How the 2nd Amendment’s ‘Militia’ Argument Fails

On October 1, 2017, a gunman (name withheld for fear of glorifying a villain*) opened fire from his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay on a concert in Las Vegas, killing at least 58 people and injuring hundreds more. Upon storming the room, authorities found the gunman had killed himself and left a cache of automatic and other weapons and ammunition in his wake. Little is known about the gunman other than he was local to the area and had a fondness for guns and gambling. As of this writing there is no known motive. Predictably, gun control advocates are frothing at the mouth while fake news about the gunman’s motives is directed at both ends of America’s political spectrum. None of this matters; it is already mostly forgotten in just one week.

[* He was a white male, though.]

There was, without hesitation, conversation about enacting gun control. (Okay, more like there was knee-jerk reaction by some to cry foul and plead for gun control measures while gun enthusiasts clenched their arms wide-eyed and white-knuckled.) Now, whenever gun right advocates fear regulation – any regulation – they inevitably invoke their 2^nd Amendment right which states, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The central tactic of gun rights advocates is to argue that in order to prevent a tyrannical government from imprisoning its citizenry or otherwise running roughshod over their lives, the public must be properly prepared to resist armed government assault. While I do not oppose the 2^nd Amendment’s basic principle, gun rights advocates wish to invoke the amendment to oppose any regulations of the arms they claim they have a right to bear. The argument is fallacious on several accounts.

First, and so obvious it is always overlooked, is the fact that there are already regulations regarding weapons. By this I mean although I am fearful of the current U.S. government invading my life and creating laws that limit my freedom (if not throw me in jail outright for being an atheist), I cannot own the weapons necessary to actually oppose the government if its jackbooted thugs come gunning for me. I cannot own nuclear weapons. I cannot own a fully functional tank. I cannot own an anti-aircraft missile launcher. Why not? Would these things not be useful in guaranteeing my freedom from a tyrannical government? Naturally, the counter argument here is to claim the things I am talking about are weapons of mass destruction and personal firearms are not that. As we saw with the Las Vegas shooting, personal firearms can indeed be weapons of mass destruction. Even if ‘bump stocks’ were banned – well, they are but are still easy to get – wouldn’t personal firearms in the hands of many people constitute a weapon of mass destruction? Coincidentally, just prior to the Las Vegas shooting, a bill was headed to the floor of Congress that would ease the sale of silencers to the public. UH, WHAT DOES JOHN Q. PUBLIC NEED WITH A SILENCER? The answer is nothing; the bill is sponsored by the gun lobby (shocker) that values money over lives. Imagine the Las Vegas shooter had used silencers – he could have and thank goodness he didn’t – think of how many more people he would have killed before people knew what was going on and where he was shooting from. (Certainly, silencers don’t silence a weapon, but it sure suppresses the sound.) Remember that American citizens are constitutionally guaranteed the right to free speech but that this right is not without limits, nor should it be. However, gun enthusiasts never acknowledge this basic fact, probably because they’d lose a whole lot of ground in their argument by conceding it.

Second, think of how a government attempting an armed takeover of the lives of its citizens would actually go. Well, it wouldn’t. The U.S. government doesn’t possess the manpower to intern the entire country to say nothing of the volunteer army that would side with their own families in such a conflict. Even if the government went after people one by one, there are so many guns available in the country that all citizens would be armed before too long. What’s that, but the government has bombers and tanks and nuclear weapons? In that case, please reference the previous paragraph. It seems to have escaped the notice of the vast number of Americans that the U.S. government has zero interest in an armed conflict with its own citizens in order to control them because, well, the citizenry is already under control. Is anyone at this point still denying the tremendous amount of influence corporations and other organizations have with the U.S. government? How do you think the silencer almost got to the floor of Congress to begin with? The bill will still get there; Congress just has to wait until the next iPhone release and no one is looking. Even if we forgot the lobbyists, companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to name just three of many, are data mining people to learn how best to get them to buy their products. They also want you to update their software constantly so that you waste huge amounts of your free time trying to undo the havoc each update causes. Meanwhile, Facebook’s AI’s main purpose is to learn what your preferences are and keep shoveling your own shit down your throat. Meanwhile, the U.S. – nay, world – food supply is largely run by just ten companies. And let us not forget the banks which are happy to tell you that you can’t borrow money because your value as a human being is tied to your credit score. Strangely enough, I don’t see anyone taking up arms against any of these corporations or organizations that control their lives far more than the U.S. government ever will.

Now, given these criticisms, gun rights advocates will claim they need their guns to protect themselves from criminals. Problem is, it is QUITE clear given the wording of the 2^nd Amendment that this is not why there is a right to bear arms. Statistical data, now at least three years old, shows that the “more guns, less crime” mantra of gun owners is utter bullshit. Gun owners are also FAR more likely to shoot themselves – whether accidentally or in the act of suicide – than to use a gun against a criminal. Here, we might add that no one owning and/or concealing a gun at the Las Vegas concert could have stopped the gunman, so that right there defeats this argument for gun ownership. Fortunately, government controlled police had the tools and weapons necessary to address the situation and no one complained. Please insert ‘confused’ emoji here.

Finally, let’s stop pretending that the Founding Fathers (FF), who ratified the 2^nd Amendment is 1791, are gods who knew everything and didn’t make mistakes. We’re talking about many of the same people who wrote that “all men are created equal” yet owned slaves. There is simply no way the FF could have foreseen the circumstances its citizens currently endure. There is no one, and I mean no one who knows what life in the U.S. will be like over two hundred years from now. We can’t fully expect laws we make today to remain relevant that far into the future. So let’s stop treating the U.S. Constitution as if a gentle breeze blew it off God’s desk the very second He dotted the last ‘i.’ Had the FF foreseen current circumstances, I like to believe they would have been more clear about the 2^nd Amendment. But, if God couldn’t be clearer about ‘thou shalt not murder,’ why should we expect clarity from bureaucrats? Seeing how we cannot, maybe we need to come to our own conclusions that are relevant to life in America today.

Should there be a right to bear arms? In principle the answer is now maybe. Or, yes, if only to make the owner feel safer; we can’t have snowflakes worrying about sharing the street with a black man, after all. The reality is that America does need its gun because in the words of comedian Jim Jefferies, “There is one argument and one argument alone for having guns, and this is the argument: ‘Fuck off. I like guns.’” And that’s okay; we can like guns. And, maybe, we can have guns. But also maybe not before America gets a grip on its criminally insane mental problem. 

Losing the War

As more and more people fall victim to mass gun violence, the debate between whether there should be more or less gun laws heats up. For a large majority of people, they fall on either side of this debate. The problem is, to be on either side of this debate suggests an unwillingness to think about the problem’s origins. Whether the public has a right to bear arms has nothing to do with what is allowing for the U.S.’s staggering gun violence problem – Collectively speaking, the U.S. has a deep, severe mental problem that is based upon its very foundation.*

[* That is to say, The U.S. as a country was born out of violence and established a two-century old patriarchal, racist society not much better than the U.S.’s country of origin.]

But this deep, severe mental problem is merely indicative of a larger problem; what it means to be human. In the last year there has been an alarming rise of practically fascist, regressive leftism in America paralleled by the number of people who think Donald Trump should be the President of the U.S. On both these sides there is a very particular way in which these people’s brains operate, which is to say however good their intentions may be, they are not capable of critically thinking not because they lack the tools – self-reflection requires no tools – but because they are determined to believe what they want to believe.

If the number of people on the planet is any indication, this lack of self-analysis and moreover, reasoning ability, has preserved and perpetuated the species. This same ability is what puts people at odds, though, and has long made the world an unfriendly place to live. It appears as though we may have to settle for this state of affairs in order to preserve and perpetuate the species, which really is the point of life after all. Our genes don’t care how we treat each other; they just want to get themselves into the next generation. If this is the case, it is more likely that people are going to be less rational than rational despite how many generations come and go. In other words, it will always be the case that people will make dumb decisions, do dumb things and believe in dumb ideas. Despite absolutely zero evidence, particle physicists cling to string theory. Despite the overwhelming evidence that smoking is harmful to the body, people still smoke. Despite the health problems that come with being obese, people still overeat. Despite being as far from science as one can get, people still heed warnings from their horoscope. Despite the fact that wealthy socialites contribute nothing to society, people still worship them. For a human, being dumb is inescapable.

It is tempting, seeing how humans are capable of as much hope as they are capable of stupidity, to assume people can be rational especially when lives are at stake. For example, cooler heads prevailed in October, 1962 during the Cold War when Russia attempted to base missiles in Cuba aimed at the U.S. Ultimately, Russia withdrew their weapons from the U.S.’s backyard and a nuclear war was averted. This is because everyone involved came to see that for either side, the whole debacle was a lose-lose situation. At the same time, Russia acted irrationally and thought, “What the heck, the U.S. won’t mind if we put some missiles in their backyard. After all, they have missiles in Italy aimed at us.” Sadly, hope is often a result of humans acting or doing something stupid. We ‘hope’ as a hedge against a cruel world in which we would otherwise feel completely defeated. In this example, we hoped to avoid nuclear war and we did, but first, someone did something which required hope as a hedge against their action. That is to say, if we build a nuclear weapon, we have to hope that we never have to use it which indicates building the nuclear bomb in the first place is irrational. (Using nuclear fission to produce energy, yes. Using it to kill people, um…)

Acting or thinking rationally is a foreign practice for most people. There are many reasons for this, the foremost being that thinking requires the brain to use a lot of energy and it goes against people’s general desire to be placated as soon as possible (despite evidence that prolonging the reception of an award or desire appears to allow for more enjoyment of the award or desire). One cannot even rationalize with a teenager who will post damning pictures of themselves on social media despite how far their posts may travel around the world to say nothing of their local police force because a teenager, like people in general, needs to placate their ego immediately. As I alluded to earlier, it is not a part of human nature to be rational and this is why it is so rare. With human population closing in on 7.3 billion people as of 2015, it appears there is no particular reason for the human race to be any more rational than it is if being irrational perpetuates the species. Notice if you will that the people with the most offspring are usually the least educated and often the most ideologically radicalized.

There is no rationalizing with an irrational person when there is nothing in it for the irrational person. An irrational person will choose to believe in a heavenly afterlife over being atheistic because even if they see an atheistic lifestyle as potentially making their earthbound life more important, they know that one day their earthbound life will end. In other words, the atheistic principle as it may apply doesn’t offer the ultimate in hope. If there is no potentially bigger reward for changing sides in a debate, it is very unlikely that people on opposite sides of a debate will come around to a new way of thinking. Once a person is indoctrinated into thinking a particular way, it is very difficult to change their mind. It is often not worth the energy one spends trying to do that unless one’s survival is literally at stake. That is to say, it is irrational to continually engage irrational people when there is only a small chance of changing their minds ‘for the better.’ It does happen, on occasion, that people do think deeply about their ideas and beliefs, but it will always be the case that such people will be vastly outnumbered and ultimately always be at the mercy of the irrational.

This is in part why, here at the end of 2015, I am coming home from the war. Fighting stupidity, however noble, will forever be a losing battle. Over the course of years of debate and attempted discussions, I’ve had very few rational, much less civil, interactions with people on a myriad of issues. It’s not worth trying to get people become uncomfortable with their ideas or beliefs; I only become a villain so I suppose it is better to let sleeping dogs lie unless I am confronted myself. I will allow people their beliefs if there is no cost to me, but of course one should not expect to get off easy when trying to engage me with their irrational ideas or beliefs. I otherwise don’t have the time to waste and I don’t want to end up like Socrates (as if I were important enough to be so lucky).

I have plans for 2016 that include contributing to answering the question of time, exploring Genetic Philosophy (developed by yours truly) and solving problems within the Philosophy of Language (as far as any philosophy is concerned), committing more time to my tourism blog and spending more time writing fiction (something people seem to lap up as they apparently identify strongly with lives that are not real) and reading for enjoyment. I have enjoyed writing and posting my thoughts here as any good philosopher must mentally masturbate, but I suppose I have reached the point in my life when I want to do other things.

This blog will be maintained in 2016 by occasional ruminations and relevant re-posts, but other than that, there will be no commentaries on religion, atheism, politics or any other current events. I know, I know, what will you do with yourselves? You can always follow Kim Kardashian on Twitter.