of people whom you otherwise might have persuaded due to your choice of tactics, and it’s rude to the veterans. For the ostentatious gun-toting around elected officials, change “rude” to “reasonably appears threatening given all the rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.”
I’m glad you noted that the fact that you would assume anyone carrying a gun is doing so solely for self-defense is a reflection of your own experiences and background. Police officers and others who have been threatened with a gun or even shot often take a different view.
If the U.S. were as uniquely authoritarian as Sarah suggests, the power to censor speech would not be a good thing to give its government. Indeed, I guarantee you that, if we had hate speech laws, there would be attempts to include police officers as one of the protected groups we would not be allowed to condemn.
Since at least the time we legalized William Burroughs (1965?), we’ve shown a healthy mistrust of the State’s wishes to control speech and writing. Canada, on the other hand, banned an Andrea Dworkin book; and Australia banned one by Alan Moore.
Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it? Does the person have the gun for self-defense or to threaten others? And if it’s someone I don’t know, and they’re part of a group holding threatening signs and shouting threatening slogans, how might that change how I feel about it? (ETA) And it’s one thing to say in the abstract that the “government” should fear the “electorate.” But this debate is both between different factions within our government and between different elements of our general society. And what is the fear that is being imparted to the government? Don’t vote for the public option? Or what? I’ll shoot you? What is the non-threatening message here? Just remember that we have guns or … what?
I, too, know a number of gun owners and have used guns. Shooting is pretty fun. And living in Arizona, I’m pretty used to seeing people with their guns out in public. But taking a gun to a political debate sends a different message than taking one hunting or taking one to the range. Personally, after the shootings at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and at the Kirkwood, Mo. City Council, I’m glad the elected bodies I covered provided gun safes and asked people to check their guns at the door.
As far as the Patriot Act goes, I don’t remember any particular number or emphasis of “town halls” being held to debate it.
Yeah. Funny that.
But then when I see a citizen openly carrying a gun in this context I see someone prepared to defend themselves against threats, not someone preparing to threaten others.
I don’t see why the government would be afraid. Why don’t you think other unarmed citizens coming to express their opinions, to which the gun carriers are in strong, loud opposition, might feel intimidated and not see what legitimate purpose carrying serves in that context?
RonF, there are two aspects to this that seem immoral to me.
One is that carrying the gun seems like an implicit threat against political opponents, especially in the face of the not-so-distant-past of multiple acts of violence by right wing militants in the ’90s under the last President that tried healthcare reform. And the recent murder of Dr. Tiller. There’s not a complete overlap between the militia/patriot/anti health care reform/anti-abortion groups, but there’s a broad one – I certainly have relatives who are members of all four.
The other is, if I were trying to design a situation where it was impossible for the Secret Service to defend the president against potential assassins, I don’t know that I could design a better one than media figures and organizers encouraging everyone who could legally carry a gun to his public appearances to do so.
Seriously, if this were a gun control debate, the gun would be a political prop and not a threat (though it could still be a security concern, political free speech generally trumps security). But what do the guns have to do with health care?
I don’t believe Hitler was elected–his party never won more than 37% of the vote, and it had sunk slightly by the time he was appointed Chancellor by a reluctant Hindenburg as part of a back-room deal. I think the moral there is that leaders shouldn’t be appointed–also, they shouldn’t be given the power to rule by decree in case of an emergency.
I do not generally think that the government needs a gun to threaten me, and I do not generally think that having (or using) a single gun would deter the government at all. That is, at all beyond giving me the choice of being dead rather than taken.
The government, these days, will always have bigger guns. Even if I were to be falsely arrested by the government (unlikely given my race and class), the people doing so would not simply leave because I had a gun. They’d just shoot me, wait until I surrendered, or the equivalent.
So while the government is a constant concern, the real threat to me is from individuals. They are a comparatively standard threat when they are unarmed, and are a high level threat when armed. In fact, there is no way in hell I would get into a serious heated argument with someone who was armed, unless I was extraordinarily confident that they wouldn’t shoot me.
My position is normal. Everyone realizes that a random person can fly off the handle, and everyone realizes that said handle-less flight is a hell of a lot more lethal when backed up by ammunition. So guns, when held by individuals in the context of a meeting designed to ferret out and expose disagreements, are definitely an implied threat.
Seriously, if this were a gun control debate, the gun would be a political prop and not a threat (though it could still be a security concern, political free speech generally trumps security). But what do the guns have to do with health care?
Right.
RonF –
There was plenty of rhetoric about the childlike, even animalistic qualities of blacks long before the law in the US bothered to offer them any protections, even from rape, murder, and abuse.
And the supposed infantilism of women is rhetoric that has a long history in Western thought that did not coincide with the rise of legal protections for women.
Also: raids of GLBT bookstores and seizure of gay-related material in Canada has not been done in an effort to protect GLBT people from hate speech. It has come as a result of attempts to legislate against pornography and obscenity (laws the US has been deploying in more and more conservative fashions in the past couple of decades thanks to the culture wars). So referencing such incidents in a hate-speech context is misleading.
Elusis,
And the supposed infantilism of women is rhetoric that has a long history in Western thought that did not coincide with the rise of legal protections for women.
Depends on what you consider to be “legal protections for women.” Inasmuch as you mean legal equality for women, I agree. However, special laws to “protect” women — laws applying only to women and not to men — often were indeed about the assumption that women could not make their own decisions as men could.
See, e.g., Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908), in which the Supreme Court decided, despite having previously held that there was a constitutional right to an almost absolute freedom of contract regardless of the number of hours or the level of wages in the contract, that this freedom didn’t apply to women where the state felt it needed to protect their fertility by limiting the number of hours a day they could work.
I humbly submit that the problem with our political system is not that we have too much free speech but that we don’t have enough politicians willing to respond as Barney Frank does.
Money quote to entice you to click the link: “Ma’am, having a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table.”
PG – indeed, paternalistic laws go way back too. Unfortunately I gave away my “Encyclopedia of Western Women’s History” or else I could verify this, but I have a feeling that writings about women’s feebleness go back before they were even mentioned in law, Athenian law being the usual Western Civ touchstone.
Regardless I think it’s got the cart/horse backwards. Women aren’t seen as feeble because laws are protecting them; the laws are there because they’re seen as feeble. Same with POC, gays, etc. (and are there actually any laws that purport to “protect” GLBT people as somehow vulnerable or unfit? usually they’re seen as something to be warded off, e.g. they’re kept out of the military because they would damage morale/cohesion, not because they’re fragile and could be damaged.)
chingona, my favorite instance of such was back in 1976 when Nelson Rockefeller, at that point Vice President of the U.S., responded to a heckler at a campaign stop by flipping him the bird. I can’t find a copy of the photograph online, which I find strange because I distinctly remember numerous copies of the newspaper photographs having been cut out and pinned up on the wall all over the place where I was working and going to school.
Sarah in Chicago:
The playing field has never been so level as it is now in the United States of America. The Internet has the lowest barrier to entry and the broadest reach of any mass communications system ever invented. Name a group that does not have it’s views expressed fully in the Internet and on media such as TV, radio and newspapers.
Expression of views is not imposition of them. Yes, words have power. But when all can speak – and all can speak – no one set of views is or can be forced on anyone. The judgement of whether a given set of ideas are predjudical or truth belongs to the people as individuals, not to the government.
If you think that the proper response to publishing those Mohammed cartoons is for the publisher to be forced by the government to sit in a meeting closed to the public and to counsel and account for his thoughts to a government official, you and I are going to have to agree to disagree.
And I second Josh’s comment. Should the U.S. government have had the power to censor speech during, say, the Bush administration, what effect do you think that would have had on anti-war protestors or opponents of government policies? It wouldn’t take too much of a stretch in the hands of sympathetic legislators and judges to get “hate speech” laws to cover cops and the military. The U.S. has a closely divided electorate. We went from a government where the White House and both houses of Congress was held by one party to where they are held by the other in IIRC less than 10 years. It could go back in that time or less.
Rosa:
At the point that any of those protesters had an open shot at the President he was in a vehicle impervious to any armament less powerful than, say, an anti-tank missle. Even the tires will work despite multiple direct hits from a high-powered rifle. At the point in time when he leaves that vehicle and enters the meeting hall, there’s nobody permitted in shooting range. And there’s no firearms permitted at the meeting, of course. Despite the presence of armed protestors, during the course of his arrival to, attendance at and departure from these meetings the President would be far more likely to be struck by a thrown shoe than a bullet.
I don’t know. I don’t recall any explanation from any of the armed protestors saying why. I can speculate that they want to communicate the concept that they think that imposition of these changes in American healthcare represent government tyranny. Our right to keep and bear arms was instituted to enable us to resist govenrment tyranny, so the presence of such arms implies the presence of such tyranny and the necessity to resist it. At least in their minds. Again, I’m speculating.
Well, but it’s always implied. Sure, the government can threaten you via taxes, fines, expropriation of your property, incarceration, etc., but their ability to compel you to comply is because in the end they can send armed men to your home or wherever you are and seize you and your property under color of law.
Not in the individual case, I grant. It’s more of an aggregate thing. People can organize and resist government forces. Owning a gun also means that the government can’t just send one or two people to strong-arm individuals. They have to put on a show if you’re determined not to go peacefully, and that can galvanize the public.
As far as that choice goes, there’s a lot of people both in the past and now who accept that as a real choice. What does New Hampshire put on it’s vehicle licence plates? It’s not just a historical slogan, it’s a live philosoply.
Which is why many think that the ban on “assault rifles” is a violation of the 2nd Amendment. Since the idea of the 2nd Amendment is to enable people to resist the government, it’s not logical that the government should have better guns than I do. Of course, when that was written there were no such things as machine guns.
So while the government is a constant concern, the real threat to me is from individuals. They are a comparatively standard threat when they are unarmed, and are a high level threat when armed. In fact, there is no way in hell I would get into a serious heated argument with someone who was armed, unless I was extraordinarily confident that they wouldn’t shoot me.
Was it Heinlein who said “An armed society is a polite society”? There’s some virtue in that. I seem to remember Conan the Barbarian complaining in some story that the resaon that people in the cities were so rude was because they knew they could get away with it. The point, though, is to remember that you, too, have the right to keep and bear arms, so the person you are arguing with has to worry about you as well. I don’t see the loss of being able to enter heated arguments with strangers without considering how they might react as necessarily being a bad thing.
Sarah, Robert; I don’t see those laws as guardrails. I see them as prison bars.
The point, though, is to remember that you, too, have the right to keep and bear arms, so the person you are arguing with has to worry about you as well. I don’t see the loss of being able to enter heated arguments with strangers without considering how they might react as necessarily being a bad thing.
WHAT? So you think that if I, a small, physically unimposing and unarmed woman get into a heated argument with strangers (as all of you on this site technically are to me), I should have to be afraid of physical violence? I should not be able to trust in the norms of civic discourse that while my opponent may use his right to free speech to say many unpleasant things to me, perhaps even at a high volume and with obscene language, that he will not act violently toward me no matter how angry he gets?
That’s f*cked up, man. Especially for someone who is concurrently arguing for the importance of freedom of speech. I have to consider that people may react negatively — they may have a bad opinion of me that they will then spread to others, they may be vilely insulting toward me — but my consideration should be limited to reactions that can be expressed in words. The idea that I *should* go through debates fearful that someone may indeed use “sticks and stones,” or an AK-47 (now that the ban on assault rifles has expired), is horrifying.
I have to second PG here. That is seriously messed up. I should constantly be afraid that anyone I encounter might shoot me if they deem me insufficiently polite? Is that really what you’re arguing? And if I don’t like that idea, I should carry a gun, too? How about, instead, a general assumption that we can debate public policy without shooting each other or resorting to implicit threats of shooting each other?
It’s also pretty astounding to compare your position on this thread to your position on the Gates thread. If getting arrested for being in your own home isn’t some sort of unwarranted government imposition, I don’t know what is. But there, you think Gates was insufficiently cooperative with the officer and deserved what he got. Perhaps Gates should have come to the door with AR-15 on his shoulder.
I just want to add that I have been, myself, arrested for holding a sign on a wooden stick which was considered to be a possibly deadly weapon. It wouldn’t be hard to get a list of things that people were detained or relocated for holding somewhere near a political protest in the last decade, or which the police cited as a possible terrorist substance – starting with orange juice in an orange juice carton. Remember that some of the RNC protesters turned to Molotov cocktails after their truckload of puppets and plywood rectangles were seized.
Obviously, I think the way laws around public political protest are enforced need to be changed (and I think in a lot of ways they have been already – those protestors would have been off in a walled-off “free speech area” while Bush got shuttled secretly to his well-screened “public” appearance, a few years ago.) But jumping straight to “of course everyone should be able to hold a gun in the middle of a political debate” is bizarre and shows an astonishing ignorance of how these political appearances are actually manged by local police and federal agents.
Or, what EJ Dionne said:
Rosa, you need to go back and re-read that Gates thread. You are reading into it what the “racist” meme demands, but not what I said.
But there, you think Gates was insufficiently cooperative with the officer
Correct.
and deserved what he got.
On the contrary, I stated multiple times that the arrest was likely not legally justified (and I only said “likely” because I’m no expert on the law) and was not the right thing to do. I did say that I would have expected the cops to do the same thing to me if I’d acted like he did, but that doesn’t mean that I think they would have been justified in doing so.
So you think that if I, a small, physically unimposing and unarmed woman get into a heated argument with strangers (as all of you on this site technically are to me), I should have to be afraid of physical violence?
You shouldn’t have to be so afraid. But in the real world you do. It would be nice to trust that everyone will adhere to the norms of civil discourse, but in real life there are plenty of assholes in the world who will resort to force of arms if logic doesn’t carry the day – or if they don’t have the tools to employ logic in the first place.
Are you telling me that you in fact figure that everyone does adhere to the norms of civil discourse and that if you get into a heated argument with someone twice your size you don’t think in the back of your head “I’d better cool this down or this person might take a swing at me”?
RonF,
I get into heated arguments with someone much larger than I am all the time. My husband is literally a foot taller and 70lbs heavier than I am. I expect that our arguments won’t become physically violent not just because he’s my husband and he loves me, la la la (we’ve had a few arguments where neither of us was feeling or speaking very lovingly to the other), but because violence as a response to verbal disagreement is immoral and illegal.
Also, let’s remember that you weren’t saying it’s an inevitable evil that violence in response to verbal argument exists; you described it as a potential good: “I don’t see the loss of being able to enter heated arguments with strangers without considering how they might react as necessarily being a bad thing.”
That’s what I quoted and that’s what I very strongly disagree with. It *is* necessarily a bad thing. It is just as *necessarily* a bad thing for me to have to fear violence for voicing my beliefs as it is for me to have to fear being sexually assaulted if I’m alone in a deserted city park at 2 am. The fact that the fear is justified by the existence of evil people in the world doesn’t make the loss of my toddler-ish confidence in being able wander around unmolested a “not necessarily bad thing.” And I don’t think the proper response to the existence of evils that menace me is to create my own threats of evil in return. “I have to be afraid that if I speak too heatedly, you’ll shoot me? Well, then, how about YOU fear that if YOU speak too heatedly, I’ll shoot you?”
I’d prefer that neither side menace the other with physical violence. I really cannot imagine anything more burdensome to my free speech — not even the government’s threatening to throw me in jail — than a civic norm in which violence is accepted as response to speech with which one disagrees. And you create a norm by saying the state of affairs in which I am afraid is not “necessarily a bad thing.”
i’m having trouble envisioning how the second amendment could be any much clearer. i rather suspect that folks who claim it isn’t are simply trying to cover up the fact that they don’t like what it clearly says. the ACLU, i am by now convinced, does something similar — to that otherwise stellar organization’s continuing shame.
i can’t really blame people for not liking what the 2nd am. says and means; we no longer live or organize our society in a way that would make its strict, literal interpretation really viable as a way to function. but whether or not it’s outmoded, what it means is plainly clear to anybody who’s not deliberately hamstringing their comprehension of written English.
another thing about comprehension — carrying guns openly, these days, will be interpreted as a threat by lots of people. some (many?) of those people are simply needlessly phobic about weapons, and with most cases of open carry, there’s nothing for anyone to really fear. but yet it will be interpreted that way, quite widely, and everybody competent to carry a gun ought to know that by now. deliberately sending a threatening message without good cause is antisocial and rude, among a great number of other negative qualities. this is one reason we have concealed carry permits! don’t freak out the mundanes, cover up the gun!
A point on the issue of the government always having bigger guns: RonF, even if we were to allow assault rifles, the government would still have bigger guns–as in tanks, bombers, etc. The idea that an independent militia could possibly take on the modern day U.S. military is absurd. And since no one, to my knowledge, is arguing that a private citizen has the right to own a tank, for instance, we are to some extent conceding that there is some kind of a limit on the Second Amendment. (The person who brought this argument to my attention is a staunch libertarian, BTW.)
It also strikes me as ironic that the same people who talk (hypothetically) about taking arms against the government are often the same people who justify the military industrial complex.
but U.S. citizens do have the right to own tanks. tanks aren’t all that special, just heavily armored tractors on caterpillar tracks basically; why should those be banned from private ownership?
granted, the licenses and registrations needed to make the cannon and machine guns operable are punitive to say the least, but if you can afford the vehicle itself (even badly-refurbished cold war surplus ones are expen$ive) you can probably shell out the extra several thousand for the guns if you really want them.
similar things could be said for fighter jets. if you’ve got the millions to spare for one, you can own one — some folks do. the machine guns and bombs and such is what’s heavily restricted, not the vehicle itself.
I wouldn’t say that the 2nd amendment is unlimited; I don’t think you’ve a constitutional right to a tank.
But at the same time, it’s important to note that the reason for having a militia isn’t so that it can beat the regular army in a stand-up fight. One of the purposes of a militia is to make it very expensive for the government to act in a tyrannical fashion, and thus deter them from taking those actions. There are policies a hypothetical government might like to impose, that the US government would never impose, because the people would resist it. The people don’t have to win for this to have a deterrent effect; most people in government have no desire to implement policies that it takes the Army to enforce over the bodies of armed resistors, and the Army certainly doesn’t want to do that. So they don’t.
It’s a bit like having a medium-sized dog for security. You don’t expect 32-pound Fluffy to kill or incapacitate or burglar or murderer or whatever; but his presence, his barking, the fact that the burglar WOULD have to fight the dog, all contribute to burglars saying “naah, not today” and not robbing you.
i can’t really blame people for not liking what the 2nd am. says and means; we no longer live or organize our society in a way that would make its strict, literal interpretation really viable as a way to function.
I don’t know in what Golden Age you think the 2nd Amendment was taken “literally.”
(1) When the 2nd Amendment was written, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government’s laws. There was no prohibition, for example, on a state government’s having an establishment of religion so long as the state’s own individual constitution did not ban such a thing. Southern states routinely prohibited even free people of color from owning guns. The Bill of Rights only began to be applied to the states gradually after the passage of the 14th Amendment, and even then the application has been done on a case-by-case basis — there is still no 7th Amendment right to a jury trial in a civil matter brought in *state* court, for example.
(2) The right to arms always has been treated as a right of full citizenship. Never in Anglo-American history have felons, minors and the insane been deemed to have a right to possess firearms. The right to arms actually blends into a duty of citizenship, like jury service and voting. Thus in any attempt to compare the First and Second Amendments, the Second will always have been more limited. Even felons, minors and the insane have rights to speech, free exercise of religion, press and assembly. (Indeed, felons are downright obnxoious in their constant lawsuits over this or that religious exercise. “I’m a Satanist, I need a goat to kill or the Dark Master will be displeased!”)
(3) The kind of people I’ve seen who are most excited about exercising their Second Amendment rights against some hypothetical future tyranny always seem to get really quiet when someone asks them about any past tyrannical actions. For example, a lot of the people around the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast had plenty of arms, yet I’ve never seen a single report of someone’s rushing in with a firearm to defend these Americans of Japanese descent from being carted off to an internment camp. Should the Japanese have responded to the Executive Order of a duly-elected president by firing upon the American soldiers who were coming to take them away? I suppose when it comes to minorities, there’s by definition not enough of them to create the “nah, not today” impression that Robert claims is a useful aspect of bearing arms.
come to think of that, i don’t know that the second amendment has ever been taken at face value, no. but i didn’t really try to claim it ever was, only that it would not be practical or realistic for us to do so today. also that it has a perfectly clear and easily comprehensible face value to be taken at. i believe these points stand.
we no longer live or organize our society in a way that would make its strict, literal interpretation really viable as a way to function. but whether or not it’s outmoded, what it means is plainly clear to anybody who’s not deliberately hamstringing their comprehension of written English.
That sounds an awful lot like you’re saying that we ONCE lived and organized our society in a way that made a strict, literal interpretation really viable as a way to function. Moreover, if you’re now backing away from that claim while still asserting that “what it means is plainly clear to anybody who’s not deliberately hamstringing their comprehension of written English,” then presumably you think the guys who WROTE the 2nd Amendment were “deliberately hamstringing their comprehension of written English” because they never interpreted it the way you claim it should be.
ok, so sue me for having worded that original comment very badly during a period of insufficient blood caffeine content, willya? i’m not a historian and didn’t intend to imply i was. (nor should you, because amateur though i might be, i know damn well the framers were an awful lot gun-happier than even i am. don’t go appealing to that lot of violent revolutionaries for any general bans on firearms, their ghosts won’t let that fly.) the points i wanted to make, i have by now spelled out twice over, each time as clearly as i was capable of at the time; if they’re still not clear by now, then we have an irreparable failure to communicate.
for the record, the second amendment is perfectly clear: we the people have a right to own weaponry and carry it around the place. this right was intended to ensure there would be a militia, but that (to the framers) desirable outcome was mentioned by way of explanation, not as a limitation on the right enumerated.
trying to parse the language of the amendment any other way would, to me, require bending your logic and your reading comprehension into pretzels. the fact that we do not now, nor possibly ever did, live in full accordance with the plain meaning of this language is irrelevant — it must be, or most of our historical debates over what amendment so-and-so might “mean”, or might secure, or should be interpreted, would be meaningless. if the founders didn’t think the bill of rights meant women could have medical abortions if they wanted ’em, then by golly, it can’t mean that now either!
except that that’s not how law has ever worked. the facial meaning of plain English as written in a statute and the legalistic interpretation of same when deciding what manner of conduct is acceptable in society are two very different things indeed, always have been, and possibly must be. if they weren’t, i could bring up the interstate commerce clause along with the ninth and tenth amendments and point out that most of our current understanding of federalism is facially unconstitutional; we don’t live in accordance with the plain, clear, meaning of those lines of text.
executive summary, then: i’m arguing about prose English. that’s within my competency, though i can’t speak for yours. you seem to be trying to argue either amateur history or possibly constitutional law, subjects on which i know myself to be incompetent, and rather suspect you are too. either way, i’m not letting you drag me there, because i made it as clear as i was able to that that was not my point, right from the start.
er, you do realize PG is a fairly accomplished attorney, don’t you? Or if you don’t, may I suggest that you reread a variety of her posts (most of which, whaddya know, are on legal topics) and consider apologizing? She knows considerably more about this than you do.
no, actually, i haven’t the faintest notion what or whom any of you folks are, no more than you know me. i see no particular reason to apologize for a mild insult which i intended as a mild insult, being quite annoyed at the time — and more annoyed now. certainly an appeal to authority will not make me less annoyed, nor more apologetic. if anything, it’s most likely to convince me i need to make any future insults less mild and more obvious, so as to ensure they will not be lost in the communications disconnect.
feh. time for me to take a blood pressure break. i swear, i try to make one simple and frankly quite trivial point about reading comprehension, and i get a great big effin’ flamewar about professional credentials for it?!… (and why do i suspect things would have worked out differently had the subject been anything other than firearms…?)
Why bother spending time reading up on things? Everybody’s an authority, in a free land. In a free land.
I disagree and have stated why in the past on this blog. I don’t think that my interpretation, although obviously not the most common one, requires bending my logic into pretzels. Thank you very much.
Nomen,
If you consider my post to be a “great big effin’ flamewar,” then I agree; it’s time for you to take a blood pressure break.* Because it seems like your communications are not working so well.
*Not to be confused with directions from a mod. I am not a mod. My experience here leads me to guess, though, that exercising your stated intent to “make any future insults less mild and more obvious” will result in a somewhat longer, involuntary, break.
Sailorman,
Thanks for the compliment :-)
As for credentials, well, I actually stole my point about the right to arms being a right of citizenship like jury service and voting from Bob Levy (the guy at the Cato Institute who spearheaded Heller), when we had lunch together a few years ago (I was a Federalist Society officer and get alumni privileges when my alma mater hosts events). I questioned him about whether the Second Amendment really was comparable to the First Amendment, and he agreed that it functioned differently but still was a fundamental constitutional right. He explained to me the relevant English legal history for felon disenfranchisement that worked similarly for firearm possession, and that has carried over into the U.S. (where felon disenfranchisement has been upheld as Constitutional, and Heller stated that the federal laws barring felons’ possession of firearms would still stand).
Levy’s a sweet, thoughtful guy and hopefully can vouch for my ability to have a reasoned conversation with someone with whom I disagree on the 2nd Amendment, so long as that person also is willing to stick to the law and avoid the insults. But let’s not expect too much of a person who declares that anyone who reads the 2nd Amendment differently than he does is “bending your logic and your reading comprehension into pretzels,” then says he can’t see why this “one simple and frankly quite trivial point about reading comprehension” would raise some rather strong disagreement.
A couple of points on the open carry demonstrators at the town hall in Arizona.
They were not protesting health care in any regard. They were not potesting anything at all. They were just what I called them; demonstrators. They are part of a larger ‘open carry’ movement that has been going on for years. They used the protests to get ‘face time’ on the news, no more no less. They said so themselves. They did not go around yelling and arguing, or even holding signs. What they did do was dress up nicely and carry themselves politely.
Many people have a very adverse emotional reaction to seeing a firearm, one that exceeds any rational response. The deomonstrators very intentionally provide a situation where the firearm is presented wihout any other threat behaviours. Some people freak out, but nothing bad happens. Next time, less people freak. As the stimulus (“GUN!”) is repeated with no negative results, the response (“AAAAAHHHH!”) fades. It is hard to maintain a state of freaked out when nothing bad happens.
And that’s the goal. To change the focus from the gun to the behaviour.
Note that even amongst gun rights advocates, this is a controversial tactic. Not because anyone disagrees with open carry itself, but rather due to varying assessments of risk/rewards.
It is also worth pointing out that the demonstrators contacted the police ahead of time to coordinate. It is the very point of what they are doing to avoid any action that is controversial other than open carry itself.
(That idiot in Jersey with the ‘tree of liberty” sign is another story altogether.)
On an off note, I personally cannot see how anyone can seriously read the second ammendment as being in any way unclear. I have never yet heard anyone explain how “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” can be translated to mean anything but what it says. I am willing to listen, mind you. I probably won’t agree, but I would love to understand the reasoning.
The very basic explanation would be this: Language changes.
To use an extreme example, let’s say that “Arms” used to mean, in the language of the time, “buggy whips.” Then, the applicability of that language w/r/t assault rifles would be unclear.
Hopefully that makes sense to you.
Now, in reality, it doesn’t refer to buggy whips. But “keep and bear arms,” as a phrase, had a historical meaning. There is also the context of the first part of the amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State”
Taken together, the text provides additional fodder for figuring out what the right to “keep and bear arms” means: Any weapon? Some weapon? Only weapons commonly used by militias? Does it have to be in the context of a “well regulated militia?” And so on.
Jon,
I watched an interview with one of the AR-15 carriers, and he didn’t say anything about this being simply a demonstration of his right to open carry. On the contrary, he was talking about how it was necessary to carry his firearm as a practical matter because of the risk of attack at any time, anywhere. From whom he thought this attack would come, he didn’t say; he just said that the police could probably handle it, but he wanted his gun to be able to defend himself if necessary. He also claimed that law enforcement wasn’t aware of the open-carry laws and that people were getting arrested when it was wholly legal. (And apparently the solution to law enforcement’s ignorance of the law is not to mandate that all police be educated about open-carry, but to go to one particular media-heavy event. Yeah, I think these guys are accomplishing their purported goals here.)
Also, I wonder how these open carry guys would regard someone who showed up to get “face time” for the 1st Amendment right to burn a flag. It seems to me a very trivializing attitude, as well as a patronizing one: “Sure, you might have once gotten mugged by someone carrying a gun, but it’s just irrational for you to have a negative emotional reaction toward guns on a city street.”
I find it implausible that most people in Arizona haven’t already seen “a firearm presented without any other threat behaviors.” I grew up in Texas, and while no one in my family ever owned a gun (although my future in-laws took me to a gun range the first time I ever met them, when I’d been dating their son for 8 months), prior to the Gun-Free School Zones Act coming into effect, I’d see teachers coming into the school parking lot who had their hunting rifles with them because they either had come straight from their stand or were going to it after school. (Meanwhile, half the boys and a few of the girls in my class would be missing on the first day of youth deer season.) It was entirely non-threatening; the guns were presumably unloaded and were locked securely away.
However, that’s completely different from, oh I don’t know, one of the kids in class bringing a handgun with him “just to defend himself.” We had enough school violence without that. Once a kid brought an ice pick to school and ended up stabbing another kid with it; the stabbed kid tried to run home to get his gun and use it on Ice Pick Kid, but he passed out from blood loss in front of the doughnut shop.
So the idea that people who are concerned about having guns everywhere must just be having an irrational fear of seeing any gun any where, is really pretty demeaning. One can be wholly comfortable with guns in certain places — unloaded and stored in my in-laws’ closet; unloaded and locked in my teacher’s trunk; loaded and in use in a hunting area or gun range — and be rationally less comfortable with them in other places, like a school cafeteria in a school with a minor gang problem, or at a public meeting where people are highly emotional and referring to each other as Nazis.
(Also, the conservative blog that posted the interview is almost a parody: the guy being interviewed is apparently named Chris, and he’s African American. The blog said, “He speaks very well for himself, so here he is.” Cue the Chris Rock…)
PG.
WRT having guns legally in students’ hands: I believe all open carry or ccw laws have age limits. So high school isn’t going to be an issue.
There have been two shootings in colleges that I recall in the last couple of years which might have been stopped if some of the adults (profs, admin staff, maintenance, vendors on campus for deliveries, etc.) had been armed. And there have been a couple of others stopped just so which didn’t turn into mass murders.
Richard,
According to the NRA website, some states allow people as young as 16 to carry either openly or concealed (see, e.g., Vermont). Lots of 16-18 year olds in high schools.
Colleges aren’t covered by the Gun-Free School Zones Act, and generally everyone at a college, including the students, is legally an adult (i.e. 18 or over).
PG
You’ll note that V-Tech, shortly after the shootings, proudly announced they were a gun-free zone (I thought they had been), and mewled about how that would make people feel safer.
Wasn’t it Yale which insisted one of its more violent Shakespeare plays include Nerf swords so as to prevent violence? One of the Ivies.
Point is, the precious and overeducated are stupidstupidstupid on this issue of weapons, people and violence.
I think the laws against guns being here or there are equivalent to drug laws. Meaningless.
There was a demo my wife was shown where a kid stands in front of a table, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt, and drags out from various places you’d have sworn had no room, a veritable arsenal. It was designed to show teachers either to worry a lot, or say the hell with it.
In high schools where students are eligible, you will have two groups carrying. Those who are legal and won’t cause trouble and those who aren’t and will, but who aren’t dissuaded by the law. If the law keeps the non-troublemakers from being able to defend themselves (gun-free zone) then we have to question the law.
I simply don’t believe this is true — this sounds like the sort of thing that’s believable within the right-wing echo chambers, but not to anyone who actually knows liberals.
Can you provide evidence to support this claim?
Amp.
I will say I saw the pix. I’ll see if I can resurrect it.
For someone who has been mugged at gunpoint to react badly to guns is understandable at least to some extent, although I have to ask… if they were robbed at knife point, would they panic every time they entered the kitchen?
A year or so I read an article by an obviously well educated and articulate individual describing how he had to leave a book store because a police officer, in uniform was within thirty or so feet of his child with a gun. The contrast between how reasonable his presentation was and how irrational his actions were struck me very strongly.
As far as how the ‘open carry’ crowd would react to flag burning? Most are best described as libertarians; so they would think a flag burner was a jerk who was well within his rights.
To respond to the part about the second ammendment, while it is inarguable that the meaning or words has changed, I find it impossible to support the notion that a group of people who had just finished fighting a revolutionary war would not consider that ‘arms’ would specifically include combat effective weapons.
(meh. I am at work and I have to actually eat on lunch break, so I am cutting this shorter than it deserves. Feel free to roast my half-a@@ answers, I’ll get back later)
Pic don’t prove anything, Richard. I could certainly believe that a college production would decide to use nerf swords, either for artistic effect, or (more likely) because they were doing a humorous production.
What I don’t believe is that the administration of an Ivy league school issued an edict that only nerf swords could be used in dramas.
I can’t figure out how to link it.
Go to “Volokh Conspiracy”. It’s a law/law prof blog. Go to April 22, 2007, scroll to “Zero Tolerance Comes to Campus”. The references to “nerf” I read elsewhere, along with the pix.
They have to use obviously non-sword swords in the play at Yale.
Now that I think about it, maybe going directly to “Zero Tolerance Comes to Campus” would do.
Amp.
You can get there by “Zero Tolerance Comes to Campus” where they link to the Yale Daily News article. One reference is to “plastic”, not Nerf. The Volokh blog has an interesting discussion on the subject, including the presumption that Dean Trachtenberg must believe in sympathetic magic. The play is “Red Noses”. Yale Daily News quotes a couple of actors on the issue. Mostly they think it’s stupid, but that’s because they’re not college administrators and still have brains.
The guy who had to leave a bookstore was probably lying. He was trying to pretend that’ s how sensitive and highly evolved he is. Nobody’s that nuts.
Looking at the posts on Volokh, it sounds like a single Yale administrator, in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, went overboard and issued an edict, which was immediately overturned in the face of massive derision, including from the students.
So I have to admit, you were right — it did, strictly speaking, happen. But for me, that shows not that lefists are typically ridiculous about weapons, but that even on an extremely liberal Ivy league campus, ridiculous suggestions like this won’t fly.
Excuse me, but nobody stops a shooting by carrying a gun. You can’t make a bullet fly back into the gun after it’s been shot. Sure you can provide a deterrent, but for most people, the act of shooting someone itself is a deterrent enough.
I grew up in Texas and I know the hunting crowd and I respect them. I have never seen anyone I respected carry a loaded weapon on their person for the purpose of defending themselves that was not in a police uniform. A gun is not a weapon for creating or suppressing fear; it is a tool that must be wielded with respect to the power of it. It is not a tool for casual use or to deter crime. My father has told us from day one that if you pull a gun on someone, you must be prepared to end their life and everything that means. That is a weighty responsibility that contrasts with the glib attitude of “I can carry my gun in public.”
It really gets me, and maybe I’m putting my foot in my mouth here because I’m a bit heated about this, but when people talk about guns for protection and carrying in public, they are being irresponsible. Responsible gun owners know the risks outweigh the benefits in most public places. People who are fearful don’t. Seeing a gun on a person makes me think twice about talking to them because it tells me deep down they are insecure and afraid.
I fully support the 2nd amendment. It doesn’t keep me from looking down on you when you don’t respect the power of a gun.
You’ll note that V-Tech, shortly after the shootings, proudly announced they were a gun-free zone (I thought they had been), and mewled about how that would make people feel safer.
An individual university might opt to exclude guns from campus, but they are required to do so by neither federal nor state law.
Those who are legal and won’t cause trouble and those who aren’t and will, but who aren’t dissuaded by the law.
The law allows the school to take action to enforce the restriction on what can be brought into the school. Hello, metal detectors.
For someone who has been mugged at gunpoint to react badly to guns is understandable at least to some extent, although I have to ask… if they were robbed at knife point, would they panic every time they entered the kitchen?
Most people have positive experiences of knives (cuts something they wanted cut) before they ever have a negative experience of one (cuts them or threatens to cut them). Within certain types of knives, I can tell you that when I used to sell knives door-to-door, some people had a negative reaction to the particular brand that prided itself on its super-sharpness, because they knew someone who had cut themselves deeply with it. For myself, I had to contend with one customer whose teenage son started picking up the knives I was displaying, and evidently cut himself. He went away quietly dripping, and his mother didn’t even realize until she saw the blood on the floor. Not a sale for me.
As far as how the ‘open carry’ crowd would react to flag burning? Most are best described as libertarians; so they would think a flag burner was a jerk who was well within his rights.
And their reaction to the flag burner — “jerk who was well within his rights” — differs from Jeff Fecke’s reaction to the guys carrying firearms to town-halls … how?
To respond to the part about the second ammendment, while it is inarguable that the meaning or words has changed, I find it impossible to support the notion that a group of people who had just finished fighting a revolutionary war would not consider that ‘arms’ would specifically include combat effective weapons.
“Arms” in 1787 included very few of the weapons that are standard today. For example, the first successful design of a semi-automatic firearm post-dates the Revolutionary War by a century. If you want to read “arms” in the context of the Revolutionary War, I personally am fine with people’s bearing the kind of arms that were used in that war, if they keep their powder dry so they don’t blow their own hands off. I think some of the aspects of the old federal “assault weapons” ban were very cosmetic and silly, particularly labeling a firearm as an “assault weapon” if it had a bayonet attached. I’d much rather someone had a Revolutionary War musket with a bayonet than a Glock 19.
And as I’ve already stated, the Founders evidently considered the 2nd Amendment compatible with longstanding bans on possession of arms by felons and the mentally ill (the kind of restrictions that even the NRA supports, despite their having no support in the text of the 2nd Amendment).
Richard, I now recall that you were banned from posting comments on “Alas,” back in May. For that reason, please don’t post here anymore. Thanks.
PG, your statement about peoples relative experiences with knives vs firearms is exactly the idea behind ‘open carry’. Knives are used in homicide several times more often than rifles, but are viewed with less alarm because they fit into people’s world view in a non-violent way. If someone is seen waving a knife around and acting erratically, that is alarming, because of the behaviour. Not wanting a specific brand of knife because of assessed risk/reward value is not in any sense irrational. Feeling afraid and exiting the area because someone has a clasp knife on their belt whilegoing about their business is irrational. It doesn’t happen because people are used to seeing this, and because they do not so clearly assosciate knives with violence.
As far as people having a fairly similar response to ‘open carry’ as they would to flag burning; you are more or less correct. I would submit that the only significant difference that I can see is the relative availability of less upsetting approaches. There are simply not a lot of means available to get the more alarmist people out there looking at guns rationally.
I did not bring up the reasoning behing the demonstration to argue it’s appropriateness, I just have noted that many people are mistaking this for a way of threatening the health care protestors, and wanted people to know what it is actually about. I actually do like the idea myself, at least when it is done this carefully, but I can understand why many do not.
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As far as the arms available to the founders, I would point out that another entirely accurate description of the weapons they were talking about would be “the most deadly weapons in the history of humanity at the time”. I personally think the concern over ‘assault weapons’ stems primarily from not really internalizing how rare the use of long guns in crime is. Knives, blunt objects, and bare hands each rank substantially higher in homicides. Rifles are powerfull and deadly, but they are big and obvious. Looking at this, how much of an effect would you say banning a portion of rifles going to have on homicides?
As far as restrictions on gun ownership by felons and crazies, the first ammendment makes no allowances for restrictions either. It is still illegal to call ‘911’ as a form of political protest. A certain level of sanity is presumed.
Knives are used in homicide several times more often than rifles, but are viewed with less alarm because they fit into people’s world view in a non-violent way.
Or because there’s a non-violent use for them? After all, these “open carry” demonstrations rely for their alleged usefulness on the firearms’ never being used.
Feeling afraid and exiting the area because someone has a clasp knife on their belt whilegoing about their business is irrational.
It’s evidently an “irrationality” that the New York legislature has long been willing to accommodate:
The difference between people’s being comfortable with knives in a kitchen, and comfortable with semi-automatic weapons at a contentious public debate, is that people know that the knives in the kitchen have a non-violent use. What’s the non-violent use — as opposed to exhibition — of the AR-15 at Obama’s town hall? And if it’s just about exhibition, I think Simple Thing has a point that this is rather frivolous attitude toward firearms.
I would submit that the only significant difference that I can see is the relative availability of less upsetting approaches. There are simply not a lot of means available to get the more alarmist people out there looking at guns rationally.
Sure there are. Sponsor school groups to visit gun museums when they are doing units on the American Revolution, Civil War, WWI, etc. so they can get an idea of how battles were waged. Sponsor scouting troupes to gun ranges to teach about the safe, respectful use of firearms (in fairness, in some parts of the country like Northern Virginia, people are already doing this). Encourage your friends who aren’t vegetarians but who don’t have guns to join you sometime when you go hunting (invite them when you’re not really set on bagging anything and it won’t be a problem for them to keep screwing things up).
What doesn’t make people feel comfortable about firearms is seeing them in the vicinity of the president.
It’s kind of odd to claim that there’s a substantial number of Americans who cannot bear the sight of guns — how do these people play video games, watch TV or go to the movies, given how violent our entertainment is? My favorite show of the last season was “Kings,” and multiple people got shot every episode. Liberal Hollywood loves guns.
As far as the arms available to the founders, I would point out that another entirely accurate description of the weapons they were talking about would be “the most deadly weapons in the history of humanity at the time”.
Really? I may be misremembering my Revolutionary War history, but I thought the latest stuff the colonists would have had would have been whatever they kept from the French-and-Indian war, which means they missed any later innovations.
Huh, North Carolina has decided to jump over the ancient Anglo-American prohibition on felons’ ownership of firearms. I assume this will be only after the full time of the sentence is over (i.e. either the full sentence is served in prison, or the parole/probation period is over), or else a guy with a felony drug conviction in North Carolina could own a gun, but still couldn’t vote.
Face-palm.