SuaveSocialist said:
sc94597 said:
1. A lack of a second amendment <=/=> a lack of a right to self-defense.
2. A people without guns can't assert their rights.
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1. And yet dozens of countries without such an equivalent to the 2nd A. still grant their People the right to self-defense.
2. And yet people without guns manage to assert their rights all the time.
Bye!
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According to you, the rights of people in these countries are "granted" by the benevolence of the bourgeois state, so quite obviously they aren't asserting them, the bourgeois state is allowing them to have them out of deference to cost mitigation. Meanwhile in the United States people have the means do defend themselves against oppression. Guns have saved black lives from the Klu Klux Klan. Guns have saved laborers from private corporate armies. Private gun ownership has secured liberty for many, when the state militias and police turned their eyes away, citizens organized and defended themselves.
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/07/06/a-brief-history-of-socialist-support-for-gun-rights/
"For blacks in the 19th century South, as we know, the nightmare scenario that had haunted President Wilson was very much a reality. As Historian David Kopel has noted, in the 1800s, “gun control laws were exclusively a Southern phenomenon.” The only people allowed guns in the antebellum South were whites. Blacks found with weapons were often executed on the spot. After the Civil War, nervous whites—Democrats, all—feared freed slaves’ having access to guns and made weapons bans part of their punitive Black Codes. So determined were they in this endeavor that when the federal occupying authorities deemed the Black Codes illegal, gun control for blacks was enforced after hours by the Ku Klux Klan.
Given this history, it is understandable that some of the firmest proponents of gun ownership in the 20th century were black Americans. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Even such proponents of nonviolence as Martin Luther King, Jr. purchased a firearm and installed armed guards around his house (one visitor likened it to an armory). The cornerstone of the self-styled Maoist group the Black Panthers rather worshiped guns."
"Nor were white socialists against gun ownership. Eugene Debs, a four-time socialist candidate for President, saw gun control as a means for capitalists to install a tyranny over a weaponless working class. (Debs would pay the price for such views; he was jailed by President Wilson for criticizing American involvement in World War I.)"
But Americans weren't the only ones.
"Another world war later and across the ocean, another socialist would oppose gun control. George Orwell, who, as Christopher Hitchens once wrote, was “conservative in many things but not politics,” supported the right of the citizen to bear arms. Some might say that it was only natural that a former coolie-crushing colonial policeman such as Orwell would be a gun enthusiast. But Orwell viewed gun control through a politically socialist, not a law-and-order, lens:
“That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
These sentiments were based on hard-worn experience. As a soldier on the Loyalist side during the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was aware that it was only the citizenry breaking into the armory that initially repelled Francisco Franco’s fascist-backed rebellion. When Joseph Stalin, who “backed” the Loyalist side, sought to import his murderous purge trials into Spain, and thus kill off any non-communists on the Loyalist side, his first order of business was confiscating the Loyalist fighters’ weapons. Orwell, having the misfortune of belonging to a Trotskyite militia, engaged in street fighting agianst these gun confiscators.
And so, personally aware of how a tyrant crushed his weaponless opposition, Orwell was determined for this never to happen again. In 1940, when a Nazi invasion of his native Britain seemed all but imminent, Orwell joined a citizen’s militia, the Home Guard, which was deliberately modeled on the “people’s army” of Spain (many of the volunteers had fought there). This group was tasked with protecting England’s bridges and railroads and, if necessary, fighting from house to house. But Orwell saw a bigger role: that of ensuring that a home-grown fascist coup and/or separate peace would never happen. Predictably, the Colonel Blimps among his countrymen worried about any sophisticated weaponry getting to these “Reds” and sought to halt it. A better example of gun control cannot be imagined—but Orwell believed that the Home Guard should remain weaponized beyond the war so as to protect individual liberty. "
All it takes in modern Europe is for a malovalent group or individual to consolidate power. In the United States we have a backup.