indessed roscivs

What is the purpose of the Second Amendment? The text itself is rather simple:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

There are many and varied interpretations of the amendment, many of them creative, few of them historical, and a good number downright silly. Many believe that in our modern era, with a large standing national military, and a similarly large standing national guard, coupled with the fact that guns are no longer typically needed for hunting food, the Second Amendment is obsolete.

While I agree that there are many costs to having unregulated and unrestricted access to firearms in the United States, I believe those costs are worth it. Not because I enjoy hunting, or because I think our national military isn’t large enough, or even because I think it reduces crime—but because I believe the right of private citizens to own and bear arms is a serious threat to any fascist government that might arise.

The Founding Fathers, from what I’ve read, felt similarly. James Madison, for instance, wrote:

Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops.

But this was centuries ago. Madison may have doubted whether state militias could ever be conquered by a federal army back then, but what about today? I’ve heard many say that the Second Amendment is useless for purposes of a “civil uprising,” because the federal government has access to tanks, airplanes, nukes, satellites—the sheer amount of firepower at their disposal could completely destroy all people in the United States many times over. So how on earth could a few guns make any sort of difference?

This seems to be a rather short-sighted perspective. It is the same sort of perspective that made us think that the Iraq War would be easy—after all, we have enough firepower to destroy all the people in Iraq many times over. It was only a matter of days before Saddam’s army fell and Baghdad was under US control. But what’s happened since then is much more important in demonstrating the importance of a well-armed populace.

Handguns, or even semi-automatic machine guns, may not seem like a big difference compared with nothing at all, given a face-to-face battle with a well-armed, well-trained federal force with all the advanced weaponry today’s soldiers are equipped with. But such weapons are very useful for the purposes of guerilla warfare. As Iraq has shown us, there’s still a big difference between quashing a rebellion among unarmed citizens and well-armed citizens. Widespread civil resistance, especially when well-armed, eventually makes control—particularly the sort of fascist control that would make inevitable such an uprising—impossible to maintain.

In the end, urban combat is not a desirable state for an occupying military force to be in, regardless of how well-equipped they are or how superior their arms. And, of course, I’m not saying that in the end, such an uprising would be any more successful than the one at Warsaw. But I would rather die fighting for my liberties than killed because I failed to.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.