Fear Of The Masses, or Fear of Armed Thugs

[Leo Casey]

This is the kind of argument that comes out of the NRA
academics who try to defend an absolutist
interpretation of the Second Amendment on the grounds
of a purportedly originalist doctrine: it provides the
masses with the means to keep the government in check
through the force of arms, just as its authors
supposedly intended it to do. The government gets too
oppressive, and the masses just rise up with their
guns and overthrow it.

This would simply be an example of how absurdly
ahistorical propositions of the type which simply
ignore over two centuries of developments in the
technology of armed force and its concentration in the
hands of the state, could be argued as if they bore
some relationship to the real world, if not for the
fact that the incredible proliferation of handguns do
pose a real danger -- to the people who live and work
in poor communities where a simple walk down the
street can mean being caught in the crossfire of armed
thugs. Not exactly a threat in the world of academia
where such theories are constructed and entertained,
apparently even among self-styled "radicals," but
certainly the overriding reason why liberal and social
democratic leaders of the African-American community,
such as Major Owens, put such an emphasis on gun
control. Fear of the masses, my foot.


> Doug:
> I think that liberals get exercised by gun
> control for reasons not 
> dissimilar to their obsession with the Supreme
> Court: they're scared 
> of the masses. Bigoted yahoos who can't be
> trusted. So disarm them - 
> and leave the important decisions to judges and
> other experts (you 
> know, getting all the smart people together on
> the Vineyard...).

 
> Yoshie Furuhashi:
> Yes, I think it's important to call liberals on
> their fear of the 
> masses.  It's just that, you know, in the past,
> criticism of this 
> nature has been mainly coming from folks who
> think like Alex 
> Cockburn, and that it has tended to come across
> as an expression of 
> vicarious identification with armed macho men in
> weekend warrior outfits.

 
Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)

 
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation are men who want crops without plowing the
ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --

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