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Guns and Liberty

Suicide attempts in perspective

Libertarians: What are They On?

The American Dream™

Making America Proud of You

The Defence of Liberty

Military Salute

Animals: Give and Take

Why are Americans such assholes?

The Civilized States of America and Jesusland

The Mob, the Mask and the Masquerade

Unilateral Armament

9/11 Inside Job?

Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Islamic Threat

Empires of the Future

Slavery: Not a Black and White Issue

Free Pornography

The Right to Bare Arms

Rednecks can recite only one amendment to the US constitution, there is only one that they care about, the second amendment, because it is the one which makes them into heroes of the American Revolution - just by owning guns.

I would like to see that amendment abolished. The reason for that is not that I want to see Americans disarmed, theirs is a democratic country so the decisions about policy should be down to the people who live there. The reason I would like to see it abolished is because it gives succour and support to the most objectionable aspects of American society and culture, the selfishness, the distrust of outsiders and the paranoia about government.

The American constitution has been copied many times around the world. More than half the nations on the planet owe some of their constitutional arrangements, or at least the vague shape, trappings and labels, to aping the US constitution. Throughout the world there are bicameral parliaments with an upper and lower house, with the upper house often called the senate. There are elected executive presidents with formal limits on the number of terms they can serve. There are even special federal capital districts carved out of other states in a federal system. There are numerous examples of supreme courts. There are many bills of fundamental rights. The American model is widely admired and widely copied, but with one major exception. Nobody has ever sought to copy the Second Amendment.

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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.

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The idea that defence of a country should be down to the private ownership of weapons is quaint, but it does not match modern reality. You can organize a defence force around privately held guns, but to be efficient this requires national service, training and issuing of standard weapons and ammunition. Switzerland requires its citizens to engage in national service and to be trained in the use of military equipment. This works fine for Switzerland, a small land-locked nation surrounded by non-hostile neighbours with no designs on invading. It is not a model which is applicable to the world's only military hyperpower with enough weaponry to take on and probably beat any or all major military powers combined. America does not need a citizen militia for the same reason Queen Elizabeth doesn't need to know karate – she already has ample protection and taking such precautions insults her real defenders and makes her look absurd.

To mount an invasion successfully requires superior fire-power, superior numbers of troops, ideally a three to one advantage or more and most importantly of all air superiority. Without air superiority an invasion would be horrendously bloody. That is why Hitler cancelled his plans to invade Britain – it is one thing to have superior numbers of troops and tanks but if they are the wrong side of a stretch of water that you have neither air nor naval superiority over they cannot be used effectively. An invasion of the United States would be the biggest and most audacious military operation in human history. It is not going to be thwarted by cousin Billy-Bob with a minigun mounted to an army surplus armoured car and sixteen deer hunters with seventeen different kinds of assault rifle. The idea of defence by citizen militia is cute but it is unrealistic. Of course back in the day the citizen militia and the right to bear arms was nothing to do with protecting the people from foreigners at all, it was actually all about protecting immigrants from the native Americans. This is another aspect of gun owning traditions in America, there is a strong element of racism involved.

The last time Americans successfully used privately-owned weapons to protect their rights against a tyrannical government was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Since then whenever Americans have used weapons against their government the citizens have come off distinctly second best to the shame of everybody involved. The right to armed revolt to throw off tyranny is not something that needs to be enshrined in a constitution. I have that right as an Englishman. It is a right which comes from English common law. It is an inalienable human right. More than that, it is an inalienable right even for aliens too, just ask Obi-Wan Kenobi , Yoda or the Doctor. Nobody needs a piece of paper to tell them that they have a right not to ruled by tyrants. Anybody who understands what freedom is knows it is something they should have and have a right to fight for. Because it is a right that does not need to be stated stating it should be avoided unless it achieves something positive. The second amendment does not achieve anything worthwhile. States' rights have been reduced and the people's rights have been reduced too. The people have a right to put in place governments which have the power to enact the will of the people. But the constitution directly thwarts the will of the people and the power of their government. That is what it is for – to stop the people from getting their government to do what they want. This is the dead telling the living what they are allowed to do. How can a vote of politicians from two hundred years ago bind the hands of politicians of today? Constitutions are just pieces of paper. Investing them with mythical power is a dangerous venture.

Every clause in a constitution is a point of weakness. The more a constitution tries to do the more enemies it creates. Imagine if the US constitution had in place a clause which mandated compulsory free education, a mandatory requirement to land a man on Mars and a requirement to keep the western hemisphere free of European military forces. If there were such commitments in the constitution the constitution would have more enemies and less support, and this is the crux of my argument, this would be so even if such policies were popular with the electorate. Policies don't belong in constitutions. Gun control or the absence of gun control should be a matter for the policies of the individual states. Personally I don't think America is ready for tight restrictions on gun ownership and they would not be implemented. But the freedom to make laws should be granted to the states. “You can't do that because the blessed ancestors said you can't” is a poor argument. The obvious reply to that argument is “Why does their decision made two hundred years ago carry more weight than ours, made today, by people who have been elected by a larger and more representative and better educated electorate consisting entirely of people who are not actually dead?”

The constitution would be improved by being filleted down and many of its clauses recast as simple statutes or removed altogether. Besides the second amendment which I have argued for other obvious candidates for removal on the grounds of being anachronisms are the amendments enacting and repealing the prohibition of alcohol and the provisions of the amendment which makes Franklin Roosevelt exempt from the limit to two presidential terms. Constitutions should live and breathe, not be fossilized. A quick pruning every couple of centuries with a full plebiscite to ratify the newly trimmed results would do it a power of good. What is the problem with leaving the matter of gun laws down to the individual states? By what right is gun law policy better regulated by men who have been dead for two hundred years than by the people living in the states today?

What harm does the second amendment do?

The second amendment allows people who have no redeeming features at all to cast themselves as all -American heroes and defenders of essential liberties just by owning weapons which they fantasize about using on mythical enemies of freedom and their family and values. By owning weapons they see themselves as defending the constitution and the rule of law, even if they are tax-evading crystal-meth-toking potential lynch mob members who would happily prevent Jews and atheists from voting and shut down CNN for being too damn liberul. That's why. Without the special protection of the constitution gun owners would be more aware that their antics have consequences and that the downsides of their actions need to be justified. When the myth of the people's militia is exploded they will be aware that the ownership and use of weapons is something which the community allows rather than something which the community has no damn business being interested in at all. In Europe men can own rifles and shotguns and enjoy shooting game, usually subject to licensing conditions. Owning guns is no more of a basic human right than running a car, it is seen as something which the wider community has a right to be interested in, but the body politic should only intervene when there is a good case to do so.

In Britain handguns have not been regarded as legitimate tools for self defence for fifty years or so. The idea that a householder could keep a gun to point at burglars has come to be as old fashioned and anachronistic as nigger minstrel shows and wife beating as the socially acceptable norm. Gun ownership was very much a minority behaviour and nobody was very open about it – rather like homosexuality in the nineteen fifties, everybody knew there were out there somewhere but very few of them were particularly visible so nobody expected to meet one or live next door to one. Because gun ownership was so low key nobody made a living out of scaring people into owning guns, there was no powerful gun lobby and nobody saw gun owners practising to be guerilla fighters as being heroes or particularly sane. I know because that was me.

In my teenage years I lived the fantasy. I had an air rifle with telescopic sights and a .410 shotgun. I slept with a seven inch sheath knife under my pillow, just in case the Soviet paratroopers landed. I later bought a 12 bore bolt action shotgun, an air pistol, a pistol crossbow and another air rifle. I came very close to buying a replica Colt 45 automatic. In fact the only thing that stopped me from buying it was the fact that it was not real, not that I wasn't licensed to own it. If it had been real I would have bought it. Fortunately I was distracted from my increasingly worrying interest in weaponry by a new hobby which absorbed surplus funds and time and saved me from a very unhealthy way of thinking. I have no doubt that if I had been living in America instead that I would have been sucked into buying real guns and thinking that I was a big man for having a big weapon and I was a defender of freedom for owning weapons.

As it happens I lived in Britain, and maintaining a shotgun certificate was a bureaucratic hassle, so I gave my weapons to my mother and got married and got a life.

The Soviet paratroops didn't land. I haven't ever had to face an intruder in my house (except tomcats) and neither have any of my family. I don't sleep with a knife under my pillow. There is no gun in my house. I do have a weapon for self defence in my home, it is the hardwood spacer from a chair, it is just a little bit bigger than a drumstick. I work on the basis that any weapon you carry downstairs while investigating a strange noise in the night may be seized from you and turned against you. Therefore it is vitally important that it is smooth and capable of anal insertion without too much discomfort should that be its fate if you find yourself disarmed. This stick is unlikely to cause too much discomfort or injury to anybody, it is not heavy enough to be likely to kill if used at full force on the head but it would definitely be useful to fend off a blow and a rap across the knuckles at full force stands a good chance of causing an intruder to drop whatever is in his hands and run away without feeling the need to embark on a lifetime or intergenerational revenge vendetta. Of course in America such thinking would be laughed off as defeatist nonsense and the man in the gun shop would probably have little difficulty in selling me a pump action pistol-grip combat shotgun. Then of course you have to ask yourself what the burglar would do to get around this and before you know where you are you are opening the front door with a semi-automatic with 25 rounds in the magazine and covering fire from an assault rifle on the landing. Guns don't make people feel safer in just the same way cigarettes don't make people feel calmer, they create and increase the needs they claim to satisfy.

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited