Contributors

Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Militia or Not?

Some gun enthusiasts claim that, rather than granting the people of the several States the right to form Armed Militias, the Second Amendment provides an individual an untrammeled right to own and carry guns. They are not, these people claim, members of the Militia.

You may be able legitimately make this argument if you use your guns only within confines of your home and property and never take them outside. But as soon as you arrogate yourself the right to shoot people outside your home, you are performing the function of the militia, which these days is essentially the police.

But the gun nuts of the NRA do not stop at their property line. They demand the right to carry guns anywhere they want, any time they want -- except at NRA conventions and Trump rallies.

They claim they can shoot people outside their homes, like the Louisiana man who killed a Japanese student who knocked on his front door.  They claim they can patrol the streets and don't have to back down when they pull their guns on people minding their own business. They consider George Zimmerman's murder of Trayvon Martin a righteous act. But patrolling the streets is a police function.

They claim they need guns to protect themselves as they drive along traffic-clogged streets and interstates. This frequently results in road rage incidents, like the shooting David Michael Keene was found guilty of in 2008. Keene is the son of David A. Keene, who was a member of the NRA board of directors at the time.

They claim they need guns to protect themselves from muggers while walking down the street, though muggers will nearly always get the drop on you and take your weapon from you. They then pivot to the idea that they will protect others who being accosted by muggers. This is a function of the police.

They claim, as Donald Trump implied during the meeting where he asserted the right to confiscate guns from people without due process, that they need guns to rush into schools and stop shooters. This is a function of the police. Except when they sit outside the school and do nothing.

If individuals are taking it upon themselves to perform the functions of the police, they are claiming the right to deputize themselves as members of the police.

If they are protecting the public, then they are either members of the "Militia" -- the armed citizenry -- or they are lawless vigilantes.

So, if you've got a gun, and consider yourself as a protector of your fellow citizens, then state and federal governments have the right to regulate your use of that gun. They can impose the same kind of licensing, training and storage requirements that they impose on members of the military and the police force.

Otherwise gun owners are just a bunch of lawless vigilantes. The idea that any random moron should be able to wave deadly weapons around on the streets and in churches and bars (!) without any restrictions is, at best, catastrophically naive.

This is why the Heller decision is restricted to guns in the home and nothing more. The justices were angling for a "Castle Doctrine" excuse to prevent the District of Columbia from stopping people from owning handguns.

But this completely ignores the reality of handguns. They can be taken outside the home. DC was trying to prevent carnage in the streets from too many handguns in circulation. The activist conservative justices completely ignored reality to cook up a legal excuse for a political quid pro quo on guns.

They did the same thing when they ruled corporations can contribute unlimited amounts of cash to political campaigns with Citizens United. It is catastrophically naive to assume that wealthy corporations -- which are often owned by foreign interests -- would never buy politicians and spend anyone who opposes them into the ground.

These two decisions were overt political acts, overturning decades and centuries of legal precedents, and have engendered a horrible climate of fear and division in this country.

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