The 2nd Amendment is a Nonsensical Paradox
While John Locke wrote a very good rationale for self defense in his Treatises on Government, often quoted in defense of the second amendment, the following paragraph, where he says no one in their right mind would ever want to even think about having to do it, let alone actually do it, is very carefully edited out. After some years encountering flamboyant and often vulgar supporters of the right to kill, saying 2A entitles them to just about shoot with anything they want regardless how safe they are to other people, it occurred to me their frequent cry SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED belies an unrecognized and fundamental paradox in Hamilton's phrase. That isn't surprising, seeing Hamilton was a college dropout who bribed his way into the bar and was given far too much to do.
The problem is simply this: shooting someone to death infringes on their right to bear arms.
I don’t know why no one ever said this before, and it should not require a philosopher from Oxford University to notice it. But apparently, now I’ve communicated with two State Supreme Court judges, and President Obama, who was a Constitutional lawyer and professor, and they all said, I'm right, and no one noticed before. Its not as if its that complicated. I said it in one sentence.
So now I’m getting ready to petition that the 2nd amendment get replaced with something that actually makes sense, hence, I’m giving people who are concerned with the issue a chance to say what they would like it to be instead.
The problem is simply this: shooting someone to death infringes on their right to bear arms.
I don’t know why no one ever said this before, and it should not require a philosopher from Oxford University to notice it. But apparently, now I’ve communicated with two State Supreme Court judges, and President Obama, who was a Constitutional lawyer and professor, and they all said, I'm right, and no one noticed before. Its not as if its that complicated. I said it in one sentence.
So now I’m getting ready to petition that the 2nd amendment get replaced with something that actually makes sense, hence, I’m giving people who are concerned with the issue a chance to say what they would like it to be instead.
Comments (30)
Actually, killing someone infringes on all sorts of rights...but since the 2nd Amendment specifies the "infringement issue" it seems to have merit here.
Allow me to be frank with you. You should pursue it earnestly...and see where it leads.
Which must mean you don't have the Constitutional right to kill someone with a gun solely because they have a gun.
From whatever the 2nd Amendment suffers, it's not that it's self-contradictory.
Some attorneys have expressed the view that the right to lethal self defense is not actually supported by the 2nd amendment, in which case, it says absolutely nothing, and could be entirely deleted.
You're thinking too small. I suggest a petition to put all bad people in jail until they become nice.
Some attorneys have argued that the 2nd Amendment relates only to your right to protect yourself against the government and not against your fellow citizen. Four of those lawyers were on the Supreme Court when the matter was decided against them in the Heller case.
I do think there is merit to the dissenter's opinion, although I do not agree that had the dissent prevailed, the 2nd Amendment would have become meaningless. The right would have been considered only another of the protections against a tyrannical government, as opposed to a right to citizens against one another.
The whole shooting other people idea has not actually been a part of a set of rights as much as it has been a license to kill certain people.
If I am wrong about that, establishing the grounds of that wrongness should supersede other arguments.
What would you say to this. A major religious institute dictates the following as far as discussing philosophy.
"A collective of higher Learning and Thought, being necessary for the advancement of civilized society and reduction of human suffering, the right of the students to discuss Philosophy, shall not be infringed."
Not everyone is going to come up with some groundbreaking new philosophical idea that propels their society into the future and ends all suffering, but they have a right to try. Or perhaps contribute unintentionally.
A logical argument I heard was it is much harder to invade or overthrow a nation state when all its citizens are armed and content with the society enough to defend it. Some would go further and say "there is a gun behind every blade of grass" or even "the entire United States civilian populace is a standing army of 300 million."
That said, when a word is Capitlized liked 'arms' are in this case there is usually some defined meaning to it. Like in contracts for example. A surface-to-air missile system in your backyard would probably not apply for example.
No you cannot just shoot people as this is against not just an amendment but the Constitution itself, Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness. If you do so intentionally you would probably get charged with murder. If you and your friends happen to be drunk and camping, shooting off guns and someone in the distance is fatally struck you would probably get charged with manslaughter and improper handling/misuse of a firearm and maybe even lose the right to have one.
An important thing to realize about all of this is that the Constitution is a 'living document' meaning it has and is supposed to be changed as society does. Often some in the majority get overly comfortable in this fact and some even believe it only applies to them. This is not true. A Chinese-American, or several million have as much right to utilize the democratic process to add, remove, or omit any or all amendments, provided they are not acting under the auspices of a foreign government, as any American. It is essentially civilized and well-regulated mob rule and if this voting majority ever changes either in belief or some other way, so would the laws governing the land.
The property ownership of guns has over time increasingly taken over consideration of the fact that guns are intentionally designed to be lethal. Killing people is the only purpose of most guns. Some 2A supporters get upset if you talk about their rights to kill, rather than rights to self defense, because they dont even fully realize that's what they are promoting.
ok lol, to be earnest with you, I would rather be Frank :D
Well, this is a new concept. I spoke with three State Supreme Court attorneys, and they all agreed it had never been said before, so Im not suprised youd find it novel. It is only one sentence.
Shooting Anyone to Death Infringes on their 2A Rights
cheers )
agreed
Quoting tim wood
Well there are quite a number. i could give you a few examples. Exuctive orders, like Trump banning bump stocks.
There is the NRA-sponsored, pseudo-congress electonic system to check gun buyers are safe. Its not complete in a large number of ways, and because the NRA paid for it, it refuses to do the things to make it complete that the government tries to make it do.
the most extensive is the 1968 act here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Control_Act_of_1968
Oh I gotta run, Ill write more, tnanks for your comments )
A gun meaning a firearm. A rational, moderate would assume one small enough to be carried by an individual. So. A handheld instrument capable of firing one or more projectiles by means of kinetic energy igniting an explosive charge that propels the projectile forward where the projectile's main ability to create damage is either kinetic or of its velocity. So, a mortar launcher or an RPG would not be a firearm. Though, you could argue at the time of its (the Constitution's) conception the definition of a firearm would not encompass anything beyond a single-shot muzzleloaded black powder rifle. However the largely held idea of this amendment was for law-abiding citizens to be able to resist and even overthrow a tyrannical government if one would ever arise, so one could argue the rational 'definition' of what a civilian-legal firearm is ie. its capability or lethality would increase as weapons evolve. Maybe one day Star Trek like laser guns will be widely available for pennies on the dollar at any pawn shop or sporting goods store and render my earlier definition defunct.
Should any citizen be able to own nuclear bombs, fighter jets with live warheads, and weapons of mass destruction just because the government has them on the premise of being able to resist in case of tyranny? Would you be alright with your neighbor flying a drone with a bomb over your house just to test it? Absolutely not. A good question would be were citizens at that time allowed to own cannons or the same weapons used by the government? Either way there were nowhere near capable of reaching the capability of casualties that weapons of today have.
Before I get to the keep vs. own argument. More importantly than the fact the firearms of yesteryear were less advanced is the fact the society at that time was not. People were rational thinkers. There were state churches. The devout (be it moral or otherwise) were often wealthy and respected and the degenerates were kept poor and uneducated. The morally undesirable were often run out of town or at least ostracized. Today it is often the exact opposite. They own mansions, are wealthy beyond belief, and may have millions of supporters who idolize them and fawn over their every action. While some philosophers may struggle to even get by. It was a different world.
My view is the right to bear arms is the ability to possess a firearm capable of protecting you, your family, and property and the definition of what that firearm means scales up with said assets to protect. You own an average house in the city, you don't need an M60. You own a large farm in the middle of a rural area, that may vary. An 18 year old with a rap sheet doesn't need an Uzi. A middle aged man in charge of a Fortune 500 company might. There's the old tongue-in-cheek argument. If you don't want people to kill other people why don't you just make murder illegal. Essentially that means criminals will still break the law and possess firearms, while law-abiding citizens will essentially be left defenseless.
As to keep vs. own maybe there is a difference. For the sake of argument say if I see you misuse something I own and say for you to 'keep it'. Do I want it back? Is it not yours for all intents and purposes?
That’s true, I’ve never heard it before. I don’t know why anyone would bother saying it.
The only contradiction involved is the SCOTUS ruling that the first part of the sentence is logically independent of the second (contradicting the basic idea that words make sense, which is not explicitly stated in the constitution but presumably was intended by the founders).
A well regulated militia must be able to buy any arms it can afford to make sense as "necessary to the security of a free State", but must also keep those arms in secure locations to be "well regulated". A well regulated militia is a collectivist project that, as the name suggests, requires regulation to create, and SCOTUS ruling along these lines would have forced congress to make a plausible "this is how you defeat us" pathway to local militia based arms possession (which would easily unite both the right and left freedom lovers, by the way).
Ironically, the great "individual rights" victory of personal gun ownership (which we can interpret to some extent as part of a well regulated militia; but not a very far extent), was made by the SCOTUS precisely to avoid the obvious "militia" interpretation that people really should position themselves to overthrow the state if it no longer functions democratically (in case, oh I don't know, the advice of all information security experts is thrown in the trash and machines are enlisted to count votes for some unexplainable reason that is too crazy to ever happen, but hypothetically we could consider it), because SCOTUS knows its place. In the name of freedom, the individual gun owner advocate takes the position more compatible with their own subjugation; they also advocate against the far more powerful weapon of unions, again in the name of their own freedom to associate with whom they like and come to mutual collaborative agreement as they are want to define. In other words, they want to feel and appear fierce but be as tame as well trained dog.
In agreement here, but not that the other judges would have supported the malitia interpretation. The SCOTUS and all the Western elites are statists, so goes without saying that they wouldn't promote the idea of real local political power. The dissenting judges would have simply given the state more leeway to control arms, not ruled that local groups can have as many arms as they can justifiably "well regulate" for the purposes of defending freedom against a tyrannical government.
I don't know enough to say for sure, but my guess it that none of the judges understood what they were doing; that they were engaging in active cognitive dissonance; that their state of mind is "of course it goes without saying that we're statists who claim not to be statists".
So, I don't think that they conceived of themselves as ruling primarily the "militia" content out of the constitution, as to recognize that is to recognize that they are themselves outside it's bounds from which they draw legitimacy and so exercising tyrannical power. They simply erased that part from their understanding and conceived themselves to be ruling about the extent the state can regulate personal weapons, with "fighting tyranny" being meaningless empty rhetoric (no tyranny here, nor will there ever be).
Quoting tim wood
This would be interesting to see.
That is a really interesting observation.
The association of militias to an idea of being in a a location gets mixed up with misunderstandings of power and influence.
If I bring a gun into a Walmart, am I still in my hometown?
"That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia,... every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock."
Oh. Those things happened later, lol, they didnt even think about ownership restrictions or carry laws in 1968. Most extensive, ancient history :D
Because I am fed up with the insane chants of 'shall not be infringed' and I want to see them all lie on the ground and grovel to philosophers.
I support an individuals right to possess firearms for personal defense, hunting and sport but "the right to keep and bear arms" has never included grenade launchers, tanks or surface to air missiles (there are restrictions). I think those restrictions should include military assault weapons.
No attempt to make a point beyond the notion of the individual buying a gun himself rather than being supplied one.