Crazy Revolutionary Talk

Crazy Revolutionary Talk

Over at The Stupid Shall Be Punished, Joel Kennedy discusses that Town Hall meeting with Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID):

Until yesterday, I thought I was a pretty strong 2nd Amendment stalwart, in that I knew that the right to keep and bear arms was a personal right, and I couldn't imagine voting for someone who I thought would actually take away the guns that someone owned (other than those who had committed a felony). Yesterday, however, my wife and I went to a Town Hall Meeting with my Congressman, Rep. Walt Minnick, where our 2nd Amendment rights were discussed -- and I learned that there are a lot of people whose interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is a lot more radical than I would have thought likely outside an actual militia headquarters.

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Most of the rest of the attendees held forth on their belief that the real purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to (paraphrasing here) allow them to shoot military and/or law enforcement personnel if they feel the need to rebel against the government. Based on this reasoning, I'm assuming that they also believe that all laws against sedition should be unconstitutional.

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[O]nly Clayton Cramer seemed honest enough to at least imply that, yes, he would regretfully attempt to gun down my old shipmates and my sons (if they join the military) if he felt the need to rise up against "tyranny".

I'm disappointed to see that this is what Joel took out of what I said. I kept my remarks short and to the point for several reasons, and one of them was to make sure that no one was distracted by a long-winded discussion from the core point. As I pointed out afterwards,

I took a minute or two to emphasize to Rep. Minnick that the Second Amendment wasn't about hunting or recreational use of guns, and I told the story of the woman I used to get my ice cream cones from, with an unstylish tattoo on her forearm: a letter and a series of digits. Everyone knew what that meant. I emphasized that revolution is the last and most dangerous step against tyranny--but that this is the reason for the Second Amendment, and that means that assault weapons are among the most clearly protected category of arms.

Perhaps Joel doesn't understand what a serial number tattoo means, or perhaps he would prefer not to understand it. The fact that he put scare quotes around "tyranny" suggests that he either doesn't consider the Holocaust to be real tyranny, or just finds the idea that this could ever happen in America absurd.

Fortunately, there are a lot of crazy people like me that talk in these terms; some of them are Clinton appointees to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. As Professor Volokh points, out Judge Gould's concurrence in the Nordyke decision yesterday is quite strong as to the purpose of the Second Amendment:

First, as Judge O’Scannlain has aptly explained, the rights secured by the Second Amendment are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” and “necessary to the Anglo-American regime of ordered liberty.” ...
Second, the right to bear arms is a protection against the possibility that even our own government could degenerate into tyranny, and though this may seem unlikely, this possibility should be guarded against with individual diligence.

Now, if Joel Kennedy thinks that this is crazy talk, he might want to take it up with Judge Gould. He also might want to take it up with the Framers, who frequently discussed the right to keep and bear arms in relation to the danger of government tyranny--and that the an armed population was the last resort against such tyranny. If Joel thinks that armed revolution is always and necessarily wrong, as he seems to imply, no wonder he's a Democrat. As a liberal co-worker once put it, "Interfering with a democratically elected government's concentration camps would be fascist!"