Shots were fired at the rescuers in the New Orleans superdome

[fpb]

Well, this, according to the majority of Americans, is what the "right to bear arms" is really about: to be able to point them at government if government gets uppity. Like trying to organize a rescue.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It is my impression. I have heard that excuse over and over - an armed citizenship is supposed to be a bulwark against tyranny. It does not work in the Arab countries, where pretty much every adult male has a gun and pretty much every government is a tyranny, nor in Europe, where every government is democratic and every country has very severe gun ownership restrictions. But Americans have their own logic.

[adeodatus.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of an anomaly. I love guns and own several of them (including ones banned in other states) and yet I'm essentially a pacifist. I'm usually uncomfortable around those people that are zealously arguing to defend their 2nd amendment rights and I detest the NRA. It seems, in the discussions/arguments I've been in the "Right to bear arms" gets lost with the moral obligation to bear arms safely.

I own several very cool assault-style rifles and I love going out shooting (on a range). I also hope that I would be willing and able to use my weapons to defend someone that needed help, either myself or my family or friends. That said, the idea of turning my weapon against a representative of the state or federal government horrifies and sickens me. Its unconscionable and unacceptable.

We certainly do have our own logic and, for the most part, I kind of like it. I'd have less of a problem with hand gun restriction ... hand guns really only have one primary purpose ... to kill or wound a human. Thats fine in the hands of the military or legitimate authorities but I can readily say I've no need in my current environment to own or carry a hand gun (even though I do own some) and I'd have no problem giving it up if asked to do so by my government. We live in a different country but you all also don't see the really responsible hunters and other enthusiasts around me that safely own and use their firearms. They always get a bum rap in the media.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, hundreds of thousands of continental Europeans in each country - I know best about Italians, of course - also go hunting. There is a deep town/country divide on the matter, but it is not primarily about the use of guns, but about the scarcity of game: urban Greens feel that there is little left to shoot in places like Italy and that there ought to at least be a moratorium on hunting birds. (Nobody, however, objects to the culls of Italy's rich and never decreasing population of wild boars.) You need a weapons license for hunting guns, although never having had any interest in such things, I do not know what the conditions are; I do know that they are pretty stringent. Britain has by far the most draconian - they have almost killed competitive sport target shooting - passed in something of a panic after two frightful massacres in Hungerford, England (fourteen dead) and Dunblane, Scotland (ten dead children and one teacher) carried out by misfits with assault rifles.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking about what you said. I have nothing against competitive sports shooters - several rifle and pistol games are Olympic games after all - and I imagine that if I had grown up in a different environment I might well have enjoyed the sport myself, as many people do. The only time I ever fired a gun was, as I told you elsewhere, at target practice in the army; again, I have no objection to that at all, since the principle enshrined in the Italian constitution, that the defence of the country and its laws is the duty of every citizen, seems perfectly right and just to me. My main problem is that the conscript army Italy used to have was an incredibly inefficient way to that goal: people were taken away from their families for one year, and came back just relieved that it was over and hoping never again to have anything to do with all that. I still say that the Swiss militia model, with its three weeks of military practice each year, is infinitely better; instead of which, the Italian army has been made all-professional. This may be necessary for purposes of foreign policy, but does not help that sense of civic duty which I feel every citizen ought to have - "not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country".

What really bothers me about the US, and I think you and I agree on this, is the picture of each citizen being entitled to be his own defender and justiciar. The first prerogative of the State is the confiscation of violence from private hands; armies, police forces, courts of justice, are set up just to avoid ordinary people having to defend themselves from any external danger. And the principle of most codes of criminal law is that an act of open violence in the State is an offence, not only against its victim or victims, but against the whole community. It is there in the forms of criminal trial: "The People of California versus Orenthal James Simpson", not "The late Nicole Simpson versus Orenthal James Simpson". So, in this unfettered right to defend themselves by whatever means available and against whatever menace one perceives, I sense the fall of communal living, of citizenship, of mutual obligations and duties. In the face of this influence, which I can only regard as destructive, I must say that I am amazed not at how little, but at how much Americans still rely on law and ordinary justice.