The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Just a Note on the Debate:.
Alex and I have discussed this, and he has decided not to widen the debate by trying to respond to commenters. I concur with this decision, as the last time we tried this the commentary discussions got, well, a bit heated. Plus it distracts from the main thrust of this: his position vs. mine. So, feel free to comment, but don’t be disappointed if neither he nor I address your points specifically.
This isn’t about you, it’s about US! [*wink*]
Round Two… Seriously? (by Alex)
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin… How can you say so much and still be so wrong?
You say:
I don’t think so, Alex. Because when questions pertaining to the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights came up, it was the job of the JUDICIARY to determine what the words meant – and they certainly didn’t say “Nobody knows.” They looked at the evidence available – the Federalist Papers and other writings of the Founders and of public debate, and drew conclusions making legal [judgments] based upon those conclusions.
“Nobody knows” is a cop-out. We do know. All we have to do is the research.
As Apu wistfully told Homer, there are so many things wrong with that, I don’t know which part to correct first. You actually asked- “What did the Second Amendment mean when it was ratified?” and I answered your question truthfully, with the only answer to that question that is genuinely accurate- which is “we don’t know”. Read all the papers you want, all you have is an educated guess at what they meant. Dress it all up with all the “drew conclusions” and “do the research” you want.
You don’t know what exactly they meant when they wrote it, and when they ratified it. Chances are even they weren’t of one mind. Yet here you are ridiculing me for pointing out this rather obvious fact- “YOU ARE SIMPLY GUESSING”. But apparently you are some omniscient soul that can divine the collective meaning to the hundreds of people involved in creating and ratifying those words through the sheer force of your will power. Must be nice. It’s not a “cop out” to admit that we are all just making this up based on whatever limited information we can find and shaped by our own experiences now. If you wanted to know what I thought they meant, then you should have asked that. But you didn’t. For someone so fascinated with the meaning of words, you really missed the boat on that one.
Speaking of cop-outs, you really do a huge disservice to both Jefferson and yourself in your next diatribe. Allow me to sort out what you have tangled up. Despite your attempt to say I know nothing of our founding fathers (or of Jefferson specifically) it is you who misses the underlying point. Here is a man who fully KNOWS the travesty of slavery (all the quotes and links you provide fully illustrate this) and yet still allows it when forming the basis of this land. It is one thing to use the “well, it is easy to see in retrospect but given the customs and culture of the time…” excuse, but you provide example after example that he knew full well that allowing this was an abomination, contrary to every belief he held to most sacred to heart.
So he “cops out” because the “political reality” is just too tough? Because the “Economic conditions” wouldn’t allow it? Man, if that is your idea of how to support the ideal you believe in the most, something you would die for, I don’t want to see how you’d treat ideas you are only moderately in favor of. And to drive home this duplicity home further, the man had a sexual relationship with someone he OWNED. (Not proven beyond any doubt, but certainly backed up with a considerable amount of evidence). So even if you buy the, “he knew it was repugnant but was just a realist” line of crap, how do you excuse that affront to personal liberty? Again, I don’t want to come of as a Jefferson basher- he is a personal favorite of mine. But to say his mind was impervious to anything but the noblest of ideas is to ascribe to him a perfection that he (nor anyone else) would ever attain. (I will say my choice of words in “oblivious” was wrong- but to know something is wrong and still do it anyway is far worse than being ignorant of it)
Then you go rambling on about how you have an “allegiance” to the constitution, and I do not. Again, multiple errors in that twisted logic. First my allegiance lies to my country first, above any document (even the constituion). And those that would have it backwards (exalting any document above the good of the nation) ultimately do more harm than good in the long run, as they fail to see the big picture. They are so intent on “preserving” their own ideal of “what this document means” that they ignore the 200+ years of history, progress, case law, advances and changes society has undertaken since. But let’s just say “ hey, these flawed human beings in the 1700’s got everything right, so let us all just reside inside their heads forever”. Talk about burying your head in the sand.
Then you use the old “if everything is relative, nothing matters” or “black and white vs. shades of gray” line of drivel. Ignore any context and just get at the “absolute truth”. Well, there is no absolute truth. Murder is wrong, absolutely- all the time, right? What if you had a chance to kill (in cold blood- hell, make him unarmed and smiling at you) Hitler before the war began and save millions of lives? Still wrong? Maybe, maybe not. There’s your gray area. It so easy for the Scalias of the world to label anyone who searches for context as a spineless, groundless wisp of transient thought. Yes, I could be simple minded and just believe that all the answers to our complex legal challenges today lie in getting inside the heads of men from 200 years ago. Or I could believe that their intent is one factor in figuring out how to apply the law, but not the ONLY factor.
I could struggle to balance a law written when arms were muskets against the rights of some mother in Cabrini Green who puts her kids to bed in the bathtub because that is the most bullet proof place in the apartment. I could say, what are the principles that make the Second important enough to include in the bill of rights, and how do we balance those principles with the others? What is the reality of the law as it has evolved, through case law, regarding guns, crime, carrying arms, and the registration of weapons? Or, like you, I could just say “it means whatever they wanted it to, and that’s it- no more thinking on my part.” Which is the “cop out”? Which puts the ideas of one group of men in one isolated time period above the needs of those who must govern and be governed today?
And I love the way you just decide that the phrase in the beginning of the sentence is “explanatory”. Really? Why didn’t the court think so in United States v. Miller? It saw the phrase about the militia and observed that “[w]ith obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces the declaration and guarantee of the second amendment were made. It must be interpreted WITH THAT END IN VIEW” (emphasis added). So the court said, rather clearly, that the second amendment must be viewed restrictively, as serving the purpose of supporting a well regulated militia. Golly I guess they thought those words weren’t simply “explanatory” (nice way of brushing them off). It gets even clearer later in the decision: “[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the second amendment guarantees the right to keep such an instrument.” Wow, a LITERAL interpretation of the 2nd that doesn’t just brush off the first phrase. Gee, how novel.
You can keep trying to find some “absolute” meaning in the constitution that is fixed, never changes, and applies properly forever- but you never will. It is a short-sighted, naïve, hopelessly simplistic way to try and iron out modern problems.
Round 2 of the Debate: Not So Fast!.
I’m not letting ANYBODY duck a question that easily. You wrote:
Let me answer the first part of the question with the only definitive answer we will likely produce in this debate: “Nobody knows”. We cannot presume to know what the “single intent” of hundreds of people attending the state ratifying conventions ever was (even they probably couldn’t agree on that). There were few records kept so all we have is, ultimately, speculation. Any idea that we can somehow divine the “true intention” of either the framers, or those that ratified it is quixotic task, and doomed from the start.
I don’t think so, Alex. Because when questions pertaining to the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights came up, it was the job of the JUDICIARY to determine what the words meant – and they certainly didn’t say “Nobody knows.” They looked at the evidence available – the Federalist Papers and other writings of the Founders and of public debate, and drew conclusions making legal judgements based upon those conclusions.
“Nobody knows” is a cop-out. We do know. All we have to do is the research.
Regardless, your answer to the second part of the question renders the first part moot:
Which gets to the second part of the question, “does it matter today?” My answer is, obviously not. Relying on someone’s personal beliefs from 1787 as the basis for governance in a modern society is a recipe for disaster.
Good that we have that out of the way right up front. It makes things considerably easier. It also illustrates that you haven’t thought this through too much.
I can see that I’m going to enjoy this.
Alex, I don’t know how old you are, but I can tell that you’re relatively ignorant of early American history – and specifically about the Founders themselves. Your comment
But the same genius of Jefferson that saw so much in the power of freedom and liberty, was oblivious to the inequality of slavery- mankind’s greatest affront to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What does it say if the mightiest mind of that time (a biased opinion for sure, but one I’ll support) could be so ignorant as to allow this atrocity to remain legal? They also (many of them at least) supported the subjugation of women, many restrictions that kept the unwashed masses in their place, and other practices that we would find objectionable by any modern standard.
is quite telling. On the question of slavery, Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence – said this:
“There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.”
(Letter to Thomas Cooper, September 10, 1814)
And this:
“But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror.”
(Letter to John Holmes, 1820)
And this, from that same letter:
“I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Take a gander through this paper (a PDF file) for more info on Jefferson’s attitude towards slavery.
Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible. Jefferson recognized that slavery was either (no pun intended) the lynchpin that would allow the formation of The United States, or the shear-pin that would sunder it. He also understood that the economy of the U.S. was, at that time, dependent on it.
The Founders were certainly idealists, but not starry-eyed ones. They were fully “reality-based.” “Oblivious” they most certainly were not.
Words mean things, else they need not be spoken or written down. On the topic of interpreting the Constitution, Jefferson himself said this:
“On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
Letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights is not a guideline, not a mere suggestion of what society ought to do, it’s a legal document that establishes and constrains a government. It is, in a way, a binding contract – and the party that is bound is the government. The problem is that government is made up of people – and unfortunately far too many of the people in that government think like you do – thus the protections that legal document are supposed to afford those of us who live under it are eroded away.
You point to the obvious injustice of slavery, the apparent injustice of a lack of women’s suffrage and other heinous iniquities – and justify throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The Constitution carries within it the means by which it can be altered, legally. We’ve used that means to give women the vote, repeal slavery, and protect the rights of those freed, and of other minorities. Unfortunately, we’ve also used it to empower Congress to collect income tax, to establish the popular election of Senators, and to ban alcohol. (At least we were bright enough to reverse the ban on alcohol.)
But what you espouse is disregard for the document because it’s old and outdated.
I have to ask, upon what will you build a new edifice? If we cannot know what the Founders meant when they wrote and ratified the Constitution, if their words are meaningless to us now, why should the words you wish to replace them with have any more meaning?
Antonin Scalia has decried precisely what you champion:
It is literally true that the U.S. Supreme Court has entirely liberated itself from the text of the Constitution.
What ‘we the people’ want most of all is someone who will agree with us as to what the evolving constitution says.
We are free at last, free at last. There is no respect in which we are chained or bound by the text of the Constitution. All it takes is five hands.
What in the world is a ‘moderate interpretation’ of the text? Halfway between what it really says and what you want it to say?
(Excerpts from a speech given in New Orleans, March 2004)
He also said:
To some degree, a constitutional guarantee is like a commercial loan, you can only get it if, at the time, you don’t really need it. The most important, enduring, and stable portions of the Constitution represent such a deep social consensus that one suspects if they were entirely eliminated, very little would change. And the converse is also true. A guarantee may appear in the words of the Constitution, but when the society ceases to possess an abiding belief in it, it has no living effect. Consider the fate of the principle expressed in the Tenth Amendment that the federal government is a government of limited powers. I do not suggest that constitutionalization has no effect in helping the society to preserve allegiance to its fundamental principles. That is the whole purpose of a constitution. But the allegiance comes first and the preservation afterwards.
The primary difference between you and I, Alex, is that I have an allegiance to that document, and you do not. The purpose of this debate, from my perspective, is to get you to understand why we need that allegiance, and why disregard of it is the most grave error we can make.
Was the Constitution perfect? Hardly, but while it may not have been the greatest document ever recorded (as someone once quipped) it beats the hell out of whatever they’re using these days.
“Old” and “flawed” does not equal useless and wrong. By all means, if it needs changing, we can change it, but declaring it meaningless simply eviscerates it. That “abiding belief” vanishes, and the law behind it along with it. The Second Amendment means today what it meant when it was ratified. No amendment has been passed reversing it, and no law can be passed that will obliterate it. Only if we as a society cease to possess an abiding belief can we be stripped of our right to arms and our other rights guaranteed against infringement and usurpation by the legal document that is our Constitution.
The Second Amendment does read “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” – that’s the key, critical phrase. The militia clause is explanatory, not limiting, and the best illustration of that comes from one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever handed down: Scott v Sanford. You may not be familiar with it.
A slave, Dred Scott, was the property of a U.S. Army officer, and at one time he travelled to a “free” state when the officer was stationed there. After the death of the officer, Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that since he had lived in a free state, he could no longer be a slave. In a 7-2 decision the Chief Justice said that Scott was not free and further that blacks, free or slave, could not be citizens of the U.S. because:
(Citizenship) would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
So, in the name of “public safety” the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens (members of a militia or not) were denied to blacks.
The argument I most often hear in opposition to this case is that it is so obviously racist that it must be ignored – but hardly ever does anyone bother to grasp that Justice Taney and the other Justices thoroughly understood what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights meant when it came to the rights of citizens. Perhaps, like Jefferson, they were afraid of “letting go of the Wolf’s ears,” but NO ONE can claim that “Nobody knows” what the Founders meant when they ratified the Bill of Rights. In 1856, a mere 64 years after ratification, the Supreme Court listed what just some of the “rights of the people” were: the right to enter every other State whenever we please, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as we please, to go where we please at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless we commit some violation of law; the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever we go.
Those rights haven’t been legally stripped from us, they’ve been usurped. And they’ve been usurped because far too many people believe, like you, that the Constitution is old and outdated. They’ve lost that “abiding belief,” and allowed others to convince them that those rights aren’t important, and don’t need to be defended.
The Second Amendment is hardly the only one under constant attack, but it’s the one on which a legal “bright line” can be drawn most easily. It is, in my opinion, a litmus test for freedom, and it is my purpose here to help you see why, and to understand why those of us you term “strict literalists” are trying to protect not only our rights, but yours as well.
Round 1 of the Debate by Guest Poster Alex:.
Ok, just a warm up:
“What did the Second Amendment mean when it was ratified, and does it matter today?”
Let me answer the first part of the question with the only definitive answer we will likely produce in this debate: “Nobody knows”. We cannot presume to know what the “single intent” of hundreds of people attending the state ratifying conventions ever was (even they probably couldn’t agree on that). There were few records kept so all we have is, ultimately, speculation. Any idea that we can somehow divine the “true intention” of either the framers, or those that ratified it is quixotic task, and doomed from the start.
Which gets to the second part of the question, “does it matter today?” My answer is, obviously not. Relying on someone’s personal beliefs from 1787 as the basis for governance in a modern society is a recipe for disaster. We look back on the founding fathers as mythic heroes, infallible in thought, and always noble in purpose. Now these were, indeed, great men with inspired ideas. And I recognize the benefit the world has since seen from the ideals they brought forth.
But the same genius of Jefferson that saw so much in the power of freedom and liberty, was oblivious to the inequality of slavery- mankind’s greatest affront to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What does it say if the mightiest mind of that time (a biased opinion for sure, but one I’ll support) could be so ignorant as to allow this atrocity to remain legal? They also (many of them at least) supported the subjugation of women, many restrictions that kept the unwashed masses in their place, and other practices that we would find objectionable by any modern standard.
No, I am not bashing on these guys. Again, I do appreciate the gift their democracy adds to my everyday world 200+ years later. But to revere them as some demi-gods who had it all figured out seems so woefully naive as to be begging for a trip to the loony bin. They were flawed human beings, just like you and me. They did their best, and put down a remarkable foundation. But it wasn’t perfect, and it never will be.
Regarding the Second, for the strict literalists, I would offer these points. First, to re-ignite a well worn argument, the fact that they add in “A well regulated Militia” in the first part of the sentence shouldn’t be dismissed. If they wanted unlimited, no holds barred, everyone gets guns the second would read: “the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. But it doesn’t. They added a modifying clause. It must mean something or they wouldn’t have bothered to put it in, right? Why add it unless it restricted the other phrase? The other phrase is clear, easily understood, and unrestricted, so the only point to monkeying with it is to tone it down. Therefore, since the literalists believe so much in every word in the constitution, logic holds that they must have wanted some limitation on the second, or they wouldn’t have tossed in that modifying phrase. Second, the entire concept of “arms” represents an evolving technology, and trying to say that anyone in the 1800’s had the foggiest idea of what we have now in this arena is ludicrous. So anybody writing a law about muskets, might have a different intent when faced with a sub-machine gun.
Now we can go round and round on what the term Militia means, what the purpose of that phrase is, and what is the “intent” of the whole thing. But like I said, it doesn’t matter. What matters is how to interpret the law today, given what “arms” mean in this society.
(Posted by Kevin because Alex did this as a comment.)
Debate Resumes!.
Back in June I invited Alex, a commenter at this post at Ian Hammet’s Banana Oil!, to join me here at TSM for a debate on the right to arms.
Well, things occurred, work interrupted, etc., and we weren’t able to carry the discussion very far. I’m a bit recharged (though still pretty damned busy) and Alex has a short window of opportunity before he gets buried in work again, so we’re going to take another shot at it. I’ve sent him another invitation to rejoin me here, and asked him to answer this question to begin the discussion:
What did the Second Amendment mean when it was ratified, and does it matter today?
We’ll see where this goes!
Gun Bigots.
I’ve mentioned before that I occasionally pick up a copy of Tucson’s “Alternative” newspaper – the Tucson Weekly – just so I can keep an eye on what the “other side” is up to. I’ve got to say that they do a pretty fair job of putting the screws to the politicians – on BOTH sides – but the overall bent is intensely Leftist in nature, and that goes for guns and gun control in a big way.
Last week’s issue is no exception. Regular opinion columnist Renée Downing has once again exposed her caring, inclusive, understanding Leftist self in a piece entitled God bless the NRA and its efforts to keep us fully armed! Let us fisk:
Guns. How we love ’em.
The National Rifle Association recently called for a nationwide boycott of ConocoPhillips after the oil company joined a lawsuit to block an Oklahoma law that allows employees to leave guns in their vehicles (read: “trucks”) in their employers’ parking lots. ConocoPhillips contends that it has the right to forbid workers to bring guns onto company property; the NRA naturally sees this as an infringement of every truck’s God-given right to be fully armed at all times.
The weaselly old company spokespeople are pretending this is a safety issue, not thinking for one minute about what it would be like to be a roughneck at the mercy of, say, a pack of ravening wolves, should one appear in the parking lot of a ConocoPhillips refinery. Hey, it could happen.
Fortunately for potential ravening victims everywhere, ubiquitous NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre (his real name) has jumped right on it, and is not only organizing a boycott–which has got to hurt, because who ever heard of a manly gun-toter driving anything that gets more than 12 miles to the gallon?–but is also threatening to put up billboards all over Houston identifying the oil company as an enemy of our precious Second Amendment rights.
So, right off the bat, ALL gun owners drive gas-guzzling trucks! I guess I can assume that Ms. Downing eats granola, wears Birkenstocks, and (if she drives) drives a Volvo? (I’d have said ‘drives a hybrid’ but she writes for the Weekly so I doubt seriously she could afford one.)
I think she’s being insensitive.
Yes, just like that Brady woman whining about her brain-damaged husband–a little thing like that, and she goes wacko–and those hundreds of girlie-man police chiefs begging for an extension on the assault-weapons ban, ConocoPhillips has become a tool of a worldwide, New York-based leftist pacifist conspiracy that would like nothing better than to take away our armor-piercing bullets, leaving blameless recreational hunters defenseless against ravening herds of vengeful deer or, even worse, Mexicans.
Whoo! How much anti-gun/anti-gun-owner propaganda can you pack into one sentence?? I’m in awe! (Well, not really awe. Awe doesn’t usually make me nauseous.)
Here in Arizona, normally a bastion of redneck rights, things are getting to be just as bad. This year, the Legislature tried valiantly to get a bill through that would have permitted people to carry guns into bars, because, honestly, where would you be more likely to need one? As NRA lobbyist Darren LaSorte (his real name) explained to the Arizona Daily Star, “These places are not immune from violence,” and with guns at hand, people would have a chance to defend themselves. How could anyone possibly argue with that? You somehow find yourself in a rowdy bar full of aggressive, drunken jerks and unthinkingly hang out there for a few hours, and what do you want to bet something would happen that would call for your plugging a fellow patron at close range? Especially if you have some half-assed Frenchy name like LaSorte or LaPierre, which has apparently distorted your personality to such an extent that you’re the kind of guy who works for the NRA. All you’d have to do is introduce yourself, and bam!, the next thing you know, you’d have to shoot somebody.
Isn’t “redneck” a racial epithet? I thought Leftists cared about people, and hated racist insults! How wrong I was! My psyche is bruised!
Can I sue for mental anguish?
Unfortunately, 78 percent of the population of this poor, benighted state thought that the guns in bars thing sounded like a bad idea, and the bill was, so to speak, shot down. Still, there’s no rule against guns in bar parking lots, so you can step out and settle your business right outside on the blacktop. That’s America.
Yes it is, Ms. Downing. And glad I am of it. If it offends you, more the better.
To many people, the NRA’s single-minded drive to have more guns, bigger guns and better guns in more places seems, well, perverse. Why is it so important, these liberals mewl, to have a firearm in your pants at all times? I mean, what’s with that? Is it something to do with being middle-aged and fat and badly educated and basically scared and walking around with a huge socio-economic chip on your shoulder?
No, no, no. That’s just what it looks like.
Whoa! More stereotyping! Well, let’s see: I’m middle aged – check. I’m fat – check. I have a college degree from the U of A – well we can debate that one, but in my opinion she missed. “Basically scared and walking around with a huge socio-economic chip on your shoulder”? Excuse me? What, exactly does that mean? I suppose my bad edumacation don’t allow me to grasp them subtle nuances.
The truth is that NRA members, including their various local subsets like the Minutemen and Ranch Rescue (motto: Let’s go out and find something to do with our guns!) have grasped a basic truth: Guns and other forms of explosive weaponry make life better. You know, like electricity or aspirin.
Just stop and think about it. Without gunpowder and plastique and napalm and plutonium, what would life on Earth be like? Like some big Berkeley, Calif., that’s what. Just imagine the sheer human suffering of a world where trauma surgeons and artificial-limb makers would be marginally employed, where coffin suppliers to the armed forces would go out of business, where florists in the inner cities would be forced to scale back, and patients waiting for young, healthy organs would come to depend completely on motorcycle accidents. A world in which we still associated Baghdad with Aladdin and high-quality carpets.
I don’t know about you, but an America in which natural selection ceased to operate among the small children of gun enthusiasts isn’t one I’d ever want to see. God bless the NRA.
Let me see…
When we didn’t have plastique and napalm and plutonium we had things like, oh, the Thirty-Years War in which wiped out about 20% of the population of Europe. They had gunpowder, though. Before gunpowder, however, people still killed people, wholesale and retail. I suppose she’s never heard of Genghis (that’s apparently pronounced “Jenjis”) Khan? The Greeks? The Romans? The destruction of Carthage?
The world hardly resembled Berzerkly. Doctors got to watch people die of knife and sword wounds, blunt-force trauma, epidemic disease and starvation, not to mention childbirth. Utopia it was not. Before gunpowder the world was run by large men with bladed weapons, and it was most definitely not free, fair, or democratic. Especially for women. (See Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them for more on this topic.)
Ms. Downing repeats multiple erroneous ideas as fact: that disarming the law-abiding somehow makes us “safer;” that people who are willing to be armed in defense of themselves and others are ignorant, stupid, racist and violent; that we can somehow make all the guns go away and utopia will result; and more, and she does it all with sneering insults as though from a vastly superior intellect.
Joe Huffman had an excellent quote up the other day from Don Kates:
The gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry.
Renée Downing illustrates this nicely, doesn’t she? God bless the Leftists.
UPDATE: I sent another Letter to the Editor. We’ll see if they publish this one.
Cowboy Diplomacy.
(And now for something a little lighter, stolen off the AR15.com General Discussion board:)
I think they’re expecting this kind of behavior from John Bolton.
Let’s hope.
While I was working on the California project I didn’t have a lot of spare time, but as I’ve said before I tend to read a great deal. I took three books with me; a pulp sci-fi novel, Ayn Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It, and Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom – the book James Lileks characterized:
“Bracing” does not describe it, anymore than “Brisk” describes the sensation of a bucket of lemon juice poured on a sucking chest wound.
You could say much the same about Rand’s collection of essays.
No wonder so much of the population of the world avoids thinking about this stuff. It’s remarkably unpleasant to immerse yourself in much of it. Sucking chest wound, indeed.
Dalrymple describes the life of the British underclass vividly, and in great detail. He describes the self-destructive behavior he observes on a daily basis, and attributes it to one, specific source: the leftist intelligentsia.
Human behavior cannot be explained without reference to the meaning and intentions people give to their acts and omissions; and everyone has a Weltanshauung, a worldview, whether he knows it or not. It is the ideas my patients have that fascinate – and, to be honest, appall – me: for they are the source of their misery.
Their ideas make themselves manifest even in the language they use. The frequency of locutions of passivity is a striking example. An alcoholic, explaining his misconduct while drunk, will say, “The beer went mad.” A heroin addict, explaining his resort to the needle, will say, “Heroin’s everywhere.” It is as if the beer drank the alcoholic, or the heroin injected the addict.
Other locutions plainly serve an exculpatory function and represent a denial of agency and therefore of personal responsibility. The murderer claims the knife went in or the gun went off. The man who attacks his sexual consort claims that he “went into one” or “lost it,” as if he were the victim of a kind of epilepsy of which it is the doctor’s duty to cure him. Until the cure, of course, he can continue to abuse his consort – for such abuse has certain advantages for him – safe in the knowledge that he, not his consort, is the true victim.
I have come to see the uncovering of this dishonesty and self-deception as an essential part of my work. When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behavior, that he is easily led, I ask him if he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs. Invariably the man begins to laugh: the absurdity of what he has said is immediately apparent to him. Indeed, he will acknowledge that he knew how absurd it was all along, but that certain advantages, both psychological and social, accrued by keeping the pretense up.
The idea that one is not an agent but the helpless victim of circumstances, or of large occult sociological or economic forces, does not come naturally, as an inevitable concomitant of experience. On the contrary, only in extreme circumstances is helplessness directly experienced in the way the blueness of the sky is experienced. Agency, by contrast, is the common experience of us all. We know our will’s free, and there’s an end on’t.
The contrary idea, however, has been endlessly propagated by intellectuals and academics who do not believe it of themselves, of course, but only of others less fortunately placed than themselves. In this there is a considerable element of condescension: that some people do not measure up fully to the status of human. The extension of the term “addiction,” for example, to cover any undesirable but nonetheless gratifying behavior that is repeated, is one example of denial of personal agency that has swiftly percolated downward from academe. Not long after academic criminologists propounded the theory that recidivists were addicted to crime (bolstering their theories with impressive diagrams of neural circuits in the brain to prove it), a car thief of limited intelligence and less education asked me for treatment of his addiction to stealing cars – failing receipt of which, of course, he felt morally justified in continuing to relieve car owners of their property.
In fact most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia. Of nothing is this more true than the system of sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate (a figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.)
Literature and common sense attest that sexual relations between men and women have been fraught with difficulty down the ages precisely because man is a conscious social being who bears a culture, and is not merely a biological being. But intellectuals in the twentieth century sought to free our sexual relations of all social, contractual, or moral obligations and meaning whatsoever, so that henceforth only raw sexual desire itself would count in our decision making.
The intellectuals were about as sincere as Marie Antoinette when she played the shepardess. While their own sexual mores no doubt became more relaxed and liberal, they nonetheless continued to recognize inescapable obligations with regard to children, for example. Whatever they said, they didn’t want a complete breakdown of family relations any more that Marie Antoinette really wanted to earn her living by looking after sheep.
But their ideas were adopted both literally and wholesale in the lowest and most vulnerable social class. If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.
Here the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness, and misery may be perused at leisure – in conditions, be it remembered, of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction beween sexually permissable and the impermissable.
The connection between this loosening and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.
But deny it they do, and seemingly without effort.
What Dalrymple describes as Weltanshauung, or worldview, is at its base philosophy. It is, in the cases he describes, flawed philosophy, but it is philosophy nonetheless. Rand writes in her title essay:
The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them – from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handfull of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default. For some two hundred years, under the influence of Immanual Kant, the dominant trend of philosophy has been directed to a single goal: the destruction of man’s mind, of his confidence in the power of reason. Today, we are seeing the climax of that trend.
She wrote that in 1974. Dalrymple’s book was published in 2001. Both Rand and Dalrymple point out that a relatively small group of people control the culture – that the ideas of these people radiate outward, affecting some more than others. Dalrymple illustrates that this effect has a pernicious tendency to migrate upwards from the bottom, generally through the cultures of youth. Ignorance, it seems, is not necessarily bliss. In her essay Don’t Let it Go, Rand writes about the influence of the minority:
A nation, like an individual, has a sense of life, which is expressed not in its formal culture, but in its “life style” – in the kinds of actions and attitudes which people take for granted and believe to be self-evident, but which are produced by complex evaluations involving a fundamental view of man’s nature.
A “nation” is not a mystic or supernatural entity: it is a large number of individuals who live in the same geographic locality under the same political system. A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a “culture” is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.
(The dominance of certain ideas is not necessarily determined by the number of their adherents: it may be determined by majority acceptance, or by the greater activity and persistence of a given faction, or by default, i.e., the failure of the opposition, or – when a country is free – by a combination of persistence and truth. In any case, ideas and the resultant culture are the product and active concern of a minority. Who constitutes this minority? Whoever chooses to be concerned.)
Remember this, because it’s the key point of this rather long piece of mine.
Rand continues in her discussion of culture:
A nation’s political trends are the equivalent of a man’s course of action and are determined by its culture. A nation’s culture is the equivalent of a man’s conscious convictions. Just as an individual’s sense of life can clash with his conscious convictions, hampering or defeating his actions, so a nation’s sense of life can clash with its culture, hampering or defeating its political course. Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger – no matter how good his subconscious values – so can a nation.
This is the position of America today.
If America is to be saved from destruction – specifically, from dictatorship – she will be saved by her sense of life.
As to the two other elements that determine a nation’s future, one (our political trend) is speeding straight to disaster, the other (culture) is virtually nonexistent. The political trend is pure statism and is moving toward a totalitarian dictatorship at a speed which, in any other country, would have reached that goal long ago. The culture is worse than nonexistent: it is operating below zero, i.e., performing the opposite of its function. A culture provides a nation’s intellectual leadership, its ideas, its education, its moral code. Today, the concerted effort of our cultural “Establishment” is directed at the obliteration of man’s rational faculty.
She wrote that in 1971.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a column in yesterday’s Slate entitled Losing the Iraq War: Can the left really want us to? The simple answer is “Yes.” And the reason it can is because the Left’s sense of life clashes violently with its conscious convictions. The Left very easily, as Dalrymple put it, has the necessary intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to do so. Hitchens writes:
How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of “missing” Iraqis, to support Iraqi women’s battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?
From my perspective it’s fairly obvious: the small elite that has controlled the culture is seeing its sense of life conflict with its conscious convictions, and its sense of life is losing, badly. Yet there is hope. More and more of those on the Left are awakening to this internal clash – and reconciling it. Hitchens is a good example himself, and ever-more-blatant examples of the dichotomy such as Dick “The most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that has ever existed in the history of the planet” Gregory and Harry “Colin Powell is a house slave” Belafonte are making the contradictions more obvious and the transition easier. Writer Nick Cohen wrote a particularly good piece printed in The Guardian on Sunday about his “excommunication” from the orthodox Left because of his recognition of that clash:
I’m sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance? But his criticisms would have little impact. It’s like a religion: the contradictions are obvious to outsiders but don’t disturb the faithful. You believe when you’re in its warm embrace. Alas, I’m out. Last week, after 44 years of regular church-going, the bell tolled, the book was closed and the candle was extinguished. I was excommunicated.
The officiating bishop was Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman and a friend of long-standing, who delivered his anathema in the Guardian. The immediate heresy was a piece I’d written about how difficult the courts made it to deport suspected Islamist terrorists. As I’d campaigned to protect asylum seekers in the past, Wilby used the article as damning evidence of ‘a rightwards lurch’. The old bat didn’t understand that genuine asylum seekers are the victims of the world’s greatest criminals – four million fled Saddam Hussein – not criminals themselves.
Even if he’d grasped that the Mail was wrong and real refugees weren’t villains, I doubt it would have made a difference. My mortal sin had been to question ‘harshly the motives of the anti-war movement’, and to that I had to plead guilty.
Who needs philosophy? Everyone does. Everyone has one, be it as simple as his or her Weltanshauung, or as rigorously strict as Rand’s Objectivism. For the majority of people in any culture, however, their philosophy is absorbed through osmosis, and the source of that philosophy is from a relatively small number of people in that culture; those, as Rand says, who choose to be concerned.
In her essay What Can One Do? Rand considers the question “What can one person do?” if they want to affect cultural change. She answers:
“The immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life” cannot be made singly, piecemeal or “retail,” so to speak; an army of crusaders would not be enough to do it. But the factor that underlies and determines every aspect of human life is philosophy; teach men the right philosophy – and their own minds will do the rest. Philosophy is the wholesaler in human affairs.
Man cannot exist without some form of philosophy, i.e., some comprehensive view of life. Most men are not intellectual innovators, but they are receptive to ideas, are able to judge them critically and to choose the right course, when and if it is offered. There are also a great many men who are indifferent to ideas and anything beyond the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment; such men accept subconsciously whatever is offered by the culture of their time, and swing blindly with any chance current. They are merely social ballast – be they day laborers or company presidents – and by their own choice, irrelevant to the fate of the world.
I think Dalrymple illustrates that the “social ballast” has more impact of the fate of a society than Rand allows, but continuing:
Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them?
Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? Are you immune from the fallout of the constant barrage aimed at the destruction of reason – and can you provide others with antimissile missiles? A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.
—
If you like condensations (provided you bear in mind their full meaning), I will say: when you ask “What can one do?” – the answer is “SPEAK” (provided you know what you are saying).
A few suggestions: do not wait for a national audience. Speak on any scale open to you, large or small – to your friends, your associates, your professional organizations, or any legitimate public forum. You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results – but it is of such activities that public opinion is made.
Do not pass up a chance to express your views on important issues. Write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, to TV and radio commentators, and above all, to your Congressman (who depend on their constituents). If your letters are brief and rational (rather than incoherently emotional), they will have more influence than you suspect.
(As the Geek with a .45 puts it, “Democracy works for those who show up.” Continuing:)
The opportunities to speak are all around you. I suggest that you make the following experiment: Take an ideological “inventory” one week, i.e., note how many times people utter the wrong political, social, and moral notions as if these were self-evident truths, with your silent sanction. Then make it a habit to object to such remarks – not to make lengthy speeches, which are seldom appropriate, but merely to say: “I don’t agree.” (And be prepared to explain why, if the speaker wants to know.) This is one of the best ways to stop the spread of vicious bromides. (If the speaker is innocent, it will help him; if he is not, it will undercut his confidence the next time.) Most particularly, do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked.
Do not “proselytize” indiscriminately, i.e., do not force discussions or arguments on those who are not interested or willing to argue. It is not your job to save everyone’s soul. If you do the things that are in your power, you will not feel guilty about not doing – “somehow” – the things that are not.
Now, at the end of all of this, we reach the point of this rather long essay: Why I blog. This is it. I’m one of those who chooses to be concerned. I’m one of the tiny, but not silent voices in this culture who is willing to stand up and say “I don’t agree,” and why. I recognize the clash between our sense of life and our culture, and I’m willing to try to help expose it and reconcile it in those who are putting us in such danger because of it, and I hope that in some small way my efforts will result in individual conscious convictions – and eventually a culture – that I am happy and proud to call American again.
Something’s apparently doing some good (no, I’m not taking credit). Crime has declined remarkably over the last decade, and according to this David Brooks NYT editorial (I know, I know…)
The number of drunken driving fatalities has declined by 38 percent since 1982, according to the Department of Transportation, even though the number of vehicle miles traveled is up 81 percent. The total consumption of hard liquor by Americans over that time has declined by over 30 percent.
Teenage pregnancy has declined by 28 percent since its peak in 1990. Teenage births are down significantly and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed in the country has also been declining since the early 1990’s.
Fewer children are living in poverty, even allowing for an uptick during the last recession. There’s even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace. People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955.
I could go on. Teenage suicide is down. Elementary school test scores are rising (a sign than more kids are living in homes conducive to learning). Teenagers are losing their virginity later in life and having fewer sex partners. In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.
Something good is going on, and I’d like to see it continue – because we’ve still got a long, long way to go. Brooks acknowledges the source, though:
I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We’re in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.
The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent’s social duty to be a rebel.
In short, we’re rejecting the Left Intelligentsia’s bad philosophy. “I don’t agree, and here’s why….”
The blogosphere, I hope, will be a bigger part of that – exposing bad ideas immediately and mercilessly, and accessible to all who choose to be concerned. A free market of ideas is critical, and the Left has had a stranglehold on that market for far too long. What has resulted, as Dalrymple has repeatedly illustrated, is The Frivolity of Evil, and we cannot survive if we do not pull back from that abyss. Rand, Dalrymple, Hitchens, Cohen see the dangers of not speaking out. So do I.
I hope you do too. Make your voice heard.
I Suq.
I got a chance to go to the range today, and while I was there I thought I’d go ahead and try Mr. Completely’s current postal match, “Flyswatter.”
Humbling damn experience.
That’s four out of twenty, if you can’t see the target very well. Yes, at 10 yards. I keep telling myself it’s that crappy factory trigger. I need to spring the big bucks for that Volquartsen drop-in trigger group. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
I also got to check out my new S&W M25 Mountain Gun. It shoots pretty well, but I’ve got a damned flinch. I tried out my 300 grain Cast Performance handloads, and I’ve decided I need to try a different primer. My heaviest load of 15.0 grains of 2400 yeilded velocities from 750 to 850fps, an extreme spread of 100fps! That’s not right, and (along with my flinch) the groups were not spectacular. I was using Winchester WLP large pistol primers, advertised as being for standard or magnum loads.
Apparently not with 2400.
Perhaps I should try some Federal magnum primers under those same powder charges.
The good news is that the range was busy as hell. The rifle silhouette range was running its scheduled Blackpowder Cartridge Rifle match, the two public ranges were about 2/3 full, the pistol range had a group shooting on it. I got kicked off the police range I was on because the Boy Scouts had reserved it. They hadn’t shown up the night before to camp, but they came this morning anyway to shoot. The only ranges not crowded were the .22 rifle silhouette range and the 1,000 yard range.
Hopefully I’ll get to go back to the range next weekend for a little more experimentation.
HOME!.
I got home yesterday afternoon a little after four. Thanks to everyone who offered hospitality, but I wasn’t able to check the site until I got home! And then Comcast’s internet service only allowed me on line about 10 minutes. I checked out of the hotel room at 4:40AM Wednesday morning, left the job site at 1:50PM, drove four and a half hours to Lebec, CA and got a hotel room. I left Lebec Thursday morning at about 8:30, and got home about 4:20.
I made good time.
I’ve got a lot to do in the office and at home, so blogging will remain light for the forseeable future.