we got rid of the militia but the guns remained
In the US we abandoned half of our Second Amendment.
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.
This was not the only reference to "Militia" in the US Constitution. If you go to a copy of the Constitution on the Internet and use your word search function you can see for yourself the context of the word "Militia" back in the 18th Century. Back then countries didn't have the huge standing armies that they do today. Instead, every able-bodied adult male was subject to service in a local Militia for the purpose of self defense.
The purpose of this Second Amendment near the end of the 18th Century was to ensure that communities would continue to have the right to form Militia. This new "federal" government would never grow so powerful and tyrannic as to replace the local Militia with a federal standing army.
Except, that's exactly what we've done. There's no local Militia here in Maryland, I don't think there's one anywhere in the US. We've completely professionalized our defense. We still have state-level National Guard, as a sort of remnant descendant of the old Militia, but that's only about half a million of our hundreds of millions of adults.
There are no Militia anymore!
Yet the second half of the Second Amendment lives on, zombie-like, torn away from its original context. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." This is how the Supreme Court and many gun rights supporters view the Second Amendment in the 21st Century -- it's all about individual rights, not about service to the community.
Subject to this zombie-like Second Amendment fragment, liberals who want to reduce the prevalence of guns are pretty much impotent. We discuss things like background checks and trigger locks and limits on magazine sizes, but guns are so popular we have difficulty even passing these limited restrictions on the lethality of guns. And with hundreds of millions of guns floating around, these restrictions wouldn't have much effect anyway.
So why don't we go back to the idea of citizen Militia? You have every right to own a gun, but if you do, you have to join the citizen Militia. There you would undergo training & licensure and will be "well regulated" by the State. You'd be subject to your Governor, or in times of national crisis, your President, to mobilization and service. During a pandemic, for example, you'd be called up to operate the Test, Isolate, and Trace public health response. During a war, for example, you'd be called up to fight the enemy.
How many people would still want to bear Arms if they were subject to mobilization and service during times of emergency?
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Mostly I wish people would sit down and read this Constitution, realize how out of date it is, and then agree to a new Constitutional Convention to update the dinosaur. Or at least a new set of Amendments. But a lot of liberals are scared shitless of what might happen if conservatives had any say in updating it. And vice versa. We haven't initiated a successful amendment to the Constitution since 1971 -- 50 years ago!
But the Constitution is our legitimate authority, our Rule of Law, our referee for all the disputes we have with each other.
We update the software we use to run our lives on a near-daily basis. But we haven't updated the Constitution at all in 50 years. Instead this legitimate authority becomes more and more outdated, with more zombie-clauses that make no sense anymore, and with absolutely nothing to say about new technologies and new social concepts.
If we don't start updating this dinosaur, it will break. This is a social contract that a bunch of dead white men agreed to hundreds of years ago, and we haven't bothered to update one word of it in 50 years. It's now a bunch of dead letters that are imposed on new generations of citizens and immigrants. It's not that having a Constitution is a bad thing, it's that we need to update it to reflect our modern situations and understandings.
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.
This was not the only reference to "Militia" in the US Constitution. If you go to a copy of the Constitution on the Internet and use your word search function you can see for yourself the context of the word "Militia" back in the 18th Century. Back then countries didn't have the huge standing armies that they do today. Instead, every able-bodied adult male was subject to service in a local Militia for the purpose of self defense.
The purpose of this Second Amendment near the end of the 18th Century was to ensure that communities would continue to have the right to form Militia. This new "federal" government would never grow so powerful and tyrannic as to replace the local Militia with a federal standing army.
Except, that's exactly what we've done. There's no local Militia here in Maryland, I don't think there's one anywhere in the US. We've completely professionalized our defense. We still have state-level National Guard, as a sort of remnant descendant of the old Militia, but that's only about half a million of our hundreds of millions of adults.
There are no Militia anymore!
Yet the second half of the Second Amendment lives on, zombie-like, torn away from its original context. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." This is how the Supreme Court and many gun rights supporters view the Second Amendment in the 21st Century -- it's all about individual rights, not about service to the community.
Subject to this zombie-like Second Amendment fragment, liberals who want to reduce the prevalence of guns are pretty much impotent. We discuss things like background checks and trigger locks and limits on magazine sizes, but guns are so popular we have difficulty even passing these limited restrictions on the lethality of guns. And with hundreds of millions of guns floating around, these restrictions wouldn't have much effect anyway.
So why don't we go back to the idea of citizen Militia? You have every right to own a gun, but if you do, you have to join the citizen Militia. There you would undergo training & licensure and will be "well regulated" by the State. You'd be subject to your Governor, or in times of national crisis, your President, to mobilization and service. During a pandemic, for example, you'd be called up to operate the Test, Isolate, and Trace public health response. During a war, for example, you'd be called up to fight the enemy.
How many people would still want to bear Arms if they were subject to mobilization and service during times of emergency?
-----
Mostly I wish people would sit down and read this Constitution, realize how out of date it is, and then agree to a new Constitutional Convention to update the dinosaur. Or at least a new set of Amendments. But a lot of liberals are scared shitless of what might happen if conservatives had any say in updating it. And vice versa. We haven't initiated a successful amendment to the Constitution since 1971 -- 50 years ago!
But the Constitution is our legitimate authority, our Rule of Law, our referee for all the disputes we have with each other.
We update the software we use to run our lives on a near-daily basis. But we haven't updated the Constitution at all in 50 years. Instead this legitimate authority becomes more and more outdated, with more zombie-clauses that make no sense anymore, and with absolutely nothing to say about new technologies and new social concepts.
If we don't start updating this dinosaur, it will break. This is a social contract that a bunch of dead white men agreed to hundreds of years ago, and we haven't bothered to update one word of it in 50 years. It's now a bunch of dead letters that are imposed on new generations of citizens and immigrants. It's not that having a Constitution is a bad thing, it's that we need to update it to reflect our modern situations and understandings.