The Bourgeois Right to Bear Arms

[William S. Lear]

On Wednesday, April 21, 1999 at 08:04:26 (PDT) Jordan Hayes writes:
>	From cremick at rlmnet.com Wed Apr 21 07:24:51 1999
>
>	> You want the state to have a monopoly over arms?
>
>	The notion that an armed citizenry could present any kind of
>	meaningful opposition to the Pentagon running amok
>	(*domestically,* that is) is ludicrous.
>
>I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the intent of the 2nd
>Ammendment.  Sure, resistance against any *particular* instance of
>state-sponsored firepower (and typically it's not the Pentagon, but
>rather the FBI or BATF) is doomed; but the threat of the mobilization
>of collective will of "the militia" is a very real instrument in the
>balance of power in the US between the state and the citizenry.

I'll argue a bit more with you offline after I review the Federalist
Papers, as you suggested, but to me you are the one exhibiting a
fundamental misunderstanding.  The authors of the Federalist Papers,
and of the Constitution, had *zero* interest in protecting the
interests of "the citizenry", 91% of whom were farmers when the
Constitution was adopted.  An armed militia was needed to protect the
rights of the powerful *in each state* against the federal government.
There was no interest in balancing power of the state against the
population, only in the states (i.e., the powerful elites who
controlled them) versus the federal government.  As John Jay, one of
the hallowed Founding Fathers, remarked, "Those who own the country
ought to govern it".

And to argue that 60 million individual citizens, widely dispersed,
with no independent means of communication, could somehow be a
"threat" to our government is outlandish.  The federal government has
acted violently whenever it likes, and is only deterred when it might
be caught on television, not when an armed group of citizens opposes
it.

Bill