“Kick it out,” said the voice from behind me; I waved back over my shoulder, not looking – this was another of the pan-handlers that worked Saint Paul Street in Baltimore. It was fall, 1993, and I was walking home from Harborplace downtown, with thenwife. The Saint Paul Street bridge over the Jones Falls Expressway, where we were, was usually whipped with wind and we had our hands jammed each in the pockets of our motorcycle jackets and were walking along, hunched over, probably talking about something.
The guy behind us said, “Kick it out,” again, louder, then trotted around in front of us, blocking our path. As he did so, he raised his sweatshirt and showed us the gun stuck in the front of his pants. It looked like a cheap .357 magnum knock-off but the important part is that I’ve seen what those do to people, and it felt like someone had put a garden hose of cold water up my ass and turned it on, full. You know how they say “weak in the knees”? That’s exactly the feeling. I realized in an adrenaline-fueled flash that we were being mugged and immediately started talking, “OK, I have some money in my wallet. I’m just going to take it out and hand you the bills; the other stuff in my wallet isn’t worth anything to you. OK?” I got my wallet out, held it open, showed that I had grabbed the wad of bills from the back, about $60, and handed them over left-handed. Then, he trotted off to the end of the bridge and vanished between a few of the buildings. It was all over so fast I didn’t have much time to think and later, when I realized that he might have just shot me in the back when I made my hand-wave of dismissal – I’d have been unaware of anything until I was blown away – and his lack of effective communication skills would have been entirely my problem. Dying or being maimed for $60 is pathetic. Then, I had to sit down and cry for a while. After that, we crossed North Avenue and went west, off our usual track, to the coffee shop where the cops used to sit, and talked to the police. The guy in the cruiser told us that the bridge marks the line between two precincts and we weren’t his problem but he helpfully offered to call for a car from the other precinct, if we didn’t mind waiting.
Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of time to think on the bridge, but one of the things I was able to figure out and focused on was that thenwife usually carried a lot more cash than I did, and I wanted to keep our mugger focused on me. I also slightly moved when I got my wallet, to interpose myself between us, not that it would have helped against a .357, she’d have just been splashed with bits of former Marcus. I also had my Vietnam-era Gerber MKI in the inner pocket of my jacket, handle down as I used to carry it, and it occurred to me at great length and detail that the expression “bringing a knife to a gun-fight” embeds some profound truths. I was more prepared to beg piteously than to go for the knife and try to fight.
That was the third time in my life that I had been on the wrong end of a loaded gun. The second time was at my first apartment in Parkview Gardens in a suburb of Washington, when I stepped out to talk to a man who was beating up a woman on the grass verge outside my building. I had my katana in its scabbard, held loosely and ready, but didn’t make it obvious what I was holding, and said, “hey man, you can’t do that. Please stop, someone’s gonna get hurt.” He yelled at me, and she started to crawl off between two parked cars. I stepped back and prepared to draw and cut him down and he, clearly drunk, wasn’t processing an encounter on two fronts and walked off in a huff. I didn’t realize that I had just met the couple who lived upstairs from me, until the next day when there was a knock on my door and I opened it and the same guy stuck a gun under my chin and asked me if I felt so smart now? I said, “if you don’t hurt me I promise I’ll move out of here as soon as I can find another place.” He shoved me back into my apartment and huffed off and I broke my lease that afternoon. That happened in the summer of 1986. It was the first time I brought a knife to a gun-fight and I know that sensei would have chided me for letting him inside my defensive range. But, seriously, there were important lessons in the encounter and they’re highly relevant to forming my later attitudes.
The first time I stared down a loaded gun was the most frustrating and induced a lot of intellectual dread. I was in basic training, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, 1983, on the rifle range sitting with a few other guys from my platoon, with my M-16 in pieces on some paper towels, cleaning sand out of the action. Fort Dix is made of sand and the M-16’s pathetically designed action is a machine for ingesting and jamming on sand, dust, or bad ideas. I never could understand why anyone thought it was a battle-worthy rifle. Anyhow, one of the guys in my platoon, Brooks, G., was a tough-ass oil rigger from Alaska who had lost his job for fighting too much and joined the army. Brooks liked to mess with people for his own entertainment, which he wasn’t really intellectually cut out for, but he knew his tools. Brooks asked me casually, “you’re an atheist, right?” and when I said “yes” he pushed a loaded clip into his rifle, dropped the bolt, rotated the fire selector to full automatic, and pointed it in my face. Then, he said, “don’t talk that shit around here.” I was utterly gobsmacked – there were other guys watching this, and there were always cadre around, but nobody seemed to notice what was going on. It was a shocking moment of complete disempowerment, my rifle in pieces, his fully assembled and loaded, and we were both sitting cross-legged and I was a total sitting duck. Not that I could have done anything to Brooks, whose muscles had muscles of their own. So I said, “I believe whatever you tell me to believe, Brooks” and he made some dominant muttering noises and got up and walked off. My feeling was that I had been totally let down by the cadre (who were supposed to be watching out for exactly that kind of thing) and the rest of the guys in my platoon, who watched it all happen. Nobody ever said a thing to me about it. So, I had a gun at a gun-fight but I guess that Bonaparte’s military aphorism for that situation would be “never field-strip your rifle in a gun-fight.” My problem was that I had no idea I was in a gun-fight until it was over!
When I moved out to the farm in Pennsylvania, I had problems with some of the locals, who felt that my acreage was their ATV playground. One time, I was telling some guys on an ATV to fuck off my land, when one of them started ostentatiously cocking a .45. I quietly got back in my truck and drove off. The state police came later, and said, “what do you expect us to do?” and “you’re not from around here, are you?” Again, the “good guys with guns” appeared much too late and were ineffective. I began to realize that guns are actually a piss-poor tool for self-defense. Cops are decidedly worse – you may as well pray for divine intervention – but if you’re in a tense situation with another person who has a gun, the only weapon you’ve got is your wits and those are going to fail some day if you keep getting in that kind of situation.
At my job at Trusted Information Systems, 1990-1994, there was a certified Gun Nut and Self Defense Aficionado, Bob P., who I shared a divided office with. Bob had a carry permit, kept a gun in his car (a great big .44 Colt Python) and would often talk about how he had 2 shotguns hidden near the doors of his house, so he could defend himself. By then I was cautious around people with guns, so I didn’t troll him, but I did ask what he expected, a full-on communist assault or something? Then, he said some really racist stuff that shocked me and I didn’t report it to human resources because he was not fully hinged and I had the experience with intervening in the beating earlier and I just wanted to be left alone. But listening to Bob go on and on about how he needed to defend himself, I kept thinking “against, what?” Then a few years later I went to visit photographer and gun nut Oleg Volk down in Nashville (I was in Nashville for a USENIX) and I got to see what a real Gun Nut(tm) is like. Oleg had loaded firearms everywhere in his house. Bob P. used to talk about the shotgun by the door – Oleg had a Franchi SPAS-12 behind the door, loaded with slugs. Oleg’s a nice young man and to my knowledge has never killed anyone, nor has his house ever been assaulted by the small army he is prepared to fight, so I asked him, “why all the guns, Oleg?” and he looked at me and said, “we are Russian jews.” And, honestly, I accepted and still accept that as a sort of explanation.
After my various run-ins with ATVers, I had plenty of time to think about guns for self-defense, and I had a shocking number of otherwise sane people tell me I should take a gun with me when I go to chase hunters and ATVers off my land. In fact, in Pennsylvania, there is a “stand your ground” law which says you can defend yourself with lethal force if you are on your property or in your car and someone threatens you credibly with violence. I actually asked the state police (one of the times they came to take a report about ATV trespassers, and do nothing) if that meant I could roll window down and blaze away at ATVers and claim they were scary? “Please, just don’t.” was the best the Pennsylvania State Police could manage.
And then there was the guy I pissed off online. I got some emails, threatening to come up here and “sort you out.” I didn’t take them seriously, but finally replied, “well, great. Schedule it with my secretary and come on up, but please be on time because if I spend all night lying out with my sniper rifle and you’re late, I’m going to be grumpy.” That also made me think a lot more about guns for self-defense. I realized that, basically, they are useless except in very narrow circumstances and worst of all you don’t know when those narrow circumstances are happening until too late. That is how I figured out the essence of Iaido (the Japanese martial art of drawing and cutting with the sword) – my sensei used to lecture us that the student is always ready to defend themself, and that the principle of the art is to be fast enough to get inside the attacker’s movement and defeat them anyhow. In other words, the attacker draws first, or moves their hand to the grip of the sword and begins to draw, and you’re so fast you cut them before they can complete their movement. I realized, after some thinking, that this is an absurd conceit: nobody in their right mind is going to stand and risk being cut by a katana if they can get “the drop” on an opponent and cut them when they are not ready to defend. In other words, Iaido is a sort of philosophical hack that allows the samurai to claim self-defense while actually being the aggressor. I realize, now, that that is an essential of state-craft, too: witness plucky little Israel that keeps launching devastatingly overpowered attacks while claiming that they were threatened. It’s ridiculous. And it’s the same thing with guns for self-defense: my proposal to defend my front door with a sniper rifle from 300 yards away was similar to Israel’s foreign policy – you show up on my doorstep to yell at me, and are vaporized and never know what happened. I was not serious about the sniper rifle but it did make me wonder at the large number of Americans who own such things claiming self-defense. How do you defend yourself by shooting someone by surprise from 300 yards away? I’m skeptical.
The deadliest weapon I have is my Chevy Tahoe 4×4 (seriously, I need it for the snow we still get out here, it’s a good farm truck) if the engine is running, it can transform from helpful transportation into a manifestation of death in an instant. Who needs a gun when you’re sitting in a tank?
As I continued to clarify my thoughts, to my satisfaction, on this matter, this is where I got: you have to decide if you want to be a dangerous person. The samurai who is always ready to draw a sword and cut someone down, is a dangerous person. Doc Holliday was a dangerous person. A lot of NYPD are dangerous people: they will switch from being the friendly-seeming person you ask directions from, to the guy who just strangled you to death, at a moment’s notice. The only way to defend yourself against a dangerous person is to be a more dangerous person. If I want to fantasize that someone’s going to come out here and shoot me, as I am spotlit against my office window, then I have two choices: be outside in the dark walking the perimeter on sniper patrol, or hope that they make it painless. The kind of person who really wants to kill you is the kind of person who’ll sit outside your window and shoot you, and the only way to prevent that is to live every second of your life in a state combining fear and readiness. And, inevitably, you’ll shoot the mailman if you live in that state because you’re also a fraction of a second away from a mistake at any moment. I liked Oleg Volk, but I wouldn’t want to knock on his door at 2:00am because I’d had a car accident and needed help – even though he’s a nice guy, a gun nut is a fractional second of a mistake from becoming life-threatening. That’s also why I don’t think I’d ever walk up to an NYPD cop and ask for directions, again – I just want to get those armed goons off the streets, and I have a GPS app on my smartphone. Dangerous people, and this is an important point, are dangerous to both sides because they’re as likely to light the powder-train that blows up their own side as the other.
I came to the conclusion that guns are only useful when you know you’re on your way to a gun-fight, which is a pretty straightforward way of saying that you plan to start a gun-fight. Because, otherwise, you’d be an idiot. And, if your opponents are standing in a cluster with their “open carry” ARs on their shoulders, you should either a) not be there or b) drop mortar rounds on them from 1000 meters away, then send some guys in light AFVs to machine-gun the wounded. If you know you’re on the way to a gun-fight, then bring it all to bear. Otherwise, don’t bother because it’s just going to clutter up your battlefield consciousness at a crucial time – like my Gerber MKI did – I was aware I had a knife but I put it out of my mind quickly and I’m glad I did.
And that’s why I have a problem with guys like Bernie Goetz and Kyle Rittenhouse and all of NYPD and the other gun nuts who are parading their hardware: they’re either poseurs (i.e.: jackasses) or they are dangerous people – and if they are dangerous people, they ought to be taken off the streets because nobody on either side wants a dangerous person walking around. I hate to make a movie reference but I have to hand huge props to Val Kilmer for his portrayal of Doc Holliday in Tombstone – Holliday by Kilmer is a complete nihilist and a dangerous person par excellence because he really, truly, does not care what happens to him, and he’s fast with a gun and part of not caring means not counting consequences, either. And that, my friends, is why I discount a lot of the “open carry” crowd – if they were really dangerous people, they’d be an actual death squad. But they’re just a bunch of slobs trying to work eachother up to the point they managed to work Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse was a dangerous person, too, but in a singularly pathetic way. He fell on his ass and I wonder if his embarrassment for falling on his ass is why he really pulled the trigger. None of these people have any understanding of strategy or the lesson of the samurai, which is to care about outcomes but not for oneself. That’s why the samurai were dangerous: picture a whole bunch of Doc Hollidays trying to sort out who’s the biggest nihilist in the room.
There is a scene in Sword of Doom that always comes to me when I think of this [if you haven’t seen it, do!] in which a sword-master, played perfectly by Toshiro Mifune, is ambushed by some thugs who were trying to assassinate a politician. They got the wrong palanquin and instead of killing a helpless bureaucrat, about 20 swordsmen find themselves attacking The Angel of Death. The sword-master is furious – not because they threatened him, because they never were a danger to him – but because they made him kill when he didn’t want to. That really pisses him off. It’s interesting, because there are other elements of the story I don’t want to spoil, but it’s a sort of an extended exploration of the question of what a dangerous person is. The character played by Mifune is, in fact, one of the rare people who spends his every waking moment prepared for a l’outrance struggle. It’s his job to be a dangerous person and he does it well. In that sense he’s safe because unlike Doc Holliday or an NYPD cop, he is constrained by his excellence and deadliness and knows it’s not worthy for him to go picking on lower-level NPCs.
And that’s where I wind up: I don’t respect Rittenhouse, NYPD, or Goetz because they demonstrated their power against low-level NPCs and didn’t really put their money where their mouth is. If the “open carry” proto-fascists really think they are going to take on the US Army, why aren’t they planting IEDs right now? It’s because they’re chickenshit mouth-breather internet trolls who can afford $1000 for an AR-15 but are not, actually, dangerous people.
The big problem, for civilization, is to help the dangerous people keep from mistaking the fear in our eyes for admiration. But, ironically, when they feel that we admire them then suddenly they have something to lose, and are incrementally less dangerous.
Now, I have to clarify one thing. I do not, for a moment, believe that the samurai were anything like is portrayed in film. They were mostly military bureaucrats and functionaries. Some of them were very dangerous, but mostly they just wanted to live and party and drink and dance and do all the things people try to do. In other words, they had a lot to live for. But the ideology of bushido is complex and can be very damaging, just ask the Japanese who lived through WWII. It’s a fascinating topic and, if you are interested in taking a deep breath of samurai culture, I would recommend:
- When the last sword is drawn
- Sword of Doom
- Harakiri
Harakiri is probably the most interesting – it’s an extended rumination about what happens when a cultural artifact winds up slamming into a truly dangerous person who has nothing left to lose. When the last sword is drawn is a more complicated and a truly beautiful film about the death of one era and what happens to dangerous people when the era that created them comes to an end. In that sense it’s reminiscent of The Shootist. We all know what happens to dangerous people when their era ends – it’s almost always not pretty. The death of Doc Holliday in Tombstone, coughing to death in a sanitarium, is a perfect coda to that topic.
We got post leave during basic, and that meant you could go wherever you wanted on post and that included the bowling alley where there was cheap government-subsidized beer. Brooks went and got beastly drunk. That evening they called formation for a head-count and Brooks fell down then got back up. One of our sergeants, Billy White, a former Georgia prison guard who had fought in Vietnam and had killed a lot of people, told Brooks to fall out and sleep it off. Brooks said, “fuck you.” We were all aghast waiting to see what happened. Sgt White walked over and said, “what did you say? I couldn’t hear you” (trying to give Brooks an out) and Brooks repeated himself, louder, then tried to swing on Sgt White. We all heard a kind of meaty “POP” and Brooks went cartwheeling through the air and crumpled in a heap. Sgt White had hit him so hard and fast I don’t think any of us saw it, but Brooks didn’t get back up. One of the other cadre went over and hauled Brooks to his feet and dead-walked him off toward the infirmary. We never saw Brooks again. I didn’t miss him.
“I have a problem with guys like Bernie Goetz {…} and the other gun nuts who are parading their hardware”
Persistent misrepresentation. Goetz did not parade his hardware. If he had, the cowards who surrounded him would likely have picked someone else to rob. Also he’d have been arrested, but still.
Persistent misrepresentation. Goetz did not parade his hardware.
That is why I called Goetz out separately. (“Bernie Goetz”) AND (“The OTHER gun nuts who are parading their hardware”) is how to parse that sentence.
@2: Ah, OK.
On the rest, now I’m not on a phone:
What you had were some gun parts. Cool story. Terrifying, also.
It sounds like in a lot of cases the answer is (per the second amendment) “the government”… and I’d probably sick up my guts laughing at the idea that any private citizen, or indeed any alliance of all the other nations on earth, would stand a chance against the US government if it was really grumpy.
Interesting question. Ever since Francine Hughes it’s been established that a woman can kill a man in cold blood, while he sleeps, and successfully get away with it (“temporary insanity” or self-defence). If the principle is that someone who threatens you might do worse in the future (and if the law applied equally to men as it does to women, hohoho just kidding), you’d have been justified – even morally required – in waiting until the chap who put a gun to your chin wasn’t looking and shooting him in the back of the head. After all, the next person he does it to might not be so focused as you were, or he may twitch, and they’re dead. But that way anarchy lies, due to too many guns. You obviously did the right thing.
Here’s the thing: that applies to ALL weapons. Including empty hands, if you’ve sufficient training to kill with them. A gun is only useful if, on the way to the gunfight, your putative opponent hasn’t simply snuck up on you a stuck a knife in the base of your skull, or put a bomb under your car, or, y’know, lined up a bunch of OTHER people with guns to take you down.
Aside: I’ve always wondered about people using that “brought a knife to a gunfight” reference – haven’t they seen the movie? The guy who brings a knife to a gunfight WINS.
Any weapon is only really useful if you’re prepared to use it with full force first, which means not showing it to your opponent until after you’ve used it, if at all. This reminds me of so-called “self-defence” classes that teach you to deal with someone who attacks you with a knife. None of them deal with the reality that nobody is going to show you a knife, they’re going to stab you with it FIRST. And if they don’t, whatever colour belt you’ve got you are going to get cut, regardless of what you’ve seen in the movies. An acquaintance of mine at uni didn’t even know he’d been stabbed until the guy who did it was out of sight – he thought he’d just been punched really hard. The blood was his first clue.
One of the things places that have civilisation have done to help dangerous people is made it much, much harder for them to get their hands on guns. They’re much less likely to end up in a Goetz/Zimmerman/Rittenhouse situation if all they can carry is a knife or a hammer. Partly because they’ll have less confidence that they can prevail with a weapon that requires them to be up close, but mainly because – and this is the main point – people who knife other people are, in the main, not cool. They’re not the hero of the movie, they’re the mook in the alley. And this is the thing, I think – the “I’m a dangerous person” crowd are (Russian Jews aside) mostly acting out fantasies they’ve picked up from movies. Thank fuck lightsabers aren’t real, btw.
Based on the second bit, are you sure about the first bit?
And finally:
Can I therefore assume you have a grudging respect for Theodore Kaczynski, who did exactly that? (Just kidding, really).
Your sentence reads to me as “with guys like (Bernie Goetz AND Kyle Rittenhouse AND all of NYPD AND the other gun nuts) who are parading their hardware”. Punctuation would really help clarify your point.
Can I therefore assume you have a grudging respect for Theodore Kaczynski, who did exactly that? (Just kidding, really).
Ow. That is a question I have dreaded fielding for a long time. I think that in many ways Kaczynski was right but as the 3star general in Apocalypse Now said “his methods are unsound.” He was not at war with the government, he was at war with modern civilization, and his strategy was too small-scale for the problem.
Let me fantasize a minute. What I imagine is someone deliberately getting into the position of, say, Skilling at Enron. Then deliberately fucking the fossil fuels aspects of the power grid and announcing “I have done this to you and for you, for your own good because the political class lack willpower and I don’t. Capitalism allows me this power. Maybe you collectively need to re-think a few things while you burn your furniture to stay warm and your neighbors with solar and wind power are snug and warm.”
Kaczynski may be seen someday as a Cassandra figure but I think he was mostly a bad strategist. He attacked techbros, and pretty insignificant ones, for that matter. He made the mistake that many wont-ever-be revolutionaries made, of going after the wrong target. If he had been assassinating oil company execs he might have found grudging support, like Greenpeace does in some limited quarters. But tech journalists? Who gives a shit?
I would support a people’s action campaign aimed at terrorizing fossil fuel company executives, to render their ill-gotten gains poisonous to them. Remember how PETA lost public support because of more radical elements throwing blood on fur coats? Well, that lost them the New York media elite and their mink coats real fast. But I do wonder how fossil fuel execs have been able to walk in public without having oil dumped on them. Especially since Exxon Valdez.
So, no, I don’t approve of Kaczynski; I think he was too moderate. Drop 6 tons of coal on Joe Manchin and I’ll cheer and wave pompoms.
“they’re either poseurs (i.e.: jackasses) or they are dangerous people”
These aren’t mutually exclusive positions. Look at Kyle Rottenhouse. A poseur who posed a danger.
Regarding Theodore Kaczynski — in this country during the last century we’ve never had a combination of the three things it would take to really cause some upheaval in our way of life:
1) Strategic imagination to come up with a big plan that would actually cause a disruption,
2) Enough intelligence to pull it off without screwing it up (like letting an FBI informant into your chat room),
3) The guts to risk everything on a die roll and not care about the consequences if you fail.
The closest we’ve gotten to all three in the last hundred years was probably Mohamed Atta. Even he didn’t have a plan that could have realistically achieved his ends. Kaczynski, as you say, totally lacked #1. Trump stumbled upon a plan that would have met the criteria for #1 (election nullification), but lacked #2 and #3, plus he didn’t have the leadership skills to inspire loyalty in his subordinates.
Otherwise you’d need to go back to the architects of the civil war, or look in other countries for people like Mao or Guevera. Fortunately for the powers that be, in our era that unique combination seems to mostly show up in fictional characters like Blofeld.
My sensei used to poke fun at the “self-defence” aspect of iaido, especially once we got to the kata where you’re explicitly cutting a man down from behind. His take was that as a rule, iaido techniques require you to start moving before your opponent does, so to the extent that you’re acting in self-defense, it’s in the sense that you’ve realised that you and your opponent are going to get into a fight really soon, and then you might as well get it over with as quickly as possible. In retrospect, I’d say that the genuine self-defence part of iaido is in the etiquette for handling swords: much of it was ritual for its own sake, but the core seemed to boil down to: “Don’t get within a sword’s length of people you don’t trust. When handling swords around people, move slowly and conspicuously so it’s really clear what you’re doing.”
I just want to point out that those knife self defense classes are even worse than that. I don’t care what kind of training you think you have – if you are completely unarmed against an attacker with a knife, then odds are very high that you are going to get cut. It doesn’t matter how much you outskill them. They could be a complete novice and you could have years of training, and you’re still probably going to get cut. It doesn’t matter if you see it coming a mile away. (Unless you run away or something.)
GerrardOfTitanServer@#9:
I just want to point out that those knife self defense classes are even worse than that.
There’s a posting I want to do on that topic, eventually. But the news swirl and my blitzed schedule, etc… No excuse.
Anyhow, the short form is: you’re absolutely right.
Marcus
There’s a fun youtuber that seems reliable and legit called Ramsey Dewey. Former low-level MMA fighter. He runs a MMA gym in Shanghai. He’s got a fun way of telling stories.
He has this one story. He says that every once in a while, he’ll break out the rubber knives for the class for fun. He very clearly explains that he is far from an expert on knife-fighting, but he still knows a thing or two about it. He says that the best that he’s ever done against a student is 6 – that is being stabbed / cut 6 times before disarming the student. This includes complete novices.
That is, until a self-professed Krav Maga expert drops by unexpectedly. Dewey lets the “expert” teach the class for a little bit, and then Dewey corrects the absolute crap that the “expert” taught. The “expert” gets all upset and challenges Dewey to disarm him. Random challenge, and Dewey accepts it for shits and giggles. Dewey manages to disarm the guy three times in a row without getting stabbed / cut once by the rubber knife.
He also mentions that, with one exception, every so-called Krav Maga “expert” that he’s ever met have been absolutely shit fighters. The exception was two trainers in Israeli military who stopped by at his gym and laughed at the idea that Krav Maga was about unarmed knife defense or civilian self-defense, saying instead that it was a short training program for new military recruits. The time that they had to train them was too short to really teach them anything about hand-to-hand fighting beyond training them a few extreme basics, and the real goal of the training was to teach aggression.
The moral of the story? Nearly all Krav Maga “teachers” are full of shit (but not all of them), and knife defense is universally full of shit, and in particular, the bad Krav Maga teaches you to defend against unrealistic knife attacks that come in these weird wide arcs instead of how a knife would actually be used, e.g. one arm forward to interfere with the victim’s defenses, and the knife arm making extremely rapid repeated simple direct stabbing motions to the torso.
PS: I like him a lot for very frequently saying that you cannot learn how to fight by watching youtube videos. You need a proper trainer and live sparring with a partner that resists instead of a partner that plays along. (You don’t need full-contact sparring, but you do need sparring with a resisting partner.) (Having a partner play along with the technique as you first learn it and practice it – that’s very useful, but it’s not a replacement for sparring with a resisting partner.)
Sorry. Hope what I shared was interesting.
I should correct what I wrote above:
Mike Tyson once said “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Ramsey put a new spin on it that I really like, which was something like “No one has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” He explained: You might have years of kata / form practice, but by itself it’s almost useless in a real fight. You will never have experienced the adrenaline, the shock and pain of actually getting punched in the face by someone that means to harm you. Nothing can prepare you for that except that itself.
If you want to be a fighter, you do need to practice, including a lot of sparring. That sort of preparation is vital. (In the interest of avoiding injury, only a very small amount of that sparring should be anything above light contact striking.) However, until you’ve been in a few real fights where you have been hurt, you are not a fighter, and you will fail in a real fight.
Seconding the rec for Ramsey Dewey – bonus that he has a really (to me) pleasant, listenable voice.
One dojo I used to train at the instructor got asked by a relatively newish student about knife defence. “Ooh, good idea. Next week, knife defence.” was the response. I was interested to see what transpired. The next week, the first 20 minutes of the class went as normal – greetings, stretches, warmups, all that, then out came the rubber knives. And for most of the next hour we trained some basic deflect/disarm techniques. And it was like it was in most of those classes, where I was internally questioning the effectiveness of what we were getting – slow motion, unrealistic, planned attacks from odd directions. Most of the time it didn’t matter, because we were practicing a point-scoring controlled sport not much different from fencing and not much more use in a fight. But today, we were apparently doing “proper” self defence (of which I’ve always been sceptical) and it worried me.
Then we got toward the end of the class, and the instructor said “Right, let’s do it for real.” and I wondered wtf was next – there surely weren’t real blades in the bag? And out came the… permanent marker pens. Room full of people in nice clean white suits, and we had to attack each other with black marker pens. Not in the preset ways, not in slow motion – just to go for it. And nobody went home clean, and nobody went home with any illusions that anything we’d spent the previous hour doing was any bloody use at all. Favourite moment was when one lad who was legitimately really good and fast and also did about three other different arts on different nights was the only one still looking pristine after a few minutes, and the instructor just walked up behind him and stabbed him six times in the back while he was dealing with his partner. “And that, ladies and gentlemen boys and girls, is why we don’t do knife defence.” Thank you sensei, I bet nobody ever forgot that evening, not least for the cost of it in Vanish stain remover.
My view is that the very best knife defense is negotiation, ideally from a distance. Or maybe it’s distance first then negotiation,
In college I sparred with a guy who had killed people with a knife in Vietnam. We used red magic markers. His sparring technique consisted mostly of chopping cuts at my hand and “then I wait for you to go into shock” I was covered with more red ink than WeWork. He explained a thing which was “if you are not blindingly fast learn Uzi-fu instead” indeed he could mark me before I could move, which pretty much convinced me of the use-case for guns.
@15
300 yards with a sniper rifle?
The teacher at my old fencing/HEMA club would occasionally arrange sparring with training knives. His objective was to demonstrate that you can’t even defend yourself from a knife, with a knife. As soon as you are within a knife’s reach of your opponent you will get stabbed, irrespective of whether you happen to also be stabbing him at the same time. Or, as my dad put it: “The winner of a knife fight dies in the hospital”.
https://archive.org/details/the.-sword.of.-doom.-1966.-japanese.-1080p.-blu-ray.-h-264.-aac-vxt_202103
Subtitles are not accessible but closed-captioning (CC) is. Seems like a lot of gaps but the general thrust is reasonably understandable.
I really appreciate this post and pretty much all of the comments.
I don’t really have much to add in terms of substance, just a real minor personal perspective… while I’ve been lucky enough to not encountered much violence or serious threats in my life, at some point I made a couple of realizations in regards to fighting/killing and “self defense”.
A long time ago, I used to be really concerned with “learning to fight” and being prepared to “defend myself” At some point, I realized that in order to be ready to fight for your life at a moment’s notice, also means you have to be ready to kill at a moment’s notice. I used to be really concerned about not being capable of this, but more recently, I’m somewhat glad I don’t think I’m capable of this. I think it pretty much means I am very unlikely to assault someone “accidentally”. Maybe it means I’ll get killed in some hypothetical future mugging or whatever, but I’m ok with that risk.
Living in the SF Bay Area, it’s a pretty liberal environment, and generally, in the various circles I find myself in, sadly I tend to be the one with the most experience with firearms due to my prior enlistment. So I have previously had coworkers and other acquaintances approach me about advice in regards to carrying a handgun for “self defense”. And to a one, I think they’ve pretty much all been disappointed with my response of “don’t”. They rarely want to hear my elaboration of how before they carry a firearm, they should get extensive safety, range, and general self-defense training. Or, how before they think about carrying a firearm, they should consider never drinking in public, using a phone in public, or using headphones in public.
People really have an interesting idea of what constitutes “self defense” I don’t know if this is a primarily American phenomenon, due to romanticizing and mythologizing “self defense” and firearms. They have a hard time getting over the idea that a “criminal” is going to approach them at 30 paces and accost them or demand the draw or whatever. For some reason they seem to have no problem thinking how they would assault someone without warning if they needed to for whatever reason, but can’t seem to comprehend that mysterious “criminals” would also use the same tactics of surprise attacks on unwitting targets, if they happen to be the target…
I’ve gone through a somewhat less formal version of this thought process before. I also decided I wasn’t interested in being dangerous. Partly because of the high probability of making a mistake at some point, which was laid out very well in the original post. But also because it takes an enormous amount of effort over a very long period of time. And frankly no one will keep that up perfectly on a long enough timeline so all your effort can come to nothing in an instant. You can warp your entire life around an idea of preparedness and still be caught flat-footed.
I have some experience with this. Growing up, my relationship with my father was… problematic. As in there was either absolutely nothing there, or there was a problem. For several years straight and then later reinforced by demands that I continue dealing with him as though all problems had been resolved (when not a single one of them had). I tried everything I could think of to get out of the situation I was in with him but no matter what I tried or considered, I couldn’t affect the situation at all except to make it worse. I seriously considered whether running away from home would fix it but I lacked any means of finding food or shelter. I thought briefly about whether or not I’d have to kill him to get out of that situation. I thought about what I’d have to do to accomplish that and decided I didn’t want to go where that would take me or be the kind of person I’d have to be to pull it off. But yeah, things were pretty bad. So I spent a whole lot of time trying to avoid him as much as I could while still living under the same roof.
If you think of being a dangerous person as a fight response to the fight or flight paradigm, what I lived through was more like the flight version. And it was exhausting. It’s very difficult to stay constantly ready to deal with something. There are times when you relax and you shouldn’t. And a lot of times when you’re at a heightened alertness but nothing happens. Most of the people I’ve known who have expressed a desire to be “dangerous people” or some variant of it don’t seem to have the slightest idea how much effort or just plain endurance is required to do it. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone.
Because actually doing this would be far too much work for most people, what we get instead are people doing a very ugly version of cosplaying. They’re pretending they’re dangerous but in ways they think are low risk and low effort to them. They either lack the perspective to understand the dangers they’re inflicting upon anyone around them or they just don’t care. One depressingly common example from the last few years are the gun nuts that can’t be bothered to know or practice basic gun safety.
Good point from Ianir about the cosplay. Remember the scene in “A Christmas Story” where the kid fantasizes about bad guys coming over his fence one by one, and he pops them all with his Red Ryder BB gun? I think a version of that scene lives inside the brains of most gun nuts.
Re the gun nut fantasy above.
I guess that’s why I’m not a real gun nut (in addition to never having owned a gun). I might be dangerously close in that I still “fantasize” about that when playing video games or pen and paper RPGs, but I very very clearly would never want that to happen in real life. It would be absolutely horrible even if it was absolutely necessary. I want to save everyone. (My “hero” is Vash The Stampede. If you know the character, he wants to save everyone.)
I also wanted to emphasize another point above: To be competent to a noteworthy degree with unarmed fighting skill – or with muscle-powered weapons – it takes an extreme amount of time. Like nearly any other noteworthy skill, it takes thousands of hours to really get good at it. For most people, the cost-benefit analysis simply isn’t there to learn how to fight for self defense. I’m all for people who want to learn how to fight for other reasons, such as the enjoyment of it, and as for staying in shape and health.
Finally, I personally don’t think knowing how to fight makes you become dangerous to others (probably the opposite actually). However, carrying a gun – I do think that makes you more dangerous to others. At a minimum, accidents happen. You can have an accident with a gun. By contrast, you can’t “accidentally” punch someone, throw someone, or put someone into a choke.
This post has been a slow burn at the back of my mind since Sunday. The fact an average American citizen (I’m not going to hedge that and anyone who chooses to nitpick it can get cordially fucked) can face this many cases of gun violence in their life is … I just don’t get it. I don’t understand how a country can decide that Marcus’s experiences with gun threats and potential violence are an acceptable price to pay for anything.
I’ve lived my years in New Zealand and, lately, Australia, and the idea of everyday shootings is just laughable to us. It doesn’t happen. It’s unthinkable. Kids go to and from school with their everyday human angst and absolutely no fear of being shot. I can be tremendously rude to someone and the thought I may be shot for that is absent from my life. Thumped, yes. Shot? Never. It’s unthinkable.
I had never truly understood how gun violence is part of the everyday calculus of American life. Thank you Marcus for writing this, and holy fuck I’m sorry you have this much source material.
xohjoh2n:
300 yards with a sniper rifle?
You know, I actually started quoting that old imperialist Kipling at one ATVer who made threatening noises when I was telling them to leave. I’m such an idiot.
Sniper rifles are only a negotiating tool if you have a good voice link with your target, or a good signaling set-up.
What I want is an F-35 that I can call on the radio. Air support is a great way to win a knife-fight.
Badland@#23:
I don’t understand how a country can decide that Marcus’s experiences with gun threats and potential violence are an acceptable price to pay for anything.
Exactly. And thank you for noticing. I agree vehemently.
It’s a consequence of us having too many guns – literally any idiot in the US (including republican representatives) can buy guns. It’s like giving power tools to 10 year-olds. Worse, probably. And it’s also a consequence of having a highly militarized society: everyone has to be used to the endless fear and threat of violence that serves as the primary motivator to get the American lumpenproletariat to support bombing whoever needs to be bombed today. After all, a population that’ll pay $1000 for an AR-15 to “protect their home” will pay trillions for F-35s, too.
I had never truly understood how gun violence is part of the everyday calculus of American life.
I’d say that the underlying threat of violence IS the American way of life. That, and fast food.
I don’t want to do a whole bunch of postings on this topic, so I’m going to comment on my own posting. How gauche.
One of the questions I used to ask my gun nut friends, when they started going on about “home defense” was “have you ever actually used a gun to defend yourself?” Usually, that question trawls back a bunch of really iffy case-studies, like: “I told some guy I had a gun at home and was going to go get it and they left” but the scenario of armed people attacking someone’s house or person is mostly reserved, in American society, as an experience for black people. And the people kicking in the door are cops. Now, if someone said that they wanted to rig their home to defend against cops, then we do need to talk about perimeter alerts, sniper crawl-spaces, overhead cover, and antipersonnel mines. If someone said “yeah I have claymore mines pointed at the door in case ICE serves a ‘no knock’ warrant” I’d probably applaud them, as I remembered the meeting I have to go to and started edging my way out of there.
There is a huge topic, which I’ve pointed at a few times in postings and comments, which is that “home defense” is a prerogative of white supremacy. Something like 3% of American gun-owners own 90% of the guns and basically 100% of that 3% are white. Most gun owners are white. Partly its because guns are expensive and you’re not allowed to make your own, but I don’t see any way to interpret that except through a lens calibrated for American racism. The ideology that guns are for home defense was part of the engine that helped power the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and, later, slave-catchers. The guns that were bought allegedly for home defense were the guns that were brought out in Tulsa in June 1921, and many hot southern nights when the KKK rode. That observation has also gone a long way toward forming my view that guns are not for defense. The lie of the gun defense is one of the Great American Lies, along with “one person one vote” and “separate but equal.”
GerrardOfTitanServer@#11:
There’s a fun youtuber that seems reliable and legit called Ramsey Dewey. Former low-level MMA fighter. He runs a MMA gym in Shanghai. He’s got a fun way of telling stories.
I’ve checked some of his postings out and now I’m subscribed. Good stuff.
Eventually I’ve got some more postings to make about martial arts, possibly including my own wash-out history as a bushi. I also need to introduce you guys to some other martial arts skeptics that are interesting, and also some serious people who think about the topic. It’s more fun than global warming, at least.
I suspect that the 3% who own 90% of the guns mostly have “Mad Max” fantasies. If civilization would just hurry up and collapse due to nuclear war, global warming, a national power grid outage, a new civil war, or whatever, then in their minds they would be Kings of the New Wasteland. Post-apocalypse books like Lucifer’s Hammer and The Postman along with many video games feature this type of predator — roaming, gun-toting bands that grab whatever they want.
One of the many advantages of this thing we call “civilization” is to keep fantasists like this from gaining any real power. But I do worry that some of them will be motivated to turn their fantasy into reality by doing their best to facilitate its collapse.
Looking forward to it.
The most interesting thing I think I ever heard about martial arts is from a source I can’t remember, but whoever they were they something along the lines of “we’ve learned more about martial arts in the last 30 years than we did in the previous 3000”. “Martial arts” in this case meaning “empty hands” – if you’re allowed weapons then we learned everything we need to know in Japan in August 1945.
What they meant was: there are so many arts all over the world, so many “masters”, each claiming their style is the best. Bruce Lee was onto something in the 70s when he said “the best style is to have no style”, but he died before he could elaborate sufficiently. People who had a style generally were VERY careful never to take on anyone from a different style, because then their inadequacies would be demonstrated. Then came the Gracies and UFC, and style went up against style, and a LOT of people who thought they were hard got their asses handed to them.
What seems to have come out of it is this: if you’re going into a ring, or onto a mat, then the most efficient way to win is to spend about 5000 hours training some or other form of boxing/kickboxing, for the bit where you’ve got range and are still standing… and another 5000 training Brazilian jiu-jitsu, for the inevitable moment when it goes to the ground. Everything else – karate, taekwondo, tai chi, wing chun (to name just the ones I’ve trained in at various times) – EVERYTHING is good for health and body awareness and discipline and fitness and flexibility and speed and coordination and NOT for fighting.
The slightly depressing thing is there are still loads of people out there who can’t get on board with that fact, but it is a fact you can verify by simply watching any MMA match. “MMA” used to mean “mixed martial arts” in the sense that a karate guy could face a sumo wrestler. Now it generally means two guys who’ve split their years of training 50/50 with BJJ and kickboxing… because it’s been proven that that’s what works.
There’s a youtube rabbit hole of watching “masters” of various forms get their butts kicked by these kinds of people. In particular, there’s a chap carrying the banner for MMA in China – and the government are burying him, because he keeps humiliating masters of traditional Chinese arts with these modern ideas, and the CCP don’t like that one little bit. Google Xu Xiaodong. His story is infuriating and tragic.
The tl;dr of the history, so far as I’m aware of it, is this:
For more than a thousand years in England and in most other European countries, ending only recently in some countries (circa 100 years ago or later), there was a military duty of every able-bodied adult white male citizen of fighting age to attend to military training and to own and maintain military equipment. The exact form and shape of this military training and military equipment varied by time period and by country. This idea that the entire adult able-bodied 17-45 male citizenry being a military force is known a “militia”. The citizenry is the militia. For most of this time, it was not a considered a right. Instead, it was an imposition by the king.
Fast forward to the IIRC Glorious Revolution where the English king tried to disarm his political and religious opposition. That ended up with the English bill of rights that guaranteed a personal right to own personal weapons of war. (Which has since been discontinued in England.)
This was shortly before American independence. At that time, basically all “Americans” self-identified as loyal British citizens, along with this simultaneous duty and right of militia service and weapons rights. Add in a probably large amount of this public sentiment being abused by the American ruling class who wanted to secede to property their right to own other people (Marcus has posts on this). Then add in the British military being sent to America not as an invasion force, but rather as a police force – there was no open talk of revolt or secession when the British military first came; they came to enforce certain tax laws, and not to put down a rebellion. The final straw was when some portion of the British military tried to take the guns of some Americans in some town somewhere, and that started the American war of independence.
Out of this, a mostly mythological narrative was created where it was random untrained militia-men who fought back the English army, and that the English army were there to enforce completely unjust laws, and that it was only American self-reliance and mass ownership of weapons by the proles that made the difference. That led in part to the codification of gun rights from the English bill of rights to the new American bill of rights.
I’m very hazy on the next 150 years or so. Gun rights just didn’t come up in federal court. I don’t know if the NRA built on an already strong gun ownership belief in the population, or if they recreated it. Regardless, the NRA was captured by the gun manufacturing lobby and the Republican party, and they went to the extreme that any regulation of the right was unconstitutional and evil. The thing is, most gun owners from my experience would be open to a lot of reasonable regulations, such as mandatory gun owners training and licensing (similar to the historical mandatory militia training), but they’re so turned off from the idea because they rightly view the Democratic party as completely untrustworthy liars on this topic.
The Democratic party will never be satisfied until gun rights are wiped out (which I honestly think is probably a good thing, I’ve changed in my beliefs). I just wish that they didn’t have to lie about their goals. It might produce less acrimony among Republicans.
Alternatively, because there’s not enough support in the population to overturn the second amendment, I wish the Democrats would change their policy position to officially support gun rights as part of a grand compromise to get mandatory gun owners training and licensing, mandatory background checks, and a whole host of other things that most gun owners could agree to if it wasn’t part of a slippery slope.
Really, Gerrard? What, exactly, have any Democrats done to “wipe out” gun rights or “overturn the Second Amendment?”
I find it kinda sad when you post a comment that’s mostly sensible and then goes absolutely off the rails in its last two paragraphs.
Wow, GerradOfTitanServer @30, there is a lot to unpack there which is either poorly known history or just false. I’ll just mention a few.
First, the idea that every able-bodied man was part of militia for the past 1000 years is incorrect. There were several different forms of armies prior to the 18th century. From the feudal nobles who were required by their kings to maintain a body of armed troops, the number based on the wealth of the noble. To mercenaries hired to fight, who had an annoying practice selling out to the other side if the pay was better. Even armies composed of slaves, who often got better pay then the mercenaries. In all cases, soldering was a paid profession, and not every able-bodied man was required to participate. As for them all being white, that is completely false, take a look at the history of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges for an example, although he is more famous for his compositions than being a Colonel.
Next. The Glorious Revolution was in 1688. Or roughly 90 years before the American Revolution. Again, as far as I can tell, this war was fought mainly with paid armies. The only relationship to militias was the Militia Acts which said that the King cannot keep a standing army without the consent of Parliament. Note, militia, and standing armies, refer to professional soldiers, not armed citizens. The Bill of Rights you refer to allows Protestants to own arms, within the limits of other laws. It did not grant universal gun ownership rights, it prevented laws from selectively disarming Protestants.
As for the gun culture of America, a good bit of it can be traced to two sources:
First, the institution of slavery by the English cavalier classes before, during, and after the English Civil War (1642+). Prior to the English Civil War the slave culture in America was fairly well established, but a lot of aristocrats fled England during the English Civil War and during the period of the English Commonwealth to avoid Cromwell’s government. They needed, and used, force to keep the slaves from rebelling. Guns were commonplace among the prosperous white folks, not for hunting and food but as tools of death and fear. This culture, regrettably, has survived. But this culture is largely home-grown and not imported from England.
Second, and possibly of a greater impact was the immigration of the Scottish Borderer in the early 18th century (c. 1720 – 1770). These people were often displaced, or even sent to America as convicts, from an area between England and Scotland which was seen as lawless due to the reivers. Bands of lawless, armed, men who would raid both English and Scottish homes and towns. This culture was imported, and guns were seen in this culture as important tools for both survival and defense.
Oddly enough, the reivers were probably not all that important during the American War of Independence. That war, contrary to a lot of the history taught in grade-school, was won through the use of professional armies and foreign mercenaries. Armed civilians did not have a great deal of impact in that war, although many people did join the Colonial Army, and were paid for it. Most of the myths about civilians winning the American Revolutionary War date to about 20-30 years afterwards with some of the false histories written by Washington Irving.
But the immigration of the Scottish Borderers brought a strong belief that government is ineffectual, every man is responsible for defending themselves, and family is more important than community. Which is not surprising because for a number of generations they lived in a region where those things were true. Neither the English or Scottish governments were very successful in controlling the reivers, A family had to defend themselves, because no one else would.
The immigration patterns of the Scottish Borderers was largely to the south and west. The Appalachian states, as well as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, were largely settled by the Borderers. Yes, they settled in those regions even before they were owned by the USA. Who was going the stop them?
For what it’s worth, there were town militias formed during and after the American Revolution in America. There were laws requiring able-bodied men (and this time they were often required to be white), to maintain a rifle and get some training. Many towns had several of them, they were primarily under the direction of the State governors, with the intent that they would be available to be called up as an immediate, local, force for a variety of problems, like riots or natural disasters. Although they occasionally were used in border disputes with other states (see the Toledo War). Most references to them in contemporary newspapers are about them marching in local parades. These militia were eventually organized in the National Guard.
So there were segments of the US population who held cultural beliefs that gun ownership for personal defense was important. Over time, members of this culture did disperse across the nation, but they are still concentrated in the middle south. The NRA did build on these cultural beliefs, and helped, along with other national fears, to create our modern myth that guns are a necessary object for defense. I’ve never seen the logic in that belief, but beliefs are not usually based in logic but in culture.
Just like your belief that the Democratic Party will never be satisfied until gun rights are wiped out. While there are plenty of democrats who would like to have guns seen as a tool to be used only in specific circumstances where they are the best tool for the job (like target shooting and hunting), most would be happy there were better regulations on sales, registration, training (a lot of safety training!), carrying, and safety. The National Democratic Party has never, as a platform, called for the elimination of all guns, only better regulation of them. Local chapters of the Democratic Party may have called for the elimination of all guns, but I only say that because the local party conventions I’ve gone to have had some really weird motions for platforms passed at times. Although I’ve never seen abolition of guns even brought up at a local platform; unlike unrealistic platforms proposals like recognition of Tibet as a nation or banning gasoline (that didn’t pass). You get the wackiest kooks in local party politics, from all parties. So some local party may have voted to put abolishing guns as part of their platform, I wouldn’t be surprised. The belief that the Democratic Party, as a whole, wants to completely remove all gun rights is a lie. When confronted by a lie, please ask yourself, “who benefits from this lie?”
I haven’t had as much exposure to guns in the wild as Marcus has. Most of my experience has been with hunters or from my time in the military. But one story I can tell, which still irritates me, was that I was once hosting a party and one of the guests who usually has a couple beers didn’t drink. No big deal, I really didn’t care. Until, when he was leaving, he told me that he didn’t have a drink because he was carrying a concealed handgun. Great. I’m glad he didn’t have a drink. But I would have been MUCH happier if he had mentioned it at the start of the party and I could have told him to put it into the lock-box in the trunk of his car. Maybe he thought he needed for his job, he taught middle-school, but I didn’t want him carrying in my house especially when I have other guests.
@24
I’m pretty sure the sniper rifle is an effective negotiation tool in its own right – just a very fast, intense negotiation.
As was said in Star Wars:
Anakin: When I got to them we got into aggressive negotiations.
Padme: Aggressive negotiations? What’s that?
Anakin: Ah, well, it’s negotiations with a lightsaber.
You just might not choose to be that intense.
(Note: a true Jedi should always try to find an alternative path, “The best blades are kept in their sheaths.” You can make your own mind up whether “Jedi Mind Tricks” constitute a moral alternative path or not.)
Flex
You’re confusing 1- the composition of those for whom militia duty applied, and 2- the armies that they frequently went to war with. Those were different things. Proving that the army was typically composed of professional soldiers does not contradict my point at all about the composition of the militia. Furthre, I also wrote that, at least concerning the American war of independence, it is basically mythical that unprofessional soldiers played the major role in the fighting. Some links that you should read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assize_of_Arms_of_1181https://www.medievalists.net/2018/04/medieval-origins-of-the-second-amendment/This is simply incorrect. The historical evidence to the contrary in the American founding context is overwhelming. Just for example. Not only did the founders want everyone (all able-bodied adult white male citizens of fighting age) to be armed to the teeth – they required it by law. See the second federal militia act of 1792.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792I also have a report prepared for the federal congress about the state of readiness of the militia, and it says that in almost every case, the weapons of the militia were the individual property of the militia.
American State Papers. Military Affairs. Volume 1. 1789 – 1819. Year 1812. Page 198. Internal Title: “No. 62” “The Militia”. Link:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsp&fileName=016/llsp016.db&Page=198To beat the dead horse, let me cite a court case from about the same time period that upheld the rather hefty statutory fine for failure to obtain the military firearm, ammunition, and laundry list of equipment, and that this duty was a personal individual duty, and that the fine was also personal.
Source: The court case: Commonwealth v Stephen Annis. Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts. Year 1812. This court decision can be found in the following book: Title: “Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court Of the Commonwealth Of Massachusetts.” Volume 9. Book Compiler: Dudley Atkins Tyng, Esq. Internal page number: 31. Link:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Reports_of_Cases_Argued_and_Determined_i.html?id=_7RJAAAAYAAJThe slave patrol argument has no basis and comes from a scholar that is grossly incompetent or lying. I can go into more detail later if you want.
First time I’ve ever heard about the Scottish Borderer thing.
False. Even today, current federal law defines the militia as consisting of basically all able-bodied adult citizens between the ages of 17 and 45. Rather, militia duty was eventually transformed into the draft and the selective service registration requirement.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246As before, I want to point out that, yes, only a small portion of the militia is organized aka well trained, and that organized militia is known today as the national guard. That’s how it was back then at America’s founding too. Federalist #29 says:
Also, I think looking at California is a good indicator of what Democrats would probably do if they got into power nationally, because they are in power in the state. Open carry is outlawed. Concealed carry might as well be outlawed unless you’re a cop or a bodyguard of the rich and famous or something like that. They passed some ridiculous law that required all new handguns sold to have some AFAIK infeasible tracing technology that all gun manufacturers said that they would never implement, which is tantamount to a ban on all new handgun models. There’s also the California assault weapon ban, which is just a nonsense law based on either willful dishonesty or stupendous ignorance about firearms. Taken to the apparent logical conclusion, they really want a ban on all semiauto firearms; revolvers too probably. This is not compatible with what most firearm owners in America want. Not even close. I wish I had the stats to back this up, but I suspect it’s basically a ban on most firearms manufactured in the last 80 years.
@ GerrardOfTitanServer #34,
If you check the sources of the Wikipedia article you reference, you will find that the claim of the right to bear arms in Medieval England is certainly still disputed.
Schwoerer, Lois G. (2000)
As for the other article, here is an interesting tell:
Got that? Common people were allowed to carry knives and daggers, but not swords? This restriction was part of the sumptuary laws common at the time. Sumptuary laws commonly list what weapons are appropriate for each class of men to carry, and since they never mention carrying weapons as a right which all men enjoy, it’s pretty clear that an unrestricted right to bear arms did not exist in medieval times.
In fact, regardless of the myths promulgated by the gun fanciers, we have contemporary records as to why the second amendment was included in the federal constitution. After witnessing the chaos in Europe over the past several hundred years, aided and abetted by standing armies and mercenary troops (Flemish Archers for Hire Cheap!), the authors of the federal constitution argued that giving the President, who was also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, a permanent standing army to command at their will was too much power to give one person. Further, if you have read Machiavelli’s Art of War you will find that Machiavelli argues for a citizen militia because of the risk of standing armies or mercenary forces deciding that they should take power from the ruler. So rather than forming a federal standing army, the authors of the constitution recommended relying on a militia army. Subsequent events showed that didn’t work well.
considering I was explicitly referring to the English Militia acts of 1681/1682, which gave control of the armies and navies of England to the king, this was either a miss-understanding of what I wrote (which would certainly be at least partially my mistake), or deliberate obfuscation. The word “Militia” is not restricted in definition to “armed citizenry”, and conflating definitions in this manner is very common in debates about the second amendment.
I am familiar with the often-quoted Stephan Annis case. What is not commonly mentioned was that while the Militia Act of 1810 of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, referenced as important in the Annis case (and which includes the 1892 Militia act of federal congress in it’s entirety), also lists in paragraph 3, section 1, a large list of exclusions from serving on the militia. Men who were exempt from serving in the Militia included, among others, university students, religious leaders, and ALL Quakers. There is another list of conditional exclusions, which includes doctors, physicians, and coroners. The act requires people who are conditionally exempted to contribute $2/year to help maintain the militias, but those who are actually excluded are not required to contribute.
Further, the mustering requirement in the Massachusetts act was ONCE PER YEAR. That was, in fact, the entire basis of the case. That an 18-year-old was registered as part of the Militia, but when the mustering occurred he didn’t have his gear, so his parent was fined $1.50. Since the six month grace period between enrollment and having all required equipment had not elapsed, the court found that the boy didn’t violate any laws and so no fine could be levied. The case was dismissed. The question of the requirement for able-bodies men between the ages of 18 and 45 to provide their own equipment was not part of the case and not adjudicated in this court.
Further, as the Massachusetts statute shows, how states interpreted the Federal Militia act varied widely, granting exclusions to large classes of people. The legality of that was not addressed in the Annis case. As far as I’m concerned the Amis case is another example of gun-fanciers looking for something which might, vaguely, support their cause. This is an example of trolling through history, cherry-picking anything which might support a current argument about a topic which was not considered important at the time.
Moving on.
If you read carefully, I did not refer to the slave patrols in the cultural attitudes of slaveowners. I am uncertain how accurate the claim that gun worship started with slave patrols is. However, if you are suggesting that slaveowners didn’t use firearms as a means to generate fear and obedience in their slaves (which is what I said) you are mistaken. Again, I can’t tell whether you are miss-reading what I wrote due to my poor communication, or deliberately trying to change the topic. I’ll assume you leapt to a conclusion about what I was writing rather than reading it. Which means I should probably have mentioned them. My point was slaveowner’s did have a culture where guns were seen as necessary, and that culture has survived to the present day.
Finally, in post #35, you mention actions which California has taken to reduce gun culture:
Open carry outlawed – Since I’m not familiar with the statute, I presume it includes exceptions for transporting firearms. But as has been discussed here, open carry for the lutz, or as a threat, is something which probably should be outlawed.
Concealed carry outlawed – with exceptions for people with permits and permits will be harder to get, i.e. show a justifiable need to concealed carry. I have no problem with that. Many people with CC permits appear to have no need for them, so why allow them to carry a concealed weapon? Would you think it’s safe for people to carry sticks of dynamite, or hand-grenades, without showing that they have a need to do so?
RFID or similar technology built into guns. There is nothing technologically impossible with this requirement, similar tracking technology is already used in manufacturing plants on their power tools, carts, and other equipment. The fact that gun manufacturers have decided to not implement such technology is not a ban enacted by the California legislature, but a decision the made by the ironmongers. Put the blame in the proper quarter.
I agree that most ‘assault weapon’ bans appear to be largely based on ignorance of a topic which isn’t that hard to master. What defines an ‘assault weapon’ is usually defined in the statutes, but even then weapons which are not perceived as ‘assault weapons’ get covered by the ban while weapons which are easily modifiable to fully-automatic operation are not covered.
Then we get to this statement:
Not demonstrated. This is a slippery slope argument you are making, and it’s a regular talking point from the gun-fondlers. You are assigning motivations to other people without evidence that they hold those motivations.
If, on a national level, legislation was introduced to better regulate sales, registration, training (a lot of safety training!), carrying, and improve safety. And that regulation resulted in a reduction in gun violence, the California legislature would probably stop passing laws dealing with guns. The California legislature is responding to a problem, it not creating a problem. If the problem they are responding to goes away, they will stop responding to it.
Even in England people can get permits to own guns. To use them for hunting and target shooting. Guns are highly regulated, but not completely banned. Many people don’t bother because of the cost, but that’s their choice, not government mandates. If you want to argue that the costs are creating a society where only the wealthy have access to guns, well, we already live in a society where wealthy people have access to amenities that the average person has to sacrifice for. I could have a swimming pool, I choose not to do so because of the cost. The only difference between a swimming pool and a gun is that a large number of American citizens think that owning a gun isn’t just owning a potentially hazardous tool for recreation, but necessary for their personal safety.
Why shouldn’t we aspire to the same level of regulation the United Kingdom has?
I really wish you read my arguments instead of attacking someone else’s arguments.
Still non-sequitir. You should go back and read what I actually wrote.
That was one very important reason. It far from the only reason. You and I both know I can supply endless quotes from the founding fathers saying how vital it is for the population to have guns to overthrow a tyranical government. If you really insist, I can do so in a future post.
How is this relevant?
I’ve read the case. It seems like you haven’t. Pretty sure that they didn’t level the fine because the period between notification of enrollment in the militia and the imposition of the fine was not at least 6 months as called for by law. Also, the court decision pretty clearly stated that the fine would have been imposed if not for this reason. I don’t know why you think it is not relevant to this question.
You’re being absolutely ridiculous. We have the Federalist paper which said that there ought to be a law that requires everyone to own a military weapon. There’s the federal law which requires those members of the militia to own a military grade weapon, ammo, and a laundry list of military equipment. Then there’s the various state laws which imposed personal monetary fines for failure to comply. (Yes, there were various exceptions which were sometimes large to militia duty, but they were not so large as to deny the point that most people owned a gun and that this was reqiured by law.) Finally, there’s the report prepared for the federal congress (which I think you didn’t address), and it talked about the number of guns being held by the militia and how they were all basically the private property of the individual militia members, and the numbers mean that it’s a very large percentage of the overall population of adult white male citizens 18 to 45.
I do not have to show a “good cause” to exercise my free speech rights. I should not need to show “good cause” to exercise my other clear constitutional rights. It doesn’t matter if I think if it’s a good idea or not. That’s the law. That’s what the constitution clearly says. So as long it’s the constitution, then judges should uphold it – lest we weaken all of our other constitutional rights.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Bolt
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. – What would you do? – Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? – And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? – This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? – Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
This is you right now.
IIRC, it’s actually microstamping the cases as the gun is fired. Not sure. Would have to look it up again.
If you look at the various “bullet button” laws and cases, it seems pretty clear that the real goal of assault weapon bans is a ban on all semiauto rifles.
This is an understatement. IIRC, the freaking Olympic athletes of England who do shooting have to practice out of country because they can’t get a permit for the guns that they use in the Olympic sport.
Did you miss the part where I agreed with you already? I think you did. I think you should actually read what I write instead of arguing against a strawman.
Sources.
Yeah. Even Olympic athletes in England for certain sports can’t get around the handgun ban.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/sports/olympics/handgun-ban-after-1996-mass-shooting-hampers-british-olympian-georgina-geikie.htmlThe California ban on new handgun models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microstampinghttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/23/california-gun-control-microstamping-bullet-casingsAnd here’s all of the sources I have on standby for why the founders thought that personal gun rights were important. Given you know about the Annis case, you might already know all of these, but hey, here we go. Skipping some of the really common ones.
There’s the famous dicta in Dredd Scott which takes for granted that white citizens can carry guns basically wherever they want.
I do have to at least mention the Federalist Papers. Remember that they didn’t have law journals, and phamplets were basically the highest form of legal and political reasoning at the time. The Federalist Papers had the highest popularity and impact of all such phamplets at that time. In Federalist 29, it is argued that it might be necessary sometimes to raise a national army, and that the national militia, if well trained and well equiped in war, could defeat the national army under a tyranical government, and said that this plan of maintaining a well armed and well traied militia provides “the best possible security against [tyranny by a standing army]”. Federalist 46 makes this even clearer and explicitly states that the kings of Europe could not continue their tyranny if their people had guns. An often overlooked fact is that Federalist 46 gives specific numbers: It says that the national militia consists of about half a million people, which is basically all white males 18 to 45 in America.
Let’s get a little more obscure.
In the series of pamphlets titled “An Examination Into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution” by Noah Webster. Available at:
https://books.google.com/books?id=YJo0AQAAMAAJNote that these phamplets in particular by Noah Webster were second in popularity and impact only to the Federalist Papers. An excerpt, translated by me into modern spelling:
I have the father of the Constitution, James Madison, arguing with the father of the Bill Of Rights, George Mason, during official debates in the Virginia congress over ratification of the new constitution, and in this argument, they use the terms “the people” and “the militia” interchangeably, and they both say that it would be bad for the government to disarm the people / the militia. Source: The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution [Elliot’s Debates, Volume 3]. Saturday, 14 June, 1788.
https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwed.html… A direct link to the particular page is sadly unavailable. The search function does work. Excerpt:PS:
While I’m here, let me propose one seemingly radical idea. Today’s American police are the standing army that the founders warned about. The founders would not care as much about today’s army because they’re not used as law enforcement and because they’re citizen soldiers instead of foreign mercenaries. What the founding generation was really upset about (apart from the British army trying to take their guns), was the imposition of a police force to uphold unpopular laws using “brutal” and unjust tactics. Read the American Declaration Of Independence again, and see how many of those complaints are really just complaints about police. The problem was not really what we would call today “a standing army”. The problem was what we would call today “police”.
I’m not saying that we should get rid of police, unlike certain other activists today. I am saying that we should radically curtail their special powers and radically transform the system of accountability so that they can be held accountable. For example: No qualified immunity. Drastically reduce the opportunities that legally permit arrest in the first place – most offenses should be handled by asking for identification cards and giving a ticket. Allow private citizens first opportunity to pursue criminal charges personally or with a lawyer of their choosing when they’re the victim (an IMO necessary step in the current American context to hold individual cops and individual government prosecutors accountable) – note that this was common historical practice circa 1800.
For further information, see:
The wikipedia article on hue and cry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry“ARE COPS CONSTITUTIONAL?”, by Roger Roots. It’s the best freely available introduction article that I can find. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least decent.
https://constitution.org/2-LawRev/roots/cops.htm“Is Prosecution a Core Executive Function? Morrison v. Olson and the Framers’ Intent”, by Stephanie A. J. Dangel, in The Yale Law Journal. Spoiler: Like most peer-reviewed papers whose title is a question, the paper gives the answer “no”. It’s a proper peer reviewed paper that supports many of the same claims. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall. It pains me to cite such an article, but I have not yet found better.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/796596It’s in this cultural and legal context that we have to examine the right to keep and bear arms, and it’s this additional context which makes it very very silly to argue against an expansive personal right.
You and I both know I can supply endless quotes from the founding fathers saying how vital it is for the population to have guns to overthrow a tyranical government.
The idea that the Founders wanted the people to be able to overthrow the government they’d worked and fought so hard to create, is absolute bullshit. You can quote the Federalist papers all you want, none of it overrides the obvious fact that they intended to create a government that COULD enforce the Constitution and the people’s will, and COULD put down rebellions against the constitutional/republican order they had created.
Nor does quoting the Federalist papers override the very plain words of the Second Amendment, which explicitly called for a WELL-REGULATED militia, to ensure the security of a free state.
GerrardOfTitanServer,
You stated that:
Which I showed was not true.
You stated that:
Which I showed was not true.
You stated that per the US Militia Act of 1792, all able-bodied white men were expected to be enrolled in a militia. I agreed with you that the act says this. Then showed you that in implementation of said act, extensive exemptions were made. I also pointed out that a yearly mustering requirement is hardly an expectation of instant readiness.
As for the 1806 report on the state of readiness of the Militia, did you read it? Just as an example, the 1800 census of the first state in that report, New Hampshire, gives a population of 183,515 in 1800. The report on Militia Readiness from 1806 shows about 19,000 privates. If you added all the other ranks, you get somewhere around 25,000 people (including drummers and surgeons). So about 1 in 8 people in New Hampshire were registered in the Militia. I haven’t looked, but I suspect that all able-bodies white men between the ages of 18 and 45 constituted somewhat more than 12% of the population. So there were obviously a lot of exceptions.
Then, continuing to look at the report of the first state listed, for these 19,000 privates (not including the roughly 6,000 other men) in the militia in the New Hampshire, they had about 12,000 muskets, and about 1,700 brace of pistols. That’s about 55% of the New Hampshire Militia having guns in 1806. I’m not going to bother with the rest of the colonies, that was the first state listed in the report. I expect we’d see about the same from the other states. The claims in the body of the report about how well prepared the militia is can be discounted as political hot-air.
Have you read the Amis case and decision? Because you are getting something very different out of that case than I am. You claim that the case of Amis case shows that the Militia Act of 1782 was strictly enforced. I pointed out that the point of law considered in the Amis case was not about the requirement for all able-bodied white men to serve in a militia, but about whether someone already enrolled in the militia had their kit. These means the Amis case cannot be used to claim that every able-bodied white man was required to be a militia. The Amis case shows that someone who is already a member of the militia can be fined if they show up at a muster without their equipment. Since this is the best case the gun fondlers appear to have come up with to claim enforcement of the Militia Act of 1782 (and I’m certain they’ve looked hard for some justification). I consider this cherry-picking.
Here is something which reveals your true colors:
Maybe you haven’t been following along, but the reason there is so much debate over gun control is precisely because the constitution is not clear about it. Regardless of your claim that it is. If it had clearly said that “every adult white male between the ages of 18 and 45 must possess a gun”, it probably would have been rescinded by now. If you haven’t recognized it, by invoking the Militia Act you are making the claim that the second amendment says precisely that.
I really don’t know enough about the California law to comment on it, so I’ll drop that topic other than to say that you still haven’t shown that the Democratic Party, or the California Legislature, have a goal to take away everyone’s guns.
BTW, I looked into the story of the Olympic athlete, Georgina-Geikie, who had to practice outside of England. The story isn’t quite as sensational as you make it out to be. First, the story is more than a decade old, but I as I’m not subscribed to the NYT I couldn’t follow your link through the paywall. Second, the story is that a school shooting incident in 1996 encouraged general banning of handguns in 1997 (note: among others, one exception is for hunters carrying handguns for humane dispatch of wounded animals). She was 12 when the handgun ban was put in place, and when she decided to focus on competitive shooting several years later she had to practice out of England until her permit was granted. She got the permit in 2009, plenty of time to compete in the 2012 Olympic games in London. It does not say when her application for a permit was submitted. This is a non-story. Here’s a link to the Independent which described the situation as part of a longer story: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/great-britons/shooting-to-the-top-1938014.html.
You may stop searching the gun fondler sites for founding-fathers quotes for me to acknowledge and then explain how they fit into the larger historical context and narrative. Suffice it to be said that the history of gun control really doesn’t matter. I love studying history, and I enjoy tracing how modern cultural beliefs reached today’s world. However, the problem of school shootings, or shootings at workplaces or bars, or just accidents from people too drunk to safely handle a firearm is not a historical problem. We can look to history to see if there are any solutions there, but we can’t look to history to justify inaction. Unless, of course, inaction is what is desired.
Raging Bee.
We’ve had this discussion a million times already. You’re just wrong. You’re wrong about the intent of the founders, and you’re wrong about the meaning of “well-regulated militia”. “Well-regulated” had a very different meaning historical. In context, it meant something like “well trained, well organized, and well equiped for war”, aka “properly functioning”. It didn’t mean “properly controlled”. Your nuance is all wrong. “Militia” is simply another name for the whole national citizenry as a military force, of citizen soldiers whose day job is something other than soldier. Pointing to “well-regulated militia” displays a deep ignorance about the historical and legal meaning of these words.
…
So what?
So what?
After the 6 month period, yes. That’s what it was about.
Why!? I don’t get it. How is this cherrypicking? You completely lost me. So what if half of adult white male 18-45 were exempt? How does that change anything? It is still strong evidence that the militia is much closer to “everyone” than it is “the national guard”. You’re also not engaging with the other quotes that I provided, such as the exchange between James Madison and George Mason, where they equivocate between “the militia” and “the people”, and they say how horrible it would be if the government tried to disarm the people. Or Noah Webster and the Federalist saying quite clearly that the people should be armed so that they could overthrow unjust governments. You’re still ignoring where the Federalist includes numbers for the militia which are quite higher than later laws, strongly suggesting that the Federalist did not forsee such extensive exceptions.
What? Because I suggested that it would do great harm to the rule of law and our civil liberties if we allowed a standard of “must show good cause / exceptional cause” to practice a civil liberty? Do you think that I should have to show “good cause” to organize a protest? Or to critique a public figure? Why are gun rights special? Because you disagree with gun rights? That’s not a proper judicial argument. That’s not an argument to be used in court. That’s an argument to be used in public to organize to change the law (to repeal the second amendment).
The only people who can say this are dishonest or grossly ignorant. Translated into modern English, it reads: “Because a national population that is well armed, well trained, and properly organized in the art of war is necessary to prevent tyranny and oppression, the right of every person to keep and carry weapons and other implements of war shall not be unduly infringed.” That’s simply what the words mean. It’s not unclear at all. Lots of people pretend it’s unclear – often out of a deep ignorance of what some of the words meant historically, and the cultural and legal context of the time (especially regarding militia duty requirements, police, and private prosecutions), and often because they don’t care – they would rather tear down all of the constitutional protections via horrible jurisprudence so that they can go over guns and they seem to not give a damn about the consequences.
You’re the one who said that people could get permits if they tried hard enough. I think that you misrepresented the situation.
For properly interpreting and applying the constitution, it damn well matters.
Again, it seems like you’re completely unable to distinguish between the questions “how should the judges rule under the law as it currently is?” and “what should we make the law be?”. Those are two very different questions. It seems like you need a refresher in civics 101. I’ve endorsing changing / repealing the second amendment, but I’ve also endorsed supporting properly jurisprudence and rule of law e.g. supported judges upholding individual gun rights so long as the second amendment is a thing. Anything else is unconscionable attack on rule of law and on our other civil liberties. It seems like you have absolutely no appreciation at all for rule of law. You are Roper in A Man For All Seasons in the quote that I gave above – you would dismantle rule of law to get your particular policy goals, and you’re too short-sighted to see the damage that such a plan would do to everyone later.
PS:
Why do I care so much? Because it pisses my side off when my side lies. You seem to know more than enough that there should be no excuse for saying that the second amendment is unclear. I consider that to be a willful lie. Most of your arguments are also quite disingenuous, e.g. citing exceptions to militia enrollment as somehow being a defeater for my argument.
You claimed to have refuted my point about the extensive history of militia duty to own weapons of war. You did no such thing. In England at least, and in at least several other European countries, over much of the historical time period from at least 1000 AD to today, there was a legal duty on most adult men of fighting age to own weapons of war and to practice with them. You seem fixated on the “carrying in public” aspect of this, and yet I never said that. I agree that carrying in public was often restricted to higher classes or not permitted at all.
I’ve seen many sources talking about many sorts of laws to this effect, including the Assize Of Arms 1181, and later laws that required basically all men of fighting age to own a longbow and practice for at least 2 hours every week, and laws that also banned playing other skill games to encourage more longbow practice. I know that reality is more complicated than the simple summary here. For example, nobles and persons of other classes were exempt from the ban on playing other games of skill. However, this summary is still pretty accurate and it’s a good synopsis of the history which apparently very few people know.
Link again:
https://www.medievalists.net/2018/04/medieval-origins-of-the-second-amendment/Some new links:
https://www.forbes.com/2010/06/16/legal-humor-archery-opinions-columnists-kevin-underhill.htmlhttps://guncite.com/journals/senrpt/senhardy.htmlWell-regulated” had a very different meaning historical. In context, it meant something like “well trained, well organized, and well equiped for war”, aka “properly functioning”.
Bullshit. In the context of the Second Amendment, “Well-regulated” meant, and still means, whatever regulation is necessary and proper to ensure that the militia upholds the security of a free state (which was the stated purpose of the militia). And yes, that did, and does, include “properly controlled” by duly elected officials, and not by some oligarch, gangster-boss or church.
And do you really believe the Founders intended for a republican form of government to be overthrown by any mob with enough guns? Of course they didn’t — the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was prompted by a rebellion that the previous “government” couldn’t put down, waged by veterans the previous “government” didn’t even have enough taxing authority to pay. The Founders wanted, and created, a national government with MORE power than its predecessor.
Not exactly, but basically yes. Did you read the quotes that I provided above from the Federalist, Noah Webster, James Madison and George Mason? This is but a small sample of quotes that all say the same thing.
Then why did they write that they did? Why is that when I challenge you and others like you, you cannot find a single quote to the contrary. If these positions were even remotely controversial at the time, there would have been others writing pamphlets and the like arguing against it. I have never seen such a thing. Such a thing does not exist. Thus the inevitable conclusion that it was basically universally accepted in America at that time that gun rights were important to enable violent overthrow of tyrannical governments.
PS:
Here’s a new one. Consider this:
Original 1789 charter of the University of North Carolina
https://docsouth.unc.edu/unc/unc01-08/unc01-08.html
Whereas in all well regulated governments it is the indispensable duty of every Legislatures to consult the happiness of a rising generation […]
So, do you think that “well regulated” here refers to a government that passes statutory regulations on itself?
Again, “well regulated” meant “properly functioning”. It was not a reference to government laws e.g. government regulations.
If you need a different way to think about it, there are certain mechanical devices today called “regulators”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulator_(automatic_control)
It’s not about government control per se. Rather, it’s about maintaining some characteristic of proper functioning.
PPS:
Similarly, did you know that at that time, “police” didn’t mean what it means today? In part because police didn’t exist yet. “Police” was still a word, but it meant something different. For example, In Louisiana, “police juries” were local governing bodies similar to county boards in other states. It was only sometimes in the 19th century that “police” as a word gained the new meaning of uniformed persons employed by the government in law enforcement capability.
Words change meaning. Unless you claim to have done significant study of 17th century English, you’re being foolish for claiming any degree of certainty about the meaning of any part of a 17th century English document based on your knowledge of 21st century English.
Correction: 18th century English document, not 17th.
None of that refutes the plain meaning of the Second Amendment. Neither do the Federalist papers, because they’re not part of the Constitution, and don’t have actual force of law.
“None of that refutes the plain meaning of the Second Amendment.” — On that. You are correct. Here it is again: Because a national population that is well armed, organized, and trained in war is necessary to prevent tyranny, the individual rights of the people to own and carry weapons and other implements of war shall not be unduly infringed.
Since when has a well-armed national population ever PREVENTED tyranny? Our country’s history is full of examples of armed civilians doing exactly the opposite: enacting and supporting tyranny and violently resisting state attempts to enforce people’s legal rights.
Just for starters, our armed citizenry never did squat to stop dirty or incompetent cops from killing unarmed teenagers. Your whole idea of “a national population that is well armed, organized, and trained in war … to prevent tyranny” is pure fantasy. Grow up already.
I never said I agreed it was true. Earlier, I said it was mostly false. However, it doesn’t matter if it is true or false; that’s still what the law says. What you’re saying here is not an argument in court against applying the law as long as it is the law.
GerrardOfTitanServer:
I come by, I see a thread has 40, 50 replies and I think “Gerrard is at it again.”
You appear not to merely be an argumentative troll about nuclear energy, you seem to think your role here is to argue endlessly with anyone about anything. That is not, actually, welcome.
I’m tempted to ask if anyone on this blog values having you around and, if nobody will speak for you, I’d block you or delete you. Consider this your final warning and don’t reply. You keep dragging the conversation into ratholes for your own amusement and I’m sick of seeing comments from you.
I don’t mind Gerrard arguing about certain things, but FWIW, I do mind him incessantly banging away with arguments that have already been refuted or disproven. Argument is okay, endless dishonest crankery and incessant dredging-up of decades-old grudges is not.
No need. I’ll show myself the door. Goodbye.
As one of the other players in the recent back and forth, I don’t really think Gerrard has stepped over the line. Of if he has, not by much. Mind you, I’m not making the decision, and I haven’t been frustrated by him as much as other people.
He comes off as wanting to argue endlessly, and most of the evidence he provides appears to be not from his own research or thought, but from looking for opposing views on the internet and parroting those arguments. I don’t honestly know what position he is taking in his argument above, he seems to want it both ways. I.e. He says he agrees that gun violence is a problem and something should be done about it, then as soon as possibilities to do something are suggested he responds with canned gun-fondler’s nonsense most of us have seen, and rejected before. Which suggest that he is not arguing from a position, but from a desire just to argue.
I was a little disappointed when I noticed that after I pointed out to Gerrard that the Olympic target shooting competitor in the UK who had to practice in another country was granted her permit to practice in the UK in 2009, Gerrard used that same example about how bad the UK gun laws were in another thread on FTB. That suggests either Gerrard is not paying attention, or is just deliberately trying to get an argument started. Neither reflects well on Gerrard.
Further, I’ll admit that while Gerrard probably shouldn’t have hijacked a thread mainly focused on why weapons, or even unarmed combat training, isn’t as effective for defense as many people claim in order to bring up the topic of gun culture, I did aid and abet that conversation. At the start it was mainly to correct some of the miss-understandings he wrote. Once it was clear that he was not interested in thinking about what I was writing, and resorted to the tactic of saying, “History Proves Me Right!”, I lost interest. Which I why I said if he posted quotes from dead men out of context I wasn’t going to bother with him any longer. I don’t know why he then proceeded to post a wall of quotes from dead men out of context since no one else was really engaging with him at that point.
If I have a vote, and if it’s possible, I’d say shut off comments on this thread, explaining why. I’ll try to do better about paying attention when Gerrard is trying to switch topics and avoid getting sucked into that vortex. I know now I made a mistake in thinking that Gerrard was only miss-informed when it is pretty clear he wasn’t looking for his ignorance to be corrected. I might even point to this thread if someone else takes the bait. As for Gerrard, if he learns to stay on-topic and stops hijacking threads for his pet crankery, I wouldn’t ban him. He has on occasion given me new things to look at, even if they turn out to be something different than his claims. I tend to write walls-o-text myself, so I don’t find that annoying. At the same time, it’s not like Gerrard is offering anything special, only the occasional tidbit I find interesting. I get a lot more information, and insight, from other commentors on this and other FTB blogs. So if Gerrard goes, I won’t miss him.
If I have a vote, and if it’s possible, I’d say shut off comments on this thread, explaining why.
I’m going to let things stand; it appears my comment sufficiently made my point.
I’ve got nothing against people being argumentative – after all, I’m argumentative myself. My problem is that if every comment thread devolves into endless swirling argument with one person, eventually nobody’s going to read the comments anymore and that reduces the value of the blog.
I don’t want to start going around banning people or anything like that, but I think it’d be good if certain people would consider that a blog’s commenting threads are not a place to achieve dominance over – they’re more like a sort of friendly dinner conversation and nobody should try to be the creepy guest who makes every topic about them.
Perhaps I should start some clearly delineated debate threads, in which people are welcome (encouraged, even!) to display their rhetorical chops?