Re: So Today there was a shooting scare at my university
Any right to individual gun ownership in any capacity and for any particular purpose, such as self-defense, is at most a 9th Amendment consideration.Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh
As a purely practical matter, most guns are held in relatively few hands. The first problem is a material and a cultural one, interlinked (cf. "supply side"), which is why I said above that all new production and importation of guns needs to be ended by fiat, and the valorization of guns (if not possession itself) to be stigmatized. Afterwards, we could talk about the ongoing need to reduce the existing supply of guns in the country. What that looks like will have to comport with a certain sense of the term "permanent revolution", which I would use to describe the concept that long-term social, political, and economic problems that seem insoluble to reform must be addressed as the long-term problems they are, and is applicable generally to anything you can think of besides gun control. There are two semantic components: "permanent," meaning changes must be progressive, dynamic, and self-regulating over lifetimes without the need for achieving threshold of constant new decision-making at high-veto chokepoints (e.g. building bespoke campaigns for legislative reform); "revolution," meaning that there is widespread understanding that radical change is the long-long term goal yet it cannot be achieved quickly or under conditions of widespread (creative) disruption and upheaval. The overall idea is that since acute revolutionary activity comes at a high cost and is unpredictable to put it charitably, radical change has to be robustly 'locked in' on the part of government during periodic reformist moments in a way that doesn't require continual active upkeep. Take advantage of Chesterton's Jenga Tower of Kludges by installing kudzu vines.
The Constitution permits the restriction of all rights, no matter how they are constructed. But one of the central frauds of far-right gun ideology and jurisprudence is the "individual right" of firearm ownership. The 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right to participate in the militia (i.e. the collective). One of the official stakes of FedSoc jurisprudence has been that, supposedly, no other amendment in the Constitution applies to collective rights. A moment's consideration reveals this to be false, as the very 1st Amendment is just such a hybrid right of individual participation in collectives: freedoms of speech, press, religion, and petition were and remain substantiated by individuals participating in collectives: the freedom of ASSOCIATION. Without association there is little meaningful possibility of realizing self-expression on a systematic scale. Just so with the Second Amendment, as supported by the Framers' own documented deliberations and the precedent rights and laws they drew upon. They saw a need for individuals to participate in a collective defense (in the doublespeak sense of "Department of Defense") of their communities against people who weren't white settlers, but also as a state-level bulwark against the feared potential of a tyrannous central (federal) army. Ultimately the 2nd Amendment is part of the compromises and reassurances on behalf of the anti-federalists. The very question of "Should the federal government have authority to regulate individual gun ownership" is an anachronistic one; it didn't factor into the mindset of the Framers at all. It's just not a question they would have thought to ask. The 2nd Amendment is a parallelism of the 3rd in its preoccupation, and it would be strange to have expected the Founders to consider a question like "Should the federal armed forces be able to lease bases in foreign countries?" in the context of the 3rd Amendment. The difficulty arises not necessarily from the lack of foresight by the Framers on this issue, but from their lack of foresight on constitutionally enabling us to wisely revise the parameters of government outside the context of catastrophic turmoil. The 2nd Amendment didn't create the far-right, but the basic structure of our society and government from the beginning enabled the far-right to dominate American life for centuries and eventually to co-opt the 2nd Amendment.
So what is the militia? Whatever the government says it is. Here is how the militia is currently statutorily defined:
Now there is minimal connection between personal property or behavior and participation in modern armed forces. Training and arming of men has tended to be centralized to some extent throughout history, especially the more complex the society and larger the forces fielded. Today it is almost perfectly standardized and centralized. The unorganized militia's guaranteed access to guns is no longer a particular factor in the operation of well-regulated armed bodies. Heck, if it wanted to Congress could legislate the militia out of existence entirely. Logically the Second Amendment should not be afforded great respect today. It certainly should not be twisted into a consumer demand-side protection or as having anything to do with personal self-defense. The bottom line of the 2nd Amendment is to limit the federal government from being able to drain the state militaries of armament, which could plausibly be extended against eliminating micro-level private possession in one of those legendary "originalist" readings - but no more. A universal handgun ban, for example, should not reasonably fall afoul of the 2nd Amendment.(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
But the far-right wants it to be something it has never been, and they want it that way because it bundles well with their broader ideology of economic and social hierarchy and their aims in overwhelming and tyrannizing contemporary civil society. Flood the cultural consciousness with guns and define them into core masculinity and you increase their material and psychic significance in public life. Radicalize enough white men about the alleged omnipresent threat of violence against them, their loves ones, and their property, and they will buy guns because they think guns are effective and necessary to address the perceived problem and because they think it fulfills their masculinity. (Bonus if you can do a heel turn and convince women that they need guns to defend themselves from all the random violent men who definitely aren't a problem in the context of everyday economic and gender relations.) Once they have bought into the gun ideology they cannot be brought to abandon it because it is bundled into their core identity. Convince them of the link between the nebulous threats and the non-whites and non-Christians and the political liberals and future economic insecurity and you have the everlasting loyalty and uncritical attention of tens of millions, forming the impetus for both sectarian violence and aggressive capture of the government by a reactionary vanguard. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but we must understand guns not just for what they are but also as a proxy in the titanic conflict between the forces of reaction and everyone else, the thread running through disputes as far-flung as queer civil liberties and #MeToo and climate change policy. Cue...
I don't think it's helpful to label killers (including serial, spree, mass) eo ipso insane. You could say "f****d in the head," but that doesn't have as much content to debate.
American white supremacy inspired the Nazis. But I think it is notable that white violence tended to take the form of either pogroms or legalistic endemic terror. Sporadic mass shootings by motivated actors are a new form here, and it's eerie how much they are beginning to resemble the episodes of sectarian violence we periodically hear about from places like Nigeria or Iraq. The next step is for the militias to get in on the action and organize conflict for real, and the step after that is for the Republican Party itself to incorporate them. I remind you that insurgencies only ever needs tens of thousands of fighters, or even just thousands, to get off the ground. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara landed in the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba with like 20 guys, and stole guns and recruited peasants as they went; they occupied Cuba within 2 years. Our population is bigger than any country to have ever experienced such a thing (other than China and India), so the pool is bigger as well.American history is replete with racial and sectarian violence. I kind of cock my head when I hear people talk about northern Ierland coming here. We have NI beat! Reconstruction, The Jim Crow South, Tulsa, Detroit and Watts in 64. Its one of the reasons I don't use NAZI to describe whats happening. American white supremacy far predates the NAZIs and would be alive and well had they have never existed.
It is a failure in the teaching of the history of this country to see this as a new phenomenon. I guess we had 15 good years in the 90s where material conditons improved enough that we were able to push this just out of the discourse enough?
That's really all I have to say I guess. White terror attacks have gone on in this country a long time and Trump is simply pushing an old button. I mean he is still doing it obviously but he in no way invented it.
I said that to someone on the Internet many years ago, on my first or second forum ever.
He pointed out that this statement is logically also an absolute.
For @SEAmus, the modern adventures of a communication studies professor.
Finally, time for more feral hogs. Recommended viewing for all, but especially for @PVC.
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