The 2nd Amendment isn’t about the *guns* and its defenders have no idea what it means.com
I didn’t realize that not everyone learned in their American history classes how our founding fathers were heavily inspired by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, and that our Constitution (as well as the failed Articles of the Confederation) was more or less a testing ground for everything discussed. (It goes without saying the philosophes were basically a bunch of rich white dudes arguing with each other, but hey, so were the guys who wrote the Constitution! Unbelievable that their ideas aren’t 1000% perfect amazeballs in contemporary America!)
But yeah. That’s the case. And the whole thing with the Enlightenment was the ‘Age of Reason’, and the advocacy of science (Voltaire wrote an entire wank-fic to make fun of a critic of Isaac Newton), free thought, justice, and anti-authoritarian critiques. You know, coming out of one demographic of one social class. But their ideas spread and gained traction, and certainly were necessary as critiques of their monarchies.
There was this dude named Rousseau, who is probably best known for writing The Social Contract. In that, he argued that the “will of the people” should be sovereign. This other guy Beccaria was all about the idea that laws need to be in writing and enforced in a way that wasn’t arbitrary (which is why there was specificity in our Constitution). And then there was good ol’ John Locke, who wrote Two Treatises of Government, which argued that a right to revolution was an integral part of the social contract other philosophes had been kicking around. He actually called it an “obligation” in some cases, and argued it could be inherently violent by nature, as a safeguard against tyranny.
Hey, ever wonder why that 2nd Amendment isn’t just about the “right to bear arms”? That’s because the framers bought into this concept of the people being a check:
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.
Huh. If guns had been their priority, kinda weird they talk about the security of a free State first. Because…that’s not what they cared about. The framers of the Constitution believed that an oppressive government would try to limit people’s capacity to revolt, and in 1787 that capacity was present through one specific piece of military technology: guns.
Now, our framers were huge hypocrites. Because if they really cared about the will of the people governing, or checks against a tyrannical government, they probably would have let people, you know, directly elect the President or Senate? But they didn’t. Did you know we didn’t vote for our senators for half the time America’s been a country? And technically we still don’t even directly elect the President since it’s those random electors who cast the votes (remember the campaign for people to sway them in December 2016?).
When you get down to it, the Founding Fathers were elitist snobs who wanted to protect other elitist snobs, and believed people were too stupid to know what was good for them. They also, you know, owned slaves, so maybe their conception of a “man’s right to freedom” was a tad wonky. And hell, even our overly reactionary country realized they were wrong enough to amend their document (their second attempt) 17 times.
Anyway, fast-forward a quarter of a millennia, and shockingly the very specific military technology referenced isn’t really relevant anymore, at least not for the reason the 2nd Amendment was written. The founders didn’t give a shit that people had guns, they just wanted people to have the capacity to overthrow a tyrannical government.
Guess what? We don’t have that capacity anymore with regards to a violent revolution. There are nukes. There are drones. AR-15s are not going to do a whole hell of a lot against our damn military, and it’s an absolute fantasy to pretend otherwise. We’ve got a massive surveillance state. We’ve got extreme police brutality targeting specific vulnerable citizens. Amazingly, a minority of people stock piling semi’s and shotguns hasn’t done diddly squat to prevent this!
I don’t want anyone to misconstrue what I’m saying as though I’m advocating for private citizens should have drones, btw. Cause the thing is, I don’t think Locke was entirely right, at least not when you get to the means. See, now as American citizens, we have the right to participate in a nonviolent governmental overthrow every 2 years. (At least in theory.) We can vote out the entirety of our House, a third of our senate, and every 4 years, our executive branch.
I’m not saying this is a perfect system; there’s major issues that limit this capacity too, like the politicization of our judicial appointments, voter restrictions that once again target specific marginalized populations, the two-party choke hold, gerrymandering that has led to a distillation of voting majorities, money in elections, and so on. I’m just saying that advocates of the 2nd Amendment should actually be focusing on those issues, rather than fighting tooth and nail for their misconstrued right to a bump stock.
And in general, we need to stop framing the gun debate as beholden to an overly literal interpretation of a single sentence written more than 230 years ago. We need to stop having politicians that fear being labeled as “coming for your guns.” Instead, champion the ones that advocate for exactly that.
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