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In a recent post, I argued that Heller, the Washington D.C. gun-ban case, should not raise fears that the Second Amendment will place nukes and other WMDs in the hands of the people, on balance-of-power grounds and on hazardous materials regulation grounds. However, this is not the primary argument.

As the brief for the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, among others, has pointed out, the primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to allow the people to resist tyranny.

Nukes, bioweapons, bombers, and battleships are not weapons of resistance. They are intended to wreck widespread havoc, to cripple industry, business, and government, and to make it impossible for the people to carry on their normal lives, so that they are unable to support their own military.

However, I believe that civil war and revolution is not the goal of the right to keep and bear arms; instead, it provides citizens with the means to correct the government, to return it to its lawful bounds. This is best done in small, local, even individual ways, such as a militia ousting a corrupt county government, or a citizen standing off cops with an illegal warrant in his own home.

These limited measures will keep government from attempting larger usurpations that would eventually reach the point where the people must stand against the army on their own home ground. It makes no sense, in this context, to give the people weapons that can only meaningfully be used against the cities they themselves live in.

Moreover, as gun ownership grows, and citizens re-accustom themselves to being armed and having armed neighbors, the idea of oppressing the people in any large, organized way will seem ludicrous. The army will be filled with soldiers who learned to shoot with their families and in their schools–and who, to quell a rebellion, would have to shoot their parents and classmates, and be shot back at by them. Police departments will run gun-safety and self-defense clinics–for citizens who will shoot back if they are illegally rousted from their beds. Aspiring politicians will preside over campaign-trail shooting competitions–and make stump speeches before frowning blue-ribbon winners. All of them will know from these experiences that even small acts of oppression will be personally dangerous.

In this context, it makes no sense to give the people weapons that can be only be used against the cities and towns they themselves live and work in.

[I have made small changes for style and flow since the original post.]

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Army of Davids, Bill of Rights, Fighting Back, Guns and Ammo, Heller, Law, Politics & Politicians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.