OFF: Reefer Madness?

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 16/08/2007 09:57, Jonathan Jarrett wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 03:27:18PM +0100, M Holmes typed out:
>> [...] the Founders of the US, who had a very great distust of
>> authority.  That's why there are sundry Constitutional limits on the
>> powers of politicians and judges and, because you always need a backup
>> plan, that's why US citizens have the right to bear arms. 
> 
> 	It's not, is it? That's certainly how it's spun now by the gun 
> lobby but that provision of the Constitution originates in the need to 
> maintain a militia to deal with the possibility of reconquest from the 
> UK. 

Both really.  After all, the American Revolution was (spun as) a 
necessary step for righteous English citizens to maintain their inherent 
rights against their own unjust and overbearing government.  And a lot 
of the wrangling in the creation of US Constitution and the "separate 
but equal" Bill of Rights was precisely because many delegates were 
concerned about letting the newly minted US Government have too much 
power over its citizens.  So the idea of letting citizens have guns was 
indeed so that States could have militias (which the NRA doesn't talk so 
much about), but it might have been either to defend against foreign 
invasion (which, these days, the NRA probably only talks about in the 
context of the Mexican border ;) or against the wicked, overbearing 
Federal Government (which is more like what the NRA likes to talk about).

Fears of both foreign invasion and domestic tyranny play into the 
provision in the Bill of Rights, but in any case it is clearly envisaged 
that a militia would be maintained (and, of course, it went without 
saying at the time that any farmer needed a shotgun and/or rifle to 
hand, and there were rather more farmers about then than now).  If the 
US were actually going to update on what the authors of the bill almost 
certainly intended, we'd end up with a situation like Switzerland 
(which, given the low incidence of gun crime in Switzerland, could only 
be an improvement, whatever else we think about it!).

Cheers,
Carl

-- 
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea at carlaz.com
http://www.carlaz.com/