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.