Re: RE: Don't mess with Texas Grandmas
Colpy said:
Now, back to the issue at hand Schmitt
Save your legalistic rhetoric,
Colpy, I am not debating your legal rights to guns. In a free society a country can pass a plebiscite which repeals the law of gravity. (See current “
Intelligent Design” activism.)
Historically, the
Founding Fathers had little idea that the country they were founding would last twenty-five decades. I believe several doubted it would last a single decade. It was an experiment, and they did their best to increase its longevity.
When one considers that, with the possible exception of descriptions of
Athens, they had no
civilized model, and built their political engine from the pieces laying about:
English common law, as it was supposed to work, both the philosophy and the pragmatism of the best minds of the enlightenment, and in part from the model of the
Iroquois League Constitution (aka
Haudenosaunee, the
League of Peace and Power, or the
Six Nations).
They did better than they expected, better than anyone had a right to expect. Except for the blindness about slavery and native peoples, the machine required only an occasional adjustment to adapt for modern innovation.
The Amendment not only allowing, but requiring citizens to own and maintain their abilities with firearms made perfect sense, at a time when one man with one musket could, with intense practise, load and fire three to four shots a minute, and their former masters, the
British, only a few hundred miles away, had many of the best known for their abilities at amassing a huge phalanx of men to maneuverer and shoot in unison.
It was only through the use of superior rifles (with further range) and the colonials’ ability at the new art of guerrilla fighting, that had allowed them to exist through the early months of the war.
Britain was already experimenting with Light Infantry, to develop the style of fighting they had met within
America.
With such a foe on the continent, the cautionary injunction to keep your rifle skills well honed only made sense.
But
Britain got involved with another war in
Europe that lasted a quarter century. Except for a minor border skirmish (relatively speaking) which the
Americans instituted, the
British threat never materialized.
My claim is that if those pragmatic
Founding Fathers had been shown rifles and handguns that could by themselves duplicate – or better – the firepower of an entire regiment.
If they were told that these weapons would be available at a time when there was no threat of any land force attacking their country, and that every government – including their own – had weapons which not even a regiment of such gunmen could withstand, it would have given them pause.
They would immediately realize that no hunter required such a weapon, and that the only excuse for owning such a weapon was to oppose the laws of the land with impunity.
It may have taken considerable discussion to convince them that in the future some people would want to own such weapons for the simple recreational thrill of controlling such a death-dealing instrument, and would probably not, in themselves, represent, or come to represent, any threat to the peace of the community.
In spite of the latter, and in recognition of the
Founding Fathers’ penchant for giving preference to freedom from authority over the sensible regulation of society, I still feel confident that the
First Amendment would have taken
a somewhat different form.
