Campus Carry Gun Law Passes House/Senate in Texas

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161

Given the overall reasoning for the Constitution, and the focus on the government working for the pople, not the other way around, the interpretation that militia is the State National Guard falls apart in light of the pivotal and central role of the people in determining their governance.

The text of the 2nd Amendment itself provides the key:

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The only way it could interpreted that the 2nd Amendment refers only to the States’ National Guard / militia is if the 2nd Amendment is divorced from and judged separate from the fundamental meaning of the Constitution.

One of the most important discussions at the Constitutional Convention was the people having the ability and tools to overthrow a tyrannical government, just like the Founders did. In fact, they discussed quite openly that it is possible in the future the people may need to revolt again - they did not rest on their laurels once they won that all would stay free forever.

Since the Founding Fathers discussed the possible need for the people, i.e., civilians (which the Founders and colonists were), to revolt again, then exactly how would they expect the people to revolt if disarmed? Therefore, it is illogical to think that disarming civilians was a thought in the Constitution writers’ minds, as they were once armed civilians who gained their freedom through force.

Additionally, it can also be deduced that the 2nd Amendment involves the rights of civilians because the State government is what controls the National Guard. More accurately, the National Guard is also partly controlled by the US military, as its reserve units. Note that the National Guard is actually controlled by State Government and by the Federal Government and NOT by the people. In most stark terms, it is government bureaucrats who control and direct the National Guard.

Therefore, given that the Founders knew that, such as with their situation, government may one day need to be overthrown, it is absolutely nonsensical to deduce the Founders would deny American citizens the very route and tools, i.e., firearms in the hands of the people (civilians), that they used to gain their freedom.

162

You completely missed the point. It is not the money spent. They do not have the manpower based on size of terrain (the entire US) and the number of civilians with guns.

163

Citizenry could use Walmart stores as forts…ammo, guns, food, bedding, medicine are all right there handy in all the stores.

164

I’m not sure manpower is relevant when you consider the weapons the US government has at its disposal today:

http://www.businessinsider.com/11-incredible-weapons-that-only-america-has-2011-9

165

Basic military issue that will never change - one cannot hold and keep ground without manpower. Given the sheer area to cover, they simply do not have it.

The only people who believe that is possible are those afraid of a fight and would surrender. Well, if one surrenders then sure it can be done. But we are not talking about the surrendering type of people - gun owners are not that type. That is why they own guns.

166

This is discussion is starting to remind of the tv series “Revolution” - really miss that show.

167

Correct me if I’m misunderstanding, but are you saying that all gun owners would mobilize against the government, that they’d all be in lockstep agreement with each other? I find that hard to believe.

168

I’m unclear as to your point here: is it that homicides are always justified in NY or is it that a dead commuter is somehow more tragic than a dead teenager that wandered onto the wrong turf?

We tend to hear things that reinforce our convictions but, living in Houston, I’ve heard a lot of these stories:

There’s more, but we’ll cut to the chase - he didn’t wrestle the gun from her and shoot her with it (after sneering and telling her she was nitwit for believing all that self-defense BS) but the EMT’s did manage to get to him before he bled out.

If people want to believe they’ve a guardian angel hovering over their shoulder as they wander through what they’re sure is their daily safe zone, that’s fine with me… the Second’s elective. It’s the passionate busybody wanting to decide what’s good for me an mine that I can’t understand.

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they don’t need to be in lockstep. The only thing they would need to agree on is “hey… the federal government should not be doing this.”

170

There are 300 million guns in private ownership in the US. That stat alone should be enough to keep a hostile government at bay.

171

Gun owners will be in lockstep no more or no less than the military will be in lockstep. Thus, it will be a wash and the huge numerical advantage will remain with the gun-owning civilians.

However, the biggest weakness in your thinking is the military will be able to get supplies. There are no military-run suppliers in the US, as in totalitarian states. Our military buys its weaponry from civilian companies. All the fancy weaponry needs much more repair than any civilian gun. Furthermore, it will be difficult to get civilians to repair and produce parts for weapons to attack their families. However, I do guarantee there will be underground supply lines producing tons of ammo for civilian guns.

In contrast, tyrannical states function militarily because the military hires and controls productions of weapons and ammo AND the citizenry is already disarmed. Not so here - the Founding Fathers set up civilian control of the military structure for a reason. Therefore, all that is required to severely hamper the military is enough civilians do not report to work at their civilian defense jobs. And those dumb enough to show up will be shot by the time they get home. One way or other the civilian workforce for civilian defense companies will dwindle.

More importantly, gun owners naturally do not trust government more than non-gun owners understand. The stand against a government tyrant will be more united than you think. Gun owners do not care about getting government checks, subsidies and such and are not afraid of government, so not much a tryrant can offer them to join his side. Gun owners value freedom a whole lot more than whatever functions the government does. For people who live and depend on government, it is just the reverse, and they will bend over for a tyrant.

172

One thing I have learned about non-gun owners is they do not understand that gun owners would not hesitate to use their guns against a material threat and against them (the non-gun owners), as necessary, if they are supporting that threat. However, I assure you, the government knows this.

173

@awcntdb, There “will” be all this stuff? Sounds as if you think this is definitely happening.

I must say that your assertions are, to say the least, fanciful.

174

I find the “against the government” argument to be somewhat laughable history. If indeed the idea is 2nd Amendment literalism, the Founders would not accept the idea citizens would use their guns against the government. They saw a militia as a form of defense against invaders in the pre-industrial era in which our country was founded and actively put down Americans who attempted to use weapons against the government (even when we had almost no official military). That made sense, given the conflicts among the big European powers (that continued into the 19thC). The idea the 2nd Amendment was intended to arm citizens against their own government may have older roots but it’s mainstreaming is recent and its acceptance as an actual, rational argument is even newer. I’m not saying people don’t have a right to make whatever arguments they want, but rather that glossing an argument with nonsense about the Founders’ intent is lying. That there has always been suspicion of the government is not new, particularly in the South where States Rights still has its adherents and in the West where the government’s ownership of much land has long been an issue. And some people have always insisted on their “right” to do pretty much anything, but the cloaking of that logic as reflecting the intent of the Founders is not accurate.

In the discussions of gun ownership, the truly clear statements on record regard the fear of white Southerners about slave insurrections. There are long sections about the worry that a disarmed slave-owning population could not maintain order and its safety. I certainly understand the urge to distance one’s self from the distasteful truth that gun rights are to a large degree rooted in racism, but there’s no reason to make up a new lie.

175

It seems silly to rationalize today’s gun owners with ideas about slavery, as slavery is irrelevant. If we must generalize, then I would say gun owners are more aligned with survivalist ideas. They like that they can protect their families and provide food for themselves, without having to rely on the government.

176

All purely hypothetical. However, hypothetical does not mean not being ready just-in-case.

I believe that those with green eyeshade and a massaged sense of history are often “fanciful” to the detriment of human civilization. In fact, I do believe “fanciful” and “delusional” were very similar terms used by Neville Chamberlain and the French generals when describing the concern others had about the Third Reich. They both thought the people concerned with war in Europe were all wrong, and thus, England, France, and rest of Europe stood down, totally unprepared.

Look which party turned out to be fanciful by saying he met Hilter and he trusted Hitler would not invade. I have no problem with Neville C. being fanciful, but the huge mistake was he and the French Made was not being ready just-in-case. And that got Europe’s rear-end handed to it because of not being ready, and it took many US lives to clean up the mess.

As per my posts, if nothing ever happens, awesome! That is much preferred. However, if something does happen, a segment of us will be ready, while others have no choice, but to bend-over. And which group we are in is a choice we both make far in advance.

I make it no secret - I trust 9 to 5 bureaucrats as far as I see them.

But what is more interesting is I am expressing nothing different than what Madison, George Mason, and Jefferson et al expressed quite openly in similar words. I wonder if people would call them “fanciful.” Hum…

177

You speak about “gun owners” as if they’re some monolith. What are you basing this on? I can think of plenty of lawful gun owners who would freak out if they were to lose their Social Security benefits, for example. Most gun owners I know have them for personal safety reasons, not because they’re paranoid about the U.S. government turning into a totalitarian state.

You’re right, the U.S. military relies on civilian companies to produce its weapons. How many weapons do you think those companies would be able to produce if the government suddenly stopped paying for all that production? And all those employees would lose their jobs. Do you really think they’ll all just accept that as part of their civic, gun-owning duty? I would expect all kinds of civil conflicts within the ranks.

You “guarantee … underground supply lines,” but who is funding them? Do tell.

178

And so is posited the argument that should shame all gun owners into putting their collections on Ebay. Those who haven’t already pawned them to finance the high cost of higher ed, that is.

Historians and legal scholars are always looking for something to set them apart from the mundane crowd… or further whatever agenda they feel needs advancing at moment, but who knows?.. they might inadvertently be correct with the premise that the right to bear arms is just one more disgusting side effect of our country’s original sin:

(Dunno about our scholar here, but I think the argument would get more in the way of legs if he’d describe it in terms a little more robust than “circumstantial evidence”. Call it “settled science”… no, scratch that… “settled fact” strikes the right tone.)

179

Referring to this kind of thing in post 175: "In fact, I do believe “fanciful” and “delusional” were very similar terms used by Neville Chamberlain and the French generals when describing the concern others had about the Third Reich. They both thought the people concerned with war in Europe were all wrong, and thus, England, France, and rest of Europe stood down, totally unprepared.

Look which party turned out to be fanciful by saying he met Hilter and he trusted Hitler would not invade. I have no problem with Neville C. being fanciful, but the huge mistake was he and the French Made was not being ready just-in-case. And that got Europe’s rear-end handed to it because of not being ready, and it took many US lives to clean up the mess."

This is historic nonsense. The idea that England, France, etc. stood down and sat defenseless before Hitler is absolutely wrong. They feared a repeat of WWI, which was a slaughter, and couldn’t conceive that the tank and dive bomber and strafing fighter combined with truck pulled artillery would make warfare fluid again. They didn’t disarm. They were, in fact, arming. And that arming plus their WWI era beliefs in the nature of war was why they calculated - wrongly - that Hitler would at least for a long time settle with eating small portions like Czechoslovakia and Austria (which voted overwhelmingly to join Germany and was more National Socialist than Germany). They actually believed Hitler might become an ally against the Soviets over time once he’d gathered up the bits he cobble together to make a “greater Germany”. And when Hitler invaded Poland, they declared war and prepared to fight … but they prepared to fight the last war instead of what Germany actually did. Even that was rational because Poland, after all, is Poland, meaning its military was nowhere near the calibre of the Western powers and German success against it could be written off as poor quality.

And the British population (and French) were never “armed” in any way like the US is armed today. Never were and never have been since. During the war, British police didn’t carry weapons - and generally don’t - and weapons issued for home defense, against such threats as shot down German pilots, were controlled. They didn’t arm the populace as a response to the threat of airborne invasion but instead relied on the military.

As for the line “it took many US lives to clean up the mess,” I’ll be more charitable but the war in Europe was won much more by the Soviets. They were willing to take massive casualties and they crushed the German military. While we provided a lot of aid, the Soviets developed tanks better than the German ones, field artillery that no armor could take on and produced so many planes they overwhelmed the Luftwaffe until it had no choice but to fight only at night and to keep close to home. (One reason our bombing became more effective during the war is the Soviets killed so much of the Luftwaffe.) The Soviets took Berlin - with over 350,000 casualties, including over 80,000 dead. We lost about 180,000 in battle in the European and Mediterranean areas combined (including the Air Force). The Soviet estimates at the low end are almost 9 million killed, ranging up to over 13 million killed - and I’m talking about soldiers not civilians. So it took a lot of Russian (and Ukranian and Belarussian, etc.) lives. Without minimizing our efforts, their sacrifices dwarf ours.

I think historians would agree the invasion at Normandy would not have happened without war in the East sapping German strength. And even then, it took months of stalemate before we were able to breakout. One reason is the difference in cultures: we don’t like taking casualties and the Germans were able to fight us strategically knowing we would avoid waste if possible. The Soviets would bludgeon.

An interesting example of US issues about casualties is a memoir by a guy whose entire company was gunned down when their barely trained commander walked them, WWI style into a machine gun ambush. Only 3 men survived and then only by hugging the ground for a few days. The writer was assigned to the lost luggage section at a crossroads because the US military couldn’t deal with the concept that they’d just had a full strength, brand new company of about 200 men killed in a few minutes. The Soviets would have poured artillery down on their own men until the German position crumbled.

180

My dad was one of those, but not because he wanted a hand-out from government, rather it was because he believed the money was his, since he contributed to it for 45+ years.