Kevin Williamson of the
National Review is incensed about the notion of preventing Americans from owning piles of military hardware:
The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions. The Second Amendment is not about Bambi and burglars — whatever a well-regulated militia is, it is not a hunting party or a sport-clays club. It is remarkable to me that any educated person — let alone a Harvard Law graduate — believes that the second item on the Bill of Rights is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a recreational activity. There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny.
This, says
Matt Steinglas, is "obviously wrong":
Militia are hopelessly inadequate as a means of defending a free country. While "people's war" militia-based strategies have been employed to wear down invading armies in numerous countries over the past century, not one of those countries (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, southern Lebanon, etc) is "free". This is not an accident of history. Freedom is the product of orderly democratic governance and the rule of law. Popular militias are overwhelming likely to foster not democracy or the rule of law, but warlordism, tribalism and civil war. In Lebanon, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Colombia, the Palestinian Territories and elsewhere, we see that militias of armed private citizens rip apart weak democratic states in order to prey upon local populations in authoritarian sub-states or fiefdoms. Free states are defended by standing armies, not militias, because free states enjoy the consent of the governed, which allows them to maintain effective standing armies. Like every other free country apart from Costa Rica, the United States has a standing army in times of peace, and has since 1791, when the founding fathers realised a standing army would be necessary to fight the irregular popular militias of the continent's Native American peoples. (Guess who won?)
As crummy as popular militias have proven at defending against "sudden foreign invasions", they've been even worse at defending against "domestic usurpations of power by rulers". There is, I think, not a single case in modern history, certainly not since the invention of the Gatling gun. No popular militia has ever prevented the seizure of power by an authoritarian ruler. In countries with well-established democratic traditions, authoritarian takeovers are rare; when they occur, popular militias do not resist, or are ruthlessly crushed by national armed forces. In countries with weak democratic traditions, authoritarian takeovers sometimes go smoothly, or in other cases touch off periods of civil war, which are resolved when one faction finally defeats the others and imposes authoritarian rule. Name your authoritarian takeover: Germany, Japan, Russia, China, Egypt, Libya, Brazil, Greece, Spain, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Chile, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Syria—popular militias never resist authoritarian takeover and preserve democracy or civil freedoms. That is a thing that happens in silly movies. It is not a thing that happens in the world.
All peoples have myths, and the myth of armed citizens resisting a tyrannous government is one beloved of many Americans. That it has about as much relation to reality as Zeus and Europa has done little to decrease its appeal.
While I agree with you and Steinglas in principle, I think Steinglas' historical argument is tendentious and in places simply wrong, except in his very carefully-chosen words. Certainly the "people's war" in Afghanistan was successful against an undermotivated Soviet Union, and if the result was not his or my idea of freedom, it certainly seemed to be pretty much what a lot of Afghans wanted, and still want. Likewise the Bolshevik takeover in Russia was essentially the achievement of an armed militia (even if, again, the result was not my definition of freedom and democracy). One could cite many other examples. It seems to me this is another misguided argument from effectiveness, like the argument that torture "never" produces good information. Fundamentally, I oppose torture whether it works or not, and my opposition to a citizenry armed with military weapons is the same. That said, Williamson's interpretation of the 2nd amendment is probably closer to the original intent--though one wonders how Madison or Hamilton would react if you could sit down and explain to them about tanks, or napalm, or the workings of sarin gas, or the nuclear chain reaction (after all, isn't Williamson saying that the Koch brothers should be free to buy their own MIRV?).
ReplyDeleteGeorge Washington had the same opinion of militias. He thought that if we won our freedom through irregular militia action we would end up with some sort of mob-based tyranny, not a civilized government. So the notion that "freedom" won by militia action would not be worth it is not new. I imagine if we looked around we would find lots of examples of people like Locke or Hume expressing the same view. (Certainly Washington was no original thinker.) Perhaps Burke's view of the French Revolution is somewhat in the same vein.
ReplyDeleteI would say that while militia action might be a possible last resort, as with the Afghans and Soviets, it is extremely risky for all the reasons Steinglas emphasizes, and people who have the vote are foolish to think that guns would work better.
Actually the right to keep and bear arms tradition comes out of the Glorious Revolution. The English Bill of Rights complains that James II took away Protestants' weapons and established, without Parliamentary approval, a standing army that included Catholic officers (horrors!), and one of the rights established is that Protestants shall have the right the keep and bear arms. My point is that Locke, Hume, and Burke were all deeply steeped in that Revolution and philosophy, which is pure citizen militia (which is clearly the sort of thing Locke means when he talks about "the public force" in the Second Treatise). I suspect that, deep down inside, all three would have said that a citizen militia was a force for freedom when it was composed of English Protestants, and a dangerous mob when it was composed of anybody else. Perhaps the real point is that how most commentators feel about militias will depend on how they feel about who composes it, and what it fights for. I imagine you rather like the idea of those Swiss peasants and townsfolk storming the bishop's castle.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of that, Anyway, aren't we both arguing against type? Aren't you the one who loves free peasants, and aren't I the cynic?
As for the US constitution, it seems to me what the authors imagined was a militia of registered men who trained once a month and kept their muskets at home and kept their cannon and most of their ammunition in an armory. So if we're going to be strict constitutionalists, we would say that anyone who wants to keep an assault rifle has to be in the National Guard--and all the rest of their equipment will be stored on a military base.
The difference between what happened in Switzerland and the English peasants' revolt may be instructive here. In England, a big mass of peasants with little organization marched on the capital to force their views on the king. Lacking effective organization or leadership, they were easily defeated even though most English people probably supported many of their demands. "They had risen like the sons of the dragons' teeth, without policy or advice," as John Cleveland put it.
ReplyDeleteIn Switzerland town councils and rural associations came together to form organizations like the Patriots of the Valais, and these in turn sent delegates to larger towns to form bigger associations, on up to the Swiss Confederation, which ended up being dominated by merchants from the larger towns. Like the American Revolution, the Swiss revolt was based on existing government institutions and an existing framework of law. The mechanism by which revolutionary mobs tend toward radicalism was thwarted by Swiss town councils and American state legislatures, so these revolutions were able to proceed without veering into armed chaos or warlordism.
I imagine the fondness of many 18th-century patriots for the militia was rooted, as you say, in their having a particular militia in mind, one that was based on existing communities and the existing power structure. Institutions like the Minute Men appeal to me because they are much closer to people ruling themselves than a national standing army, but still based on old traditions of order and community, not revolutionary anger.
The will of the people in the abstract is of no use; it can only do good when it has properly arranged and widely respected institutions through which it can work. This is what I have learned about history since I was a wide-eyed undergraduate.