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(apologies for the digression, the conversation inside a conversation)
dunedan:
possession of a gun doesnt make you anything except a guy with a gun.
it provides no political orientation: it is an object.
it provides no coherent view of the world: it is an object, a commodity, like a package of oreos is except that guns will kill you faster.
to say that possession of a gun is in itself a guarantor of "freedom" then seems absurd.
the way you pitch this argument--that having a gun would make the government afraid of the citizenry--is absurd. first because you are simpy outgunned. second because once you enter into a modern state of affairs, you arrogate to the state a monopoly on legitimate violence. and the idea that you could simply make the state vaporize in 2007 is a pipedream--not if you like capitalism (which as a "libertarian" i assume that you do--correct me if i am wrong on that--but if you weren't a fan of capitalism, i would expect that you would identify as anarchist)--which would collapse in a minute without continutal state intervention to prop it up. and that, sir, is not a joke.
anyway, it matters less to me that these folk have guns than what they imagine themselves to be doing with them does. i see militia politics as entirely retrograde, predicated on a fantasy 18th century and some bizarre-o vicarious nostalgia for it. a political action by a rightwing militia group would unnerve me even more than an armed political action by a trotskyite group--and that is saying alot.
guns are just things. they have no independent political meaning. what matters is the orientation of the organizations that would use those guns. i think alot of milita folk prefer to invert logic and act as though their politics really are condensed an object because it is better pr than their actual politics could hope to be.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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