The People's Right to Bear Arms

[Paul Henry Rosenberg]

Jim heartfield wrote:
> 
> In message <14109.62414.46297.589951 at lisa.zopyra.com>, William S. Lear
> <rael at zopyra.com> writes
> 
> >It's hard to see how a document prepared by slave-owners, merchants,
> >bankers, lawyers and the like could be "revolutionary bourgeois".
> 
> Reading it, it's hard to imagine that it is anything other than
> revolutionary, and popular in character. It's major literary influence,
> I think, was John Locke, that theorist of the English revolution. A fine
> document it is too.
> 
> Particularly interesting is the great complaint against the British -
> that they armed Indian savages against the colonists. This was true, as
> it happened, but I think an enlightened democratic nation would have had
> those passages struck out.

Jim, you are obviously confusing the Declaration of Independence with
the Constitution, and even more particularly with the Bill of Rights.

As for who the major influence (on the Declaration of Independence) was,
Gary Wills' argument (in _Inventing America_) that Locke's influence has
been greatly over-rated, and the influence of the Scottish enlightenment
greatly under-rated still seems quite persuasive to me.  

Anyone wishing to offer a refutation of Wills, by all means let us here
it.

-- 
Paul Rosenberg
Reason and Democracy
rad at gte.net

 
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"