The creepy fantasy world of your typical GOPer
Hannity is pretty typical, which means he has a rich fantasy life in which he is constantly blowing MS-13 gang members and various other brown folks away with his Glock or whatever. I mean, Republicans really get off on staring as the hero of some violence.
When I used to allow run of the mill gun nuts to comment here most of their arguments became “I need a machine guns for when gangs fan out from the cities after the collapse of the world economy.” They really believed in their fantasies. Anyway… Sean Hannity is like that.
Land of the Free
I don’t understand these people. I really don’t.
Gotta have a police stateso we can all own guns to protect us from a police state. True freedom is when a bunch of minimum wage Paul Blarts with twitchy trigger fingers are everywhere.
My favorite far right fantasy is the 2nd amendment was designed so Americans can defend themselves from the eventual tyranny of the government itself. When I hear it from some worthy I play alone and proclaim “Gee, I’d like to see it!”, that usually flies over their head. If it does not I remind them that even the best AR15 is no match for a tank, fighter jet or armed contingent of real soldiers, as opposed to the self proclaimed bearded variety in camouflage drinking Pabst.
This fantasy comes from the founding fathers’ references to “tyrannical government.” They didn’t mean their own government. “Tyranny” was their term for the British monarchy and, by extension, monarchy itself. So using arms against “tyrannical government” was a reference to war with European powers, not rebellion against the government they were setting up.
As a purely historical point, that’s not completely true. By the time that the Constitution was written, Shays’ rebellion had already happened. There had also been a little “civil war” in North Carolina, culminating in the “battle” of the Alamance right around the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Pennsylvania had elections during much of the period every year (not every two or four years), and suffered from a hyper-partisanship that compares to what we see today. Rhode Island was badly politically divided between two different factions that alternatively asked for and shouted savagely against the support of the central government. In all of these cases the term “tyranny” was bandied about quite freely to describe “American despots,” as it would be right after the Bill of Rights was ratified in the Whiskey Rebellion.
Not justifying modern pro-2A historical interpretations, but there was always a significant minority interpretation that worried about the new government becoming “tyrannical.” Otherwise we’d never have had the Anti-Federalist Papers.
Fair point. But they lost the argument back then; if they hadn’t, the government wouldn’t have existed in the first place. Those who spoke of American government as tyranny are not the same people who set up that government, or those who wrote and ratified the Constitution.
But there is a strong historical case based on primary sources that the existence of the Bill of Rights is evidence that many of their views WERE incorporated into the government. That’s pretty much where it came from–the framers of the Constitutional Convention did not initially believe it necessary. Madison, ironically, questioned the need for a Federal Bill of Rights before he became its “father.”
Nor did they completely lose the argument–they simply moved the fight into the State governments, prolonging the debate for another seven decades. You can’t argue “nullification,” you can’t have the Virginia & Kentucky resolutions, the Hartford Convention, the anti-renter movement in NY, or the Dorrites in Rhode Island and New Jersey without a significant part of the body politic believing in that tyranny meme.
That said, your mega-point is correct. You don’t actually find the “modern” version of 2nd Amendment “originalism” emerging until the late 1970s/early 1980s. There simply is no intellectual continuity between this conservative interpretation of that amendment and the mainstream of constitutional thought. Throughout the 19th and half of the 20th century, Constitutionalists understood the 2nd Amendment as safeguarding the rights of States more than those of individuals, a fact lost on our current crop of advocates. That view goes arguably into and past the 1930s at the very least.
Sorry for sounding like a stickler.
No apology required. The world needs sticklers.
I’d like to see all kindergartners take a basic firearms training class and then be issued their own small .22 to protect themselves and their classmates. no way the illegals will get them now!
I have had this type of argument with my father. Lock em all up, yadda yadda. SO then I say, great you want to raise taxes. Cool, let’s raise taxes to pay for all these new programs.
…have one armed guard on every floor
of every school,
all over every mall, the perimeter and inside
every hall of every mall.”
That sounds like a twisted Dr. Suess passage.