From: jtchew@csa3.lbl.gov (Ad absurdum per aspera)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british,alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Us gun nuts in the States (was Re: An astonishing Guy)
Summary: Now that the giddiness from the election is subsiding...
Date: 6 Nov 92 01:02:00 GMT
Followup-To: talk.politics.guns
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory - Berkeley, CA, USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.254.198
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

> Notable exceptions are the gun nuts, who know that it refers to
> a right to bear arms, but who quote it incorrectly, since they 
> miss out the bit about "subject to law".

Betcha that our Founding Fathers were thoroughly familiar with the 
Brit document and that any omissions were intentional.

I'll concede that the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear
arms (i.e., outside the context of a "well-organized militia") rests
upon a comma ambiguity and subsequent heated, unwinnable debate over
authorial intent.  There are interesting arguments that the authors
were indeed talking about militias -- and that the importance of militias
back then was the self-defense of individual States against the federal
government.  It is nonetheless a right; freedom-loving citizens should 
uphold it on that basis even if they don't like guns, lest its fall be 
an encouraging sign to some fascist prosecutor or enforcement 
administrator who has his eye on some other nice juicy rights.  

Note that I said "fascist," lower-case eff.  I'm not that afraid of 
upper-case Fascists who live in bunkers up in Idaho somewhere and
give each other swastika tattoos.  They're enemies you can identify,
enemies you could bring yourself to fight.  I'm much more afraid of 
elected and appointed officials (the former may run the government, but 
the latter establish its character) who want to take away my rights for 
my own good.  

Several of our more fearsome Constitutional rights (freedom of speech,
protection against unlawful search and seizure, and freedom from the
establishment of a state religion come to mind) are under constant seige,
and just about any of them could come under opportunistic fire at any time.
There is never a shortage of cowards who would trade their fundamental
freedoms for a bit of what they consider to be security, nor of holy
zealots who consider themselves to have been anointed rather than 
appointed to office and would have their way no matter what it took.

That's the damnedest thing -- how the disappearance of rights can
masquerade as the normal, desirable, necessary functioning of government.
And how it can be implemented by the most ordinary, likeable people.
When they come to take away your gun, they won't send storm troopers.  
They'll send the cop who lives down the street and comes to your Fourth 
of July barbecue, and he'll have a paper in his hand signed by the nice 
lady at the courthouse who waved at you the other day when you let her 
have your parking space. Bumpersticker rhetoric about "cold, dead fingers" 
aside, you probably couldn't bring yourself to shoot either of the above, 
so we'd better not let the situation ever arise.  

Or more likely yet, they'll "take away" your gun with chilling judicial 
precedents, increasingly restrictive regulations, and ever-more-sluggish 
bureaucratic processes, the cumulative effect of which, over many years, 
will be an atmosphere in whigh fewer and fewer people will consider gun
ownership to be worth the hassle.  Your other rights can disappear --
might well already be disappearing -- through similar mechanisms.  

That's how freedom will end: not with a bang, but with a rustle of file
folders.  If you love any of your rights, defend all of them!

And note the followup to talk.politics.guns, which was established as a
safe place to keep this Eternal Flame without burning down the net.

--Joe "The price of bandwidth is infernal vigilance" Chew