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Ban Guns From Public Political Events
Those of us living in the Rocky Mountains are steeped in America's famous gun culture - and we therefore know well the binary debates surrounding the Second Amendment. Firearm enthusiasts - the vast majority of whom use weapons responsibly - believe the Constitution protects their right to bear arms. Gun control advocates counter that the Constitution doesn't give anyone the inalienable right to wield automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds.
This is the stultified freedom-versus-safety quarrel that seemed to forever define gun politics - that is, until anti-government activists started bringing firearms to public political meetings. In early August, a protester came to a raucous Tennessee congressional forum packing heat. Days later, President Obama's health care event in New Hampshire was marred by a protester posing for cameras with a pistol and sign reading, "It is time to water the tree of liberty" - a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote promising violence. And this past week, 12 armed men - including one with an assault rifle - not only showed off their firearms at Obama's Arizona speech, but broadcast a YouTube video threatening to "forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority."
These and other similar examples are accurately summarized with the same language federal law employs to describe domestic terrorism. The weapons-brandishing displays are "intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population." Yes, the gun has been transformed from a sport and self-defense device into a tool of mass bullying. Like the noose in the Jim Crow South, its symbolic message is clear: If you dare engage in the democratic process, you risk bodily harm.
With that implicit threat, the incessant arguments about gun ownership have been supplanted by a more significant debate over which should take precedence: The Constitution's First or Second Amendment?
Based on America's history, the Founders' answer to that question lies in the Bill of Rights' deliberate sequencing.
The First Amendment ethos guarantees people - whatever their politics - a fundamental right to participate in their democracy without concern for physical retribution. It is the primary amendment because America was first and foremost created as a place to shelter citizens from oppression.
While the First Amendment doesn't ensure credibility or significance, it is supposed to guarantee freedom from fear - a freedom now under siege. Citing the Second Amendment and the increasingly maniacal rhetoric of conservative media firebrands, a small handful of violence-threatening protesters aims to make the rest of us afraid to speak out.
And so we face a choice that has nothing to do with health care, gun ownership or any other . It is a choice about democracy itself - a choice that comes down to the two axioms best articulated by, of all people, Mao Zedong.
One option is willful ignorance: We can pretend the ferment is unimportant, continue allowing the intimidation and ultimately usher in a dark future where "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Better, though, is simply making public political events firearm-free zones, just like schools and stadiums. That way forward honors our democratic ideals by declaring that politics may be war, but in America it is "war without bloodshed" - and without the threat of bloodshed.
- Posted in
28 Comments so far
Show AllThough any American has the inalieanable and uncontestable right to own and if allowed by his state, the right to carry firearms there are places where that right should not exist by common sense and for public safety.
Political events, schools, courts, government buildings.
For once David Sirota is right (about this)
This article should be considered practically superfluous because of the logic that flows from it. Unfortunately when so many Americans wish to bray about the right to display their "freedom" which then manifests itself by exhibiting their macho weaponry then this article remains important and necessary.
For once Henry8 is right [about this].
One's better than none!!!!
I agree completely that the first amendment is more important and fundamental to American freedoms than the second, and that firearms should be banned from political events.
However, as a point of historical fact, the First Amendment was originally the Fourth amendment. The numbers of the amendments do not denote an ordering of their relative importance.
And who would claim that the second amendment takes precedence over the fourth?
Before ya'all get too atwiter about firearms in public you might Google "Deacons for Defense and Justice".
If my exercise of my constitutional rights make you uncomfortable so be it. Get over it.
Exercising your Constitutional rights has absolutely nothing to do with this. The Supreme Court has finally cleared most of the BS surrounding this away.
But if you are saying that you should be able to carry a gun into my kids school or into my Court or Goveernment Buildings, etc.......you are simply obtuse.
Listen, buddy, if dickwads like you didn't have to use weapons to intimidate people just trying to speak their hearts and minds, we wouldn't have to enact specific laws to counter you.
Just like we had to make laws to keep dickwads like you from walking into our schools and stadiums with guns. According to you, isn't that your contitutional right? Doesn't that anger you, that you or any other dickwad can't just walk into your kid's first grade class and wave a loaded firearm around?
After all, how can anyone get an education without having a gun pointed at them?
And by the way, I probably have more guns at home than you do. I'm just not a proto-fascist asshole who brandishes it around anyone who doesn't agree with them.
Is there something to hunt at these rallies? Is there someone to defend yourself from? Or do you have a tiny inadequate penis?
OK Sundrool. I've never "brandished" a weapon. At 6'2" and 280 lbs I haven't had any need. As to me being a "dickwad", you will have to ask your wife.
I would support well trained armed teachers and school staff. Columbine High School ring a bell? Gun Free Zones tell the nut jobs they can do whatever they want with no one to stop them.
Your reference to "your wife" is both offensive and callow.
I'm 6'3 and 236 and I have used weapons in my life. I suspect that you have never confronted anyone, those that speak as you do were always found in the rear echelons if not back in the states.
I suggest you take your rude manners and silly childish reasoning somewhere else.
I've got you both beat, being 6'2, around 420 lbs., don't own a gun and have never feared for my safety, including in my current residence just inside the DC city limits :-)
But the right-wingers screaming I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK do scare me, especially when (probably not if) they start using guns to back up their hysterics. So far, the people at the town halls with guns calmly just stood there and talked to people. And the shit for brains who dropped his pistol at a town hall inside a supermarket in Arizona was shooed away by police. But I doubt that will last.
There is a time and a place for everything. Let's substitute the word "penis" for gun (there are those who claim that some people already have). I have a right to carry mine openly in the privacy of my home, I can employ it in the woods for its lawful purpose of voiding, I can even, if unobserved, use it thus in an alley in a moment of vital need. But if I wave it around in public so as to offend the sensibilities of kids and ladies, I will be arrested--and I should be.
Now, for those who want to insist on their absolute right to display a gun whenever they please, I think you have failed to understand the difference between your gun and your "gun".
"I think you have failed to understand the difference between your gun and your "gun".
We almost had the same Drill Instructor! Mine said Rifle and Gun, just like the movies!
The gun toting fanatics are making the Left’s case for Gun Control. They are scaring the hell out of the moderates, ‘Burber’s’, Middle Mgt, Gym members,soccer Moms. Middle America has tolerated the gun enthusiast, but now they are gunning people down at various public venues. Don’t these NRA members realize they are being mentally linked with the likes of the Holocaust White supremest,the Dr Tiller Assasin, the murderous vigilante home invaders, like the ‘Minutemen’ and the ‘salvation’ gangs, like the mom who shot her son in the head at a shooting range to spare his soul? Moderates are starting to see the only flaws in the “mirror image” puzzle picture is a camo ball cap instead of a Turban, a Bible instead of the Koran, an American made vs a Russian made high powered rifle and the shade of the skin. If the NRA and truly responsible gun owners want to avoid terrifying the moderates into serious gun controls, they had better cull some of it’s members. The NRA likes to portray itself as some prestigious entity, but when you have no standards to adhere to, wheres the exclusivity of membership? Anyone been kicked out of the NRA? Did McVeigh die with his card in his pocket? Does Scott Roeder have it among his personal effects in lock up? How about the guy who killed the Three cops in PA? The NRA is looking more like a organization which harbors and aids criminals and Terrorist, instead of sportsmen.Why be concerned about the unlicensed when the ‘responsible’ owners are the ones shooting the country up and spilling mass amounts of American blood? If strict Gun laws are enacted, it won’t be because of the Left, or even the moderates who help us pass the legislation. It will be the sole responsibility of the NRA and ‘2nd Amendment’ misinterpreters who continue to protect these sociopaths in their ranks.
Ranjit Kumar,
Fewer people are killed by guns in the US than by automobiles. If you are trying to produce a nanny society in which everybody is safe, like say, North Korea, you will still fail, since you cannot discourage government abuse in that kind of police state.
For some reason, the CDC doesn't want us to know what the fatality rates have been this century. But in 1994 I found:
"Injury is the leading cause of death for persons aged 1-44 years in the United States. More than half (55%) of all injury-related deaths are caused by motor vehicles and firearms (1). Although the number of deaths from motor-vehicle crashes has exceeded those from firearms, since 1968, differences in the number of deaths have declined: from 1968 through 1991, motor-vehicle- related deaths decreased by 21% (from 54,862 to 43,536) while firearm-related deaths increased by 60% (from 23,875 to 38,317)."
source: CDC
So before we ban guns in the commons, let's impound your car and you can just walk there. After all, this would more perfectly achieve the perfect safety bubble you are after.
For most of world history, perfect-disarmed-safety and Liberty are not things that have coincided for long. Many of us were fortunate to grow up in a time of prosperity and safety. But each year, we loose just a little bit more of our freedom because we don't appreciate just how wise the collection of political talent was at the Continental Convention of 1788.
In the Constitutional Convention of 1788:
"On February 6 [1788}, [Samuel] Adams submitted another amendment, foreshadowing some of the measures that were soon added to the Constitution as the Bill of Rights. It said, "And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience;or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms......" "Adam's one-sentence amendment contained elements of what became the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution."
From "Samuel Adams A Life" by Ira Stoll 2008
He didn't say just at home. Nothing I have read from the founders supports your desire to "infringe" by narrowing when and where, in "the Commons" (not a school) a citizen can "keep and bear" arms. The concept of "the commons" is something we need to bring back. It cannot be owned by a private corporation. The intent was for the citizen to decide for himself whether or not he needed to be armed, not the state.
Recall that Jefferson in response to Shay's rebellion advised: "Let them take Arms".
TJ
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
- Benjamin Franklin
Speech to the Pennsylvania Assembly
November 11, 1755
We've had this debate before...
You'll find that people use their cars far more often than they bring out their guns. If you live in a city you do have to drive to get to a range and get home after all...
Moreover, the consequences for misusing your car are not as severe as those for misusing your gun. Kill someone with a car, and it's usually called an accident; even when it was your fault for speeding and not paying attention to what you were doing. Do the same thing with a gun and you'll get charged with manslaughter at least.
By the way, there has never been a successful group who've taken up arms against the us gov't. It's happened many times in your country that people who had the right to bear arms have engaged in violence against the state. From the Whiskey Rebellion (during the first of the Georges) to the Civil War, to Ruby Ridge, to the various whakos who've shot the odd cop or 'gubmint revenuer' all were put down. Your guns didn't protect you when Bush trashed your constitution, they've not protected you from the consolidation of the political parties (which look more and more like two sides of the same coin), and in the end they won't always protect you against criminals.
Good rebuttal Saturnalia,
I, for one, am not advocating "violence against the state." Why is it so hard, I wonder, for anti-gunners to distinguish defensive ownership with offensive craziness? No violent action against the US government is possible or wanted. So please stop it.
If you recall my earlier debate, it was framed around the concept of having the local assemblymen establish boycotts of imported goods into your neighborhood. If the local assemblyman, (like Samuel Adams did), ordered a Militia to enforce the boycott, as they did in 1773, this is not an action against the federal government; it is a legal action against treasonous multi-natilonal corporations who are trying their damnedest to offshore all our remaining jobs to India and China. The "Big-Box Mart" truck, by law, would be forced to return to port, and not offload it's crap which is destroying our planet and liberty, in many many ways.
Why is this idea, so foreign to us I wonder? You, personally don't have to arm yourself, because it is a right, not a requirement. And plenty of twenty year old men, would be glad to do it for you, if the local government requested it of them. Don't be so afraid. I have read that a number of local Assemblies have ordered arrest orders for Bush and Cheney for high crimes should they appear in those towns.
But I guess, maybe, from the aversion I am sensing to this idea, that this is exactly why we have arrived at a totalitarian corporate state, where passive fear rules the very segment of the population who are informed enough to recognize it and convey that insight to the single-issue gun voters who are upset, and incorrectly blaming liberals for all their problems.
I would expect that my intricate logic would be too complex for them to follow, but I am surprised that someone as obviously sophisticated as you cannot at least entertain the idea, without alarm.
I advocate doing everything within the law. But I point out, that the whole country is agitated right now, from the lawlessness on wall street. This may be the correct time to capitalize on these unpunished business and war crimes that cut across the entire political spectrum.
No one wants an actual Revolution. It is just a figure of speech; much like "the tax revolt".
Those are all just my opinions only. What do the rest of you think?
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
[Why is it so hard, I wonder, for anti-gunners to distinguish defensive ownership with offensive craziness?]
I'd imagine it's because the anti-gunners have had too much experience with the offensive crazies. I'd like to be clear as well, I used to own firearms, never shot another human (did shoot my tv, and recomend others do the same thing). I decided to get rid of my guns because I realised that the likelyhood of needing them to 'defend' myself was really quite remote, and my hunting skills were not successful at all (I could get a one inch grouping at 400 yards, yet failed to hit bambi anytime the critter was in my sights...).
Boycotts of multinationals. Restriction of corporate power.
In general I can agree that those things need to be done, the power exercised by the corporations of today is a threat to national governments of all stripes. However, I think that both those goals can be achieved without mobilizing any militias. The major reason that I'd be wary of using arms to make a point is that that sort of thing can get out of control. With the way the radio hosts are whipping up a frenzy in the states it's a matter of time before you'll have the nuttier ones rioting. Unfortunately, the people who write the laws get too much money from those corporations, the chances of them going after the multinationals or the other bloated monopolies and cooperative competitors are not good.
[No one wants an actual Revolution.]
I think you can always find those who would want a revolution, whether they be fascists, communists, fundamentalists, monarchists, or separatists. Of course, even if any of those groups are successful at getting a revolution, they're not likely to wind up with the society they wanted when they started the revolution...
Saturnalia,
I can't argue with any of that. (I realize you may not be American, but the same principles of liberty are for all, if you believe the founders, which I do. Of course they failed to include minorities, but the colonies were one of the few efforts to throw off Monarchy and achieve real freedom for most of the citizens.)
A well regulated militia, under the control of the local civil authority is the only way to control it. The local small business community (if there's even any left) would certainly support a level playing field against the big box oligopolies. WallyWorld was prevented in several instances by the local town leaders from opening a store that would surely squash the little mom and pop shops in the area. As to how to prevent corruption at the assembly level most of the time....... I'm at a loss. Probably, the only force that could achieve that are the local churches, the glue that holds the fractured American communities together.
In the revolutionary days, all the real decisions were made in the taverns and coffee houses outside of the official town meetings and the Continental Congress. So we have no record of those important conversations and how they arrived at solutions against such a mighty foe as the British Empire.
There was a time when having a strong central government was an asset to the survival of the colonies. Now it's nothing but a threat to liberty. This is why even Neil Armstrong is against a strong Fed. He has been an advocate for states rights for many years. The problem is, even the state legislatures are behaving now in the same manner as the Fed is.
The key, I'm convinced is local, as CD'ers all here realize. Witness the initial splash and impact of the Big Hole Foods Boycott that has begun. It made Faux News, so it's clear that Wall Street Royalty like "Mac-the-knife" is worried about it. Maybe we should not be so repulsed by the "tea bagger" idea after all, but mature it into a boycott of all wicked Wall Street Companies who have betrayed the public trust.
We need some elite leaders who are inclined to support a boycott and want the banks brought under control. Now just who would that be?
Anyone?
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Nope, I'm Canadian. Which means that I've got a different view of how the monarchy actually works in this country (as well as how it worked in the former british empire). The king you rebelled against had no real power, you really rebelled against the rule of the British Parliament. Only parliament had the power to raise taxes in the empire, not the king, by the end of your war it was the parliament with whom you made peace (in the name of the king, who was an individual that had long talks with trees...)
The best way to get rid of the corrupt politicians, and restrain the power of corporations, is to get more people involved in politics and actually vote out the bums who've led us into the mess. Eventually it will happen, the pols will be replaced by a new political party when the economic situation is no longer tolerable for the majority of people. I've not been able to tell that there is any real difference between how the Democrats work and how the Republicans work, sure there are minor rhetorical points, but to me they're the same rightwing party with two names. In the rest of the world's democracies a party like the repubs would never hold power, the dems might hold power rarely.
Yes, I agree with all that Satumalia, But King George III, had the power to issue key proclamations without consulting parliament; the most disastrous for him was to skip solicited negotiations with the Continental Congress completely and issue a declaration that the Colonies were in a formal state of rebellion and that all property of the Colonists in Great Briton would be immediately seized. This forced moderates in the CC to give up their hard stand for reconciliation and to fall in with the radicals. The leader of Parliament, Lord North, was selected by George the dumb wasn't he?, so from my readings I gather that that body was not really as independent as advertised. Also, the empire was mired in heavy debt from the seven year war (or the French and Indian War) and blamed the Colonies defense costs for this. Enforcing the Navigation Acts, taxes which had never been collected before, was what this was really all about. Merchants in the colonies were not about to give up their smuggling ways for a petty king in another land.
Our democracy is a distant memory down here. At the National Congressional level, it doesn't seem to matter who we put in there, they are corrupted within a year. Which is why the Massachusetts assembly required annual elections when it first met.
A scum like Polosi, knows that the microsecond she is elected, "impeachment is off the table" for another six years.
Well I enjoyed killing off this thread with you Sat,
Cheers,
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
perhaps, if we're to ban guns at these rallies, we should also ask the police to remove their weapons (guns\tasers\clubs\gas)...why is it okay for the police to unleash violence on unarmed protesters (to the point of using 'protesters' as test subjects in microwave weapons demonstrations on nationally televised programs), but not okay for the protesters to arm themsevles against such? would it be different if the citizens were packing tasers, or clubs, or teargas?
Good God....the nuts are truly out.
Bush 2 when President didn't allow persons with unflattering tee shirts to get into his meetings; how come Obama allows weapons?
Is this Democratic idealism or stupidity?
Let's ban weapons from all mass movements/meetings, unless you are planning to go to war...in which case you should be admitted to the insane asylum.
No exceptions.
Estebandido
Very well reasoned and stated.
Actually the trained soldier could reload those muskets at least 3 times in a minute. But your point is well stated. If all people had the right to bear the same arms that the gov't has available; I want a nuke! Just for self-defence you know...
Banning will be difficult to do. One would think that the Secret Service would be doing their job, using magnetometers to detect guns, if necessary, like they did with Bush. Or is protecting Obama not the goal?
Keep up the pressure for Torture investigation and prosecution.
Keep asking ALL politicians at ALL public events "Why do they support Torture?"
If they aren't actively calling for enforcement of our Federal Torture Laws They Support Torture.
SIGN THE PETITIONS
Demanding
both a Commission of Inquiry
and a Special Prosecutor
For All Their Crimes
at ANGRYVOTERS.ORG
http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG