Guns & Freedom: Egypt Gives the Lie to America’s Firearms Frenzy
The Polemicist
by Michael House
LONDON, England—(Weekly Hubris)—2/21/11—The American Constitution, as amended in, I believe, 1791, gives citizens of the United States the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment reads as follows:
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Americans, having recently been oppressed by a foreign army, did not want to be at risk from a domestic one. Instead, the defense of the citizen against foreign and home-grown tyranny was to be in the hands of a “well-regulated militia.”
Clearly, the second half of the amendment is contingent upon the first: the condition-precedent for the keeping and bearing of arms is membership in a civilian militia. But that is not how Americans interpret it. And such militias as exist in the US today are anything but “well regulated,” consisting of gangs of extreme right-wing, testosterone-fuelled lunatics hanging out in the wilds of Kentucky.
One or two things have changed in the last 200 years in America. The militia, if it ever existed, has been replaced by a standing army. That small electorate of qualified, 18th-century white men has been expanded by universal suffrage (although only in the last 40 years). And the US has remained “free” though two world wars, the Vietnam War (anti-war demonstrators didn’t need guns to bring that horror to an end), invasions of countless other countries and (to a degree) through 9/11—although the people fighting to restore freedoms removed after 9/11 are unlikely to be gun-owners. Basic freedoms have survived even the Black, Muslim, Commie alien, Obama.
So—what is it with Americans and guns?
Apparently, the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords led to an orgy of gun-purchase in Tucson. Is it due to growing up on a diet of John Wayne films? The mammal who shot Ms. Giffords would have done so even if everyone present had been packing heat. I suppose he would have been shot, thus saving the expense of a trial—a seductive argument: one fewer fascist fruitcake cumbering the Earth—but just imagine how many bystanders might have been killed had a fire-fight begun. The idiots who parrot the slogan “guns don’t kill people—people kill people” don’t seem to understand that, without guns readily available, it would be much harder for people to kill people.
The idea that people need guns available in the States just in case a dictator tries to take over is arrant nonsense.
Which brings me to Egypt. In 18 days, the people of Egypt—often portrayed as a sleepy, indolent, laissez-faire kind of folk; not like Americans at all—have overthrown a dictator without firing a shot. Likewise in Tunisia, a tyrant was deposed without the population resorting to firearms. Would US citizens be any less brave and single-minded in the face of genuine repression? I don’t think so.
It is too much to hope that this outdated amendment, appropriate to a specific period in history, will ever be removed. For most Americans, that would be like rewriting the Bible. But, presumably, the Supreme Court can “interpret” the word “arms.” Applied literally, the Second Amendment would entitle every family to go out and buy a nuclear weapon. Perhaps the court could indicate what categories of weapon are appropriate to a “well-regulated militia.” How many more massacres will be allowed to happen before America grows up?
The era of the Wild West has passed.
Michael House
Michael House, FRGS was born, of rural, peasant stock, in Somerset, England. He read law at Exeter College, Oxford and was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1974, along with five colleagues, House started up a set of barristers' chambers in three little rooms in Lincoln's Inn, London, specializing in human rights and in representing the poor and dispossessed. The set now comprises 170 members and occupies a 17th-century building that was home to the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated (Spencer Perceval, 1812). In 1987, depressed by Mrs. Thatcher's third election victory, House fled to Greece for three years, where he was published in The Athenian and The Southeastern Review. He also there met his archaeologist wife, Diane. The pair returned to England in 1990 after a half-year, round-the-world trip, and settled in London and Northamptonshire. Since then, by way of escape from humdrum criminality, House has traveled in Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, Ladakh, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Mongolia, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, where only the stout walls of Galle Fort saved him and his spouse from being swept away by the tsunami. House returns to Greece, his second home, almost every year. He has written for, inter alia, History Today, the Universities Quarterly, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Rough Guide to Greece. House practices criminal defense law from Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in London, and hopes that if he keeps on practicing, he may eventually get the hang of it. His yet unachieved ambitions are: to farm alpacas; see Tibet liberated from the Chinese jackboot; and live to see Britain a socialist republic. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)