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libertango) wrote2005-07-01 05:57 pm
libertango) wrote2005-07-01 05:57 pm
Bearing Arms
So, what with some of the talk about Kelo, I was at PrawfsBlog the other day. And I spotted a very interesting post about 2nd Amendment issues by Kaimi Wenger. He was responding to a fellow by the name of Dave Kopel who had written a post on The Volokh Conspiracy that maintained much of the violence inflicted on citizens in Zimbabwe was due to active disarmament by Mugabe's administration. Kopel has also written, in National Review, that "the Darfur genocide — like the genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica, Cambodia, and so many other nations in the last century — was made possible only by the prior destruction of [the right to bear arms]."
Wenger's reply used the Mormon experience in the US as an example of how, sometimes, even being armed doesn't necessarily stop violence and/or repression from being visited upon you.
But the real eye-opener, for me, was in the comments. Yuval Rubenstein pointed to this article from March 2003 in the Christian Science Monitor. The article is about Iraq, just on the eve of the US invasion.
Iraqi public well-armed and wary
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD, IRAQ – With a gun culture that closely resembles that of the United States, Iraq is one of the most heavily armed societies in the world. Its tradition of self-reliance and hard desert and mountain living puts it on a gun-per-person level rivaling other clan systems in Yemen or Somalia.
As US military strategists look ahead to a possible war in Iraq - and a postwar period of working with the Iraqi people to establish more representative rule - firearms loom large. What Iraqis do with those weapons if the US launches an invasion will determine success or failure for Washington. Most war plans, including a United Nations postwar contingency plan leaked in New York last week, assume a swift fall of the regime, and little Iraqi resistance."
One of the big deal arguments of gun supporters is the contention that an armed citizenry is impossible to tyrannize. That an ad hoc militia (rather than the one regulated by Congress, as in Article I of the Constitution) is the final defense against the US Federal government from overreaching.
But the example of Iraq shows otherwise. 43 busy gun shops in Baghdad, and a repressive Ba'athist regime. Not or.
Which goes a long way to validating one of my standard lines: The dirty little secret of politics is that all regimes -- all regimes -- rule with at least the implicit consent of the governed. That the real tragedy of, say, Tiananmen Square wasn't the protesters who were shot by the Chinese People's Army... But that the majority of Beijing, rather than supporting the protesters and overturning the government as in Eastern Europe, voted with their feet and stayed home.
It also says, in a Dave Neiwert kind of way, much about the potential and possibility of an armed, popularly supported, indigenous form of American fascism.
Wenger's reply used the Mormon experience in the US as an example of how, sometimes, even being armed doesn't necessarily stop violence and/or repression from being visited upon you.
But the real eye-opener, for me, was in the comments. Yuval Rubenstein pointed to this article from March 2003 in the Christian Science Monitor. The article is about Iraq, just on the eve of the US invasion.
Iraqi public well-armed and wary
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD, IRAQ – With a gun culture that closely resembles that of the United States, Iraq is one of the most heavily armed societies in the world. Its tradition of self-reliance and hard desert and mountain living puts it on a gun-per-person level rivaling other clan systems in Yemen or Somalia.
As US military strategists look ahead to a possible war in Iraq - and a postwar period of working with the Iraqi people to establish more representative rule - firearms loom large. What Iraqis do with those weapons if the US launches an invasion will determine success or failure for Washington. Most war plans, including a United Nations postwar contingency plan leaked in New York last week, assume a swift fall of the regime, and little Iraqi resistance."
One of the big deal arguments of gun supporters is the contention that an armed citizenry is impossible to tyrannize. That an ad hoc militia (rather than the one regulated by Congress, as in Article I of the Constitution) is the final defense against the US Federal government from overreaching.
But the example of Iraq shows otherwise. 43 busy gun shops in Baghdad, and a repressive Ba'athist regime. Not or.
Which goes a long way to validating one of my standard lines: The dirty little secret of politics is that all regimes -- all regimes -- rule with at least the implicit consent of the governed. That the real tragedy of, say, Tiananmen Square wasn't the protesters who were shot by the Chinese People's Army... But that the majority of Beijing, rather than supporting the protesters and overturning the government as in Eastern Europe, voted with their feet and stayed home.
It also says, in a Dave Neiwert kind of way, much about the potential and possibility of an armed, popularly supported, indigenous form of American fascism.