>The US, however, has always had the right of the *people* to be
>armed as both its basic law and living social practice.
Ah yes. American exceptionalism. The wild west myth. We all love that fantasy, I love a good cowboy yarn as much as the next man. (Women seem to prefer romance yarns.) The key thing is to distinguish reality from fantasy though.
> And every revolutionary, Marxist or ancient, counterposes to that
>right the collective right of the people to resist violence
>violently.
First, it needs to be clear that the right to resist violence violently is not relevant to any revolutionary aspirations we may or may not have. The way you express it is dangerously, ambiguous, misleading. But it can be said that every person naturally has the private right to resist violent attack on their person using violence as a last resort.
But of course such a right (even for those who have the means to exercise the theoretical right) is very much a last resort. Legally, the private citizen only has the right to use violence to resist violence if there is not other way to avoid harm.
The more valuable right is the right to be safe from violent attack. And that more valuable right is inconsistent with the romantic wild west fantasy that every mans (its almost exclusively a male fantasy) reserves the right to use violence to avenge violence.
For most people though, there is more safety from violent personal attack afforded by the state's monopoly on the lawful exercise of violence.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas