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i still do not accept the equation of gun ownership and political dissent.
what guarantees dissent--to the extent that anything does--are freedoms of speech, press and assembly. without a political project, a gun is just another thing--a dependent variable if you like (pace crompsin directly above)...
if you want to play the game of linking the 2nd amendment to the historical context in which the constitution was framed, that's fine. it seems to me that it is a residuum which speaks to the simple fact that had there not been guns around it would have been difficult to organize militias to carry out the war against the british. but this does not mean that the 2nd amendment is either a description of or theory about the revolution--without extensive ideological and political work carried out across the late 1760s and through the 1770s using pamphlets, broadsheets and other textual devices and through the development of social networks that connected the colonies together laterally (as opposed to connecting them together by way of britian, which is how they were organized economically) there'd have been no project that shaped the actions which began in 1776--and so guns would have remained just guns, used for whatever.
in other words, it is simply inaccurate to attribute the american revolution to the ownership of guns alone.
nor is it accurate to link the capacity for political dissent to gun ownership.
for example, it might be edifying for my colleagues on the right to consider the glorious history of the left in the united states and the extent to which the american state was wiling to go (the colorado coalfield wars are a good example) to crush it. a parallel kind of history can be found in the lovely history of my favorite group of moustachioed mercenaries, the pinkertons, and the situations in which they were used to eithehunt down and murder trade union activitist or to engage in battles to prevent unions from entering particular facilities (river rouge) or industries (good ole henry ford, my favorite american fascist, and this literally)....or you could look at the repeated uses of red scares to mobilize popular support for campaigns ideological and material to suppress the left.
people had guns throughout. i don't recall it making any difference at all.
but then again, maybe the problem is that the sustained war on the left would not register with my colleagues on the right as problematic because they would have and perhaps do support such actions.
this loops onto the question of what oppressive means.
if "an oppressive government" had an obejective meaning--if oppression was a feature of phenomena in the world and not an effect of statements about phenomena in the world--perhaps things would have gone otherwise with the history of the left. perhaps these heroes on individual liberties on the right would have been inclined to react to this, figuring that suppression of the right to dissent on the left would put their own abilities to dissent in peril.
or maybe they were just fine with that.
the point is that without political work, without arguments and information and relations staged between them, there is no political action. a gun is simply a tool that may or may not enable particular types of action to be undertaken *in the context of a political project*....
there are other problems, lots of them, but i'll leave it at this for the moment.
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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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