Re: Which parts of the US Constitution are less important than others or can be ignor
If you understand that essay, present its arguments in your own words on a single computer screen.
Fine, if you're too lazy to read an article online, I suppose I can summarize it for you.
It's an essay in seven parts:
Part One: The right to keep and bear arms is an important political right because it prevents the agents of the corporate state from having a monopoly on force. The right to keep and bear arms empowers the citizens by distributing the power of armed force among them, instead of concentrating it in the hands of the elite.
Part Two: The liberal
faux pacifism is not a morally virtuous position, but is instead a form of moral cowardice. If we are going to hold our police and military morally responsible for their use and misuse of force-- which, as liberals, we
should-- we should also assume the moral responsibility of our own use of force in defending our rights. We should not hide behind the skirts of the State and pretend that keeping our hands clean absolves us of our responsibility for the use of violence by our government.
Part Three: Attempting to ban guns is a symptom of the same authoritarian impulse that gave us Prohibition and the War on Drugs, and the effects will be similar. It will empower violent criminals and encourage the State to engage in greater violations of our rights in the name of law enforcement: violations of our right to privacy, our rights to the sanctity of our homes, and our rights to due process. Far from reducing gun crime, gun prohibition will create an entire whole class of new criminals, millions large, that our corrupt law enforcement system will have to expand to handle.
Part Four: Anti-gun liberals, besides not being real pacifists, are not actually proposing that we eliminate guns at all. They are not making a single proposal that would take guns away from a single policeman or soldier; they are effectively
further reducing the power of the citizen relative to the State, similar in both intent and effect to Republicans' efforts to disenfranchise liberal voters. This campaign is elitist and authoritarian; it is effectively the total betrayal of the liberal value of democracy. It denies that the State is an agent of class warfare and, as such, is hostile to the people.
Part Five: The extension of gun rights to American blacks by the Fourteenth Amendment was fundamental to the civil rights movement, from the 1860s to the 1960s. The original gun control laws were written by plantation owners, and enforced by the KKK's lynch mobs, for the purpose of prolonging the subjugation of American blacks. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was a direct response to the race riots of 1967. The success of Martin Luther King Jr's nonviolent protests was, in large part, due to the fear of the violence that would follow if they were
not effective.
Part Six: Reactionary and authoritarian forces within our government will not hesitate to use armed force to prevent the achievement of progressive goals, and to roll back progressive victories. The only check on their willingness and their ability to use violence against the people is the willingness and the ability of the progressive movement to retaliate. The State's capacity for violence will always outpace the peoples' capacity for violence, but the peoples' capacity for armed force is, again,
fundamental to the success of any progressive political movement.
Part Seven: Gun control proposals targeting specific features and functions of weapons are useless for either preventing or mitigating the damage of mass shooters, and would have even less effect on the vast majority of homicides. These are distractions from the necessary, effective, and very very
difficult changes we need to make to our culture to prevent the cultivation of the destructive urges that drive people to terrorist acts. They are an attempt to be seen "doing something" with no concern whatsoever for doing the
right thing.
In summary, either guns nor gun control are the easy answer to society's problems. The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental human right and one of our society's greatest historical accomplishments, and we should approach
reasonable gun regulations with that understanding in mind. We should manage our responses to violent crimes and acts of terrorism with our sense of reason and our love of liberty, not with the mindless reflexive fear that drives arbitrary, irrational, and draconian gun laws.