Are you keeping all of these posts for your next book ? How does Judith Butler's take on the police impact your critique of them below ? Would people with guns turn around so readily when a police officer hails them ?
Charles Brown
>>> kelley <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> 05/27/99 09:09AM >>>
>i'm starting worrying about your safety - if you slammed
>the door in the cop's face, you'd be dead on the spot, Fourth or no Fourth;
kneeslapper. guess what? i was getting peeved at one of the lecher buoys so i finally left the room to change. but--whoops-- i slammed the door to the bathroom. lecher buoy was waiting in the kitchen so he could lecture me about never leaving the room, let alone slamming the door, when cops were in my home. the nerve. ratfucker is right wojtek.
so, ok, i didn't 'zactly mean slam the door in their faces. metaphor for saying: sorry buds but where's your warrant to search the place.
>the ratfuckers just look for a pretext to use their weapon (last time they
>busted into the house I lived they shot the dof just for the heck of it.
>do not forget that the us was founded by a bunch of gangsters who were able
>to subdue the other folks thanks to their superior fire power - i do not
>think much has changed since then.
mebbe i shoulda had a gun?
>but cause-effect relationship between constitutiona and the above named
>dertiments was not the orginal argument.
it was brought up though. doug was basically saying that the constitution was purposefully designed to limit democracy. this is, of course, entirely true: it is a republic, not a democracy. the bill of rights on the other hand....we're definitely talking lotsa room for interpretation and that's where the potentially emancipatory aspects of the first ten were systematically undermined. {nb., i do acknowledge that there are other problems here, specifically the conception of the individual that undergirds the notion of "rights." so that's a problem too that i was dancing around a bit in that longer post on the constitution}
>the original argument was that
>the *cult* of the constitution is often evoked to legitimize the status
>quo; in the same way, religion does not *cause* social ills, it merely
>legitimizes and normalizes them - that's why it is the favourite opium for
>the people.
actually, doug began by arguing that whether anti-gun control or abortion proponents, both used the constitution to legitimate their claims. they both use the C to justify the status quo in that sense. BUT, he didn't acknowledge that it has been used to advance progressive change.
even so, what causes religious belief? alienation, right? what causes that? either way, it's still capitalism at root. still a mistake to blame the constitution which is what folks did subsequently.
>btw. i made the same argument about guns. i think the best argument for
>armed citizenry (by armed i mean high power automatic weapons) is the
>presence of darryl gates' brainchild aka military-style policing - the
>citizens' fire power is much much inadequate vis a vis that of those
>ratfuckers. it's a war out there and swat teams are the occupying force.
in many ways i agree with the argument about the right to bear arms as a protection against the state. yeah yeah i know, not a match against sophisticated weaponry. however, we *do* live in a world in which the ratfuckers have to think twice or even three times before they go in with guns blazing. of course, they often don't think at all when it's some group they've defined as essentially worthless, the most powerless groups. but, if joe sixpack and suzie winecooler has them, and sam singlemalt and connie cabernet has them --- well that's another story, doncha think?
part of it is personal. i lived in a county where NYS tried to locate a radioactive waste dump. and there were times that i did think that i'd be happy to help supply those pissed off farmers and rednecks with more guns if they *ever* thought they could get away with what they were doing. i was that steamed. and so were a lot of other people. they knew it and they were scared enough to actually worry about it from what i've found in research i did subsequently.
otoh, i'm ambivalent about it all. guns don't thrill me in any way whatsoever. i lived most of my life in gun country. i didn't really grow up around guns in the way it might have sounded from my parody. later, though, i lived with people who were avid sportsmen. i had always advocated gun control, until i heard the arguments of my friends from germany.
*most* people i knew used guns to go hunting and they were generally working class enough to do it because of the meat. but they also enjoyed it, the pleasure of the hunt--it is quite exhilarating and not necess. the way you think. it's very hard to shoot dear, turkey, fowl, rabbit, etc. you have to know the land well, you have to scout them out and track them (deer for a good month) and it generally takes 2-3 hours.
if there is any machismo that i ever witnessed it was about doing something for yourself, accomplishing something that was difficult and required skill. all of that did bring home to these men a sort of nostalgia for the daze of self-sufficiency; so it was that sort of machismo. so i'll have to say that you're just wrong about machismo. [btw eliades work has basically been trashed].
most folks just grow up around them, you're just taught to use a gun, most people do this reasonably well. it's something that is just there. people don't sit around fondling them and imagining themselves as big bad macho warriors cause they have a gun. it's just there, like your car. and as with cars, there are *some* people who just go nuts about them, right? washing and waxing them, tinkering with them, adding gizmos and such. same thing with gunz, there are some wackos with guns, just like there are people who wackos who fetishize their cars and trucks.
the assumption that only dumb rednecks own them is just flat out wrong from my experience. the people with the biggest collections of some of the meanest looking handguns, rifles, semi-autos and converted autos are well-to-do people. ratfucking arsenal those folks have wojtek. those big nasty mean looking gunz that can do some damage cost 1000-5000$. i'm not kidding, it was a bit scary to see. like i said, i used to be in the business of dealing firearms--tho no i never actually joined the NRA i was just goofing off for effect. our best customers were middle class professionals. and i used to cater for the very well-to-do and nearly every wealthy person i've ever worked for had a collection of guns on display or did some sort of hunting or trap/skeet shooting. so. take it for what it's worth, which ain't much cause it's anecdotal.
a lot of the guys i hung out with, too, were opposed to much of the NRAs platform. my ex, for example, always found a reason not to sell a gun to someone who was illiterate and couldn't fill out the forms. many rank and filers advocate some forms of gun control. there IS a study about that somewhere but i can't find the ref right now. the rank and file *do not* necess. think just any ole joe should have a gun.
in other words, folks i knew had a notion of the right to bear arms that distinctly entailed responsibilities. a student of mine did his qualitative research project and found much the same. there's more research out there but, again, i can't find this fellah's paper so i can look it up.
in any event, when's the last time you heard someone say that they had some sort of obligation or duty to fulfill in order to exercise a right enumerated in the constitution?
hope ya had fun el norte.
kelley
Q: Are you an academic? Q: Who says? Q: And that's enough for you, is it?