Debating is one of the most irritating task one can engage in when it comes to the average American citizen. The reason is simple: facts have nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not a battle is won, and it’s why in many ways, war is far more satisfying. Victory can be achieved by eliminating an opponent either by injury or capitulation. It’s a fairly undebatable outcome, and if you’re the one who has to make a choice between death and doing what your opponent says, you know exactly whether it’s the gold medal or a noose being placed around your neck at the award ceremony. It also has the added benefit of ending an argument, and doing so in your favor regardless of how severely you were being verbally flayed alive.
Unfortunately, in a debate no such clarity exists. You can’t force someone to accept your point no matter how meticulously you dismantle their argument, nor is an opponent required to make a bit of sense to be declared the victor in the eyes of themselves and the public. Worse, when it’s all said and done, if your opponent feels they have been slighted by a particularly well-aimed intellectual bullet, they can go home and sit in the bathroom with the lights off whittling up a retort, or at the very least they can find some excuse why they are correct regardless. Barring that, their best option is to call in a favor with their brother-in-law who is the local chief of police and have you harassed until you shut up or shot until you keep quiet.
Such is the nature of the human condition: the strong man will fight when he cannot argue, and the weak man will argue when he cannot fight, or at least argue his way out of fighting so he can go home and get a bigger stick. For that reason, debating in favor of gun control is the most infuriating of all the current arguments in the United States. Not only is it impossible to force someone to concede a point, but you’re asking the loser to also give up his stick.
It is precisely this reason that the Second Amendment failed to produce the outcome that it was initially intended to. Our forefathers who debated and drafted the Constitution made the mistake of overextending the philosophy of governance into the philosophy of arms. A system of checks and balances works fantastically well when it comes to the parliamentary procedure. As ideas flow from each body of Congress to the president, each element is empowered to varying degrees to serve as a roadblock to the adoption of distasteful ideas. While any of them may be overcome, a greater number of opinions must be swayed to do so.
However, the checks and balances of warfare are similar only in verbiage. Whereas in the realm of parliamentary procedure the quality of ideas is well-served (at least sometimes) by a hand break being applied as a call for further scrutiny, in war, bullets don’t stop and start on their way to the target depending on whether the general ceases its flight in midair by exercising his veto power, thus requiring a 2/3 majority vote from both the corps of enlisted men and the body of lesser officers, to restart its flight towards a target that waits patiently in harm’s way for due process to run its course.
The trap in which our forefathers fell was a confusion between process and outcome. A vote and a bullet do have one thing in common: success does not make you right—it only means your tactics were better. The Founders were no dummies, and they knew that checks and balances would only encourage the best arguments to be made before a law was passed. But their extension of this line of reasoning into the relationship between a standing army and the public was idealistic at best, and one to which their misgivings about the ability of the average man to know what’s best for his country should have carried over. If you don’t have faith that the average person is capable of understanding a good argument, you certainly shouldn’t trust him with a stick.
Therein lies the core fallacy of the framers of the Constitution regarding a weaponized public: they attempted to make war philosophically satisfying.
The general principle upon which the fledgling democracy was to be based militarily was that a large standing army was a perpetual threat to the sovereignty held by the public, and it’s not a bad one. The entire point of the revolution was that the Colonists were sick and tired of being told to suck it up and do what the king wanted or suck on the barrel of a musket, and it was reinforced by the fact that every major political development in favor of the masses had always occurred when the ruler decided he was above the law. This kind of thing had cost or nearly cost almost every English monarch their head for the past 500 years, and ever since James I began colonizing the New World in the early 17th century every single one of them treated the Colonists progressively more like blind mole rats, whose job it was to empty out the vast network of American commercial tunnels into the back pocket of the king.
Armed revolts were the only check the English could think of for putting down a megalomaniacal quasi-deity they were otherwise perfectly happy to tolerate on historical precedent insofar as he wasn’t a Catholic, so it seemed logical to the authors of the Constitution, still wet and glistening in the sun from molting the skin of English rule, that it was bound to be the case at home too. After moderately extensive exploration of the political structure of the Six Nations—a republic-style organization of the six major Native American tribes in the Northeast—as well as the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment philosophers and extant parliamentary structures in England, they came up with a functional democratic form of government along the lines of Ancient Greece. Naturally some adjustments were necessary given the far greater geographic distances and larger, stratified population. Besides, the average Athenian would naturally be much more aware of the local issues at hand because of the small size of their community, and representative democracy was unnecessary.
This was all fine, and has served us well as a political structure. However, extending it to military philosophy was abject and total failure. During the revolution, General Washington constantly bemoaned the state of the militia which was comprised of marginally trained, ordinary citizens who formed local units for the purpose of supporting the main army. With the exceptions of Lexington and Yorktown, they usually broke and ran because of the lack of military discipline. However, Washington himself had great faith that the new plan presented by the framers would be a great success.
That plan was as follows:
Large standing armies are a threat to popular sovereignty because they serve the ruling parties. Should the President, for example, decide that he’s going to become a tyrant, an unarmed populace would be unable to do anything about it as a referendum does little to impress a man with the big stick. The check to this would be a small standing army who would be supported by a vastly larger military force known as the “militia”. The militia was every man of proper age, and he would be required to keep in his house the equivalent military equipment of the average regular foot soldier—a musket, shot, etc. Furthermore, they were to attend drills once a month organized by officers chosen from their own state (hence, a “well-ordered militia”), and should someone try to use the regular army to take over the vastly larger militia would be in a position to put it down by sheer force of numbers. On the other hand, should the country need to repel invaders, the militia could be summoned in part of whole to fight.
It was very philosophically satisfying indeed, and even Washington was excited about it. After the Constitution officially went into effect in 1791, one of the first orders of business was organizing the militia, which was outlined by the legislature in the same year. There was just one problem. It average citizen whose idiocy was rightly feared by the founders decide not to vote, democracy doesn’t stop working. However, if they decide to stop training and organizing themselves the country is placed at great risk. This is exactly what happened. By the early 19th century, the laziness of the average person was such that the militias were a joke, good for nothing but the occasional 4th of July parade—read, four older men with a flag carrying some unloaded rifles on their back. Members of the government were very concerned about all this for years because the bulk of the military had basically deserted, and finally in the very early 20th century the Dick Act did away with them entirely in favor of reserve units in all branches of the military that were the new “militia” force.
From a legal standpoint, this is where the American public lost their right to bitch. Just as a person who lets his neighbor borrow his lawn mower provided he also mows his lawn too has every right to take it back if his yard gets overgrown, so to should the Americans lose their right to possess weapons for national defense if they refuse to show up for drills. It’s about as open and shut black letter law as you can find anywhere, but it highlights exactly what the framers of the Constitution feared in the first place.
If the average goon is vested with a portion of national sovereignty and they don’t want to give up their guns anyway, they get the last say. In fact, the people don’t have to give one single shit about idealistic philosophy if they don’t want to because they hold all the power. More often than not, they couldn’t understand it anyway.
So that’s where we are today. Popular sovereignty has, ironically, become the bigger stick. We are not a country of revolution and armed resistance anymore. For anyone who doubts it, take a look at the late sixties. Was there major social pushback and rallies that led to grand-scale social change? Yes. Did some people get shot? Yes. However, for all intents and purposes these revolutions were non-violent and were effected through the channels of government. We are a cohesive nation, and one which, should we attempt to return to the originally intended military organization of the late 18th century, would stand precisely zero chance against the most powerful military in the world should someone decide to attempt a military coup. But these things never happen. For starters, everyone in Congress has to live here too, as do the soldiers and their families. The balance of military power is a foregone conclusion precisely because the desire for civil society and the checks and balances of the government is far more than enough to prevent it, and the fears of our Forefathers proved to be unwarranted.
It is therefore time to look forward and not back. We must take society forward from where we are, not where a few men almost 250 years ago thought it might. But for that to happen it will require engagement of the one group of people about which the Founders have been proved right over and over again: the common man.
My hopes are not high. We are children with no parents to calmly explain that if everyone doesn’t want to join the National Guard then that choice comes with consequences, and that is the one advantage a monarch brings to government.