She's an awfully fickle bedfellow... especially when you can't see both sides of your own argument.
From Ed Kilgore on Kevin Williamson in the National Review.
Rather:
Interesting but the logic is backwards. It's not about arming the citizenry to defeat a modern military-industrial state.
For '76ers, they feared how easily their rights could be trampled if the crown had a "standing army" (think Boston Masacre) -- this had been a topic of complex controversy in England / Britain for two centuries beforehand.
The people needed to have the well regulated militia in their hands, rather than the monarch reigning with an enormous and enormously expensive army or, from the vantage point of the late 1700s, a globally supreme navy, able to disrupt trade anywhere in the world.
Hence the amendment protecting us from the quartering of soldiers, too.
There's as much an anti-establishment and anti-aristocratic strain to the amendment as well -- just like they didn't want a state church, like the Church of England. Only the a very few gentlemen commoners or the nobility could "bear a coat of arms" -- could posses heraldry and the like.
The founders wanted no distinction in rank, and hence the focus on a joint militia, rather than an individual liberty to amass guns in a way that could threaten other people's property -- that could lead to the tyranny of the one or the few over the many.
Indeed, that's a rather radically apposite idea to anything Locke would have argued, for instance.
For a more extensive and present decent event-based narrative, read this.
From Ed Kilgore on Kevin Williamson in the National Review.
Rather:
Interesting but the logic is backwards. It's not about arming the citizenry to defeat a modern military-industrial state.
For '76ers, they feared how easily their rights could be trampled if the crown had a "standing army" (think Boston Masacre) -- this had been a topic of complex controversy in England / Britain for two centuries beforehand.
The people needed to have the well regulated militia in their hands, rather than the monarch reigning with an enormous and enormously expensive army or, from the vantage point of the late 1700s, a globally supreme navy, able to disrupt trade anywhere in the world.
Hence the amendment protecting us from the quartering of soldiers, too.
There's as much an anti-establishment and anti-aristocratic strain to the amendment as well -- just like they didn't want a state church, like the Church of England. Only the a very few gentlemen commoners or the nobility could "bear a coat of arms" -- could posses heraldry and the like.
The founders wanted no distinction in rank, and hence the focus on a joint militia, rather than an individual liberty to amass guns in a way that could threaten other people's property -- that could lead to the tyranny of the one or the few over the many.
Indeed, that's a rather radically apposite idea to anything Locke would have argued, for instance.
For a more extensive and present decent event-based narrative, read this.
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