How To Beat Gun Nuts at Their Own Game
Forcing the right to choose between their rhetoric and their fears.
Calling Out the Great Bluff
Conservatives have spent decades claiming that an armed society is a polite society. Gun rights absolutists insist that the Second Amendment confers a pre-political, God-given right to own weapons of war specifically to check government tyranny.
This is a bluff. The modern gun rights movement does not actually desire a universally armed populace. They want an armed white conservative populace.
Progressives can win this fight by calling that bluff. We should stop fighting them with safety statistics and start fighting them with their own “originalist” logic. If the Second Amendment is about a militia, let us give them a militia.
We should mandate gun ownership for every eligible citizen, starting specifically in the inner cities. Watching the National Rifle Association scramble to disarm Black and brown communities will reveal the hypocrisy at the core of their movement.
The strategy requires us to stop apologizing for wanting to regulate firearms and instead demand that we enforce the Constitution exactly as the Founders wrote it. We must look past the bumper-sticker slogans and examine the actual text and history they claim to revere.
The Founders’ Mandatory Gun
Originalists love to talk about 1791. Let us take them back there. The militia of that era was not a volunteer hobby for libertarians who dislike the government. It was a mandatory government duty.
State laws required every able-bodied white man between 16 and 60 to enroll. This was not an optional right to be exercised at one’s leisure; it was a conscripted obligation to the state.
The government did not just allow these men to have guns. It forced them to buy specific military weapons. Statutes from the era were incredibly intrusive, detailing exactly what a citizen had to own.
A typical militia statute required a man to “own - and bring - a musket” to regular musters where their weapons and ammunition were examined by state officials. If their gun was broken, dirty, or if they lacked the requisite amount of gunpowder, they were fined.
This was the “well regulated” part of the Second Amendment. It was a system of government compulsion, surveillance, and inspection, not the “freedom” to hoard weapons in secret that the NRA champions today.
Imagine applying this standard today. “Originalism” would not mean deregulation; it would mean that every gun owner in America is subject to a federal mandate to appear at a government facility twice a year to have their weapons inspected and cataloged.
It would mean that failing to own a gun is a crime, but it would also mean that owning a gun subjects you to the direct discipline of the state.
Let’s continue by taking a quick look at the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s written decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008).
Scalia’s Fatal Admission
Conservatives rely on the Heller decision to justify their absolutism regarding gun rights, but they ignore a devastating concession buried in the text.
Scalia, writing the majority opinion that established an individual right to own a gun, admitted that the amendment’s original purpose might effectively be dead.
Scalia wrote:
“Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable.”
This admission gives the game away. The “standing army” was the very thing the Founders feared. They wrote the Second Amendment to ensure a citizen militia could resist such a force.
By calling the standing army the “pride of our Nation,” Scalia acknowledged that the structural check designed by the Founders has been inverted. The institution the Second Amendment was meant to fight (the professional military) is now the guarantor of our security.
If the amendment is potentially “outmoded” because the state now holds a monopoly on force, then the “insurrectionist theory” promoted by the gun lobby is intellectually bankrupt.
Scalia saved the Second Amendment only by divorcing it from its military purpose and inventing a new justification based on self-defense. But by conceding that the militia concept is “debatable” in the modern era, he opened the door for us to test that proposition.
The Militia Mandate
We should accept the “debatable” premise and force the issue. If the Second Amendment is about the militia, then we must revive the militia as it was intended: a universal duty as we noted above.
We should propose federal legislation requiring every able-bodied citizen (over 16) to own a functional firearm and ammunition, subsidized by the government if necessary.
This mandate must apply to everyone, male and female, updating the Founders’ age and gender discrimination for the modern era. We would require liability insurance, regular safety training, and the same “inspection” protocols the Founders used. If you want the right, you must accept the duty.
But we must begin this “originalist” revival in the urban centers. We should create a “well regulated” body of armed citizens in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore.
These units would be trained, drilled, and subject to regular government inspection of their weaponry. We would issue AR-15s to the residents of the South Side of Chicago and Harlem, organizing them into units charged with the “security of a free State.”
Calling the Hand
Republicans would face an impossible choice. They would have to either support the state-sponsored arming of millions of minority voters or admit that they support gun control.
The mere prospect of a government-organized, armed Black populace would shatter the current coalition between libertarians and social conservatives.
Fear would override ideology. Just as they did in 1967 with the Mulford Act, conservatives would suddenly discover the virtues of “public safety” and “restrictions on dangerous weapons.”
The NRA, alongside Republican lawmakers, would likely lead the charge to pass the most sweeping gun control legislation in American history, just to prevent the “wrong” people from having firepower.
We beat them by giving them exactly what they claim to want. We force them to look at the reality of their “insurrectionist” rhetoric when it is applied to people they do not control.
The moment the “well regulated militia” looks like the actual population of the United States, the gun lobby will demand it be disarmed.
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Historic Footnote: The Racist Roots of Control
The NRA has successfully erased its own history to hide the fact they don’t support gun rights for everyone. Standard conservative lore holds that the organization has always been the defender of the absolute right to bear arms. This is false.
The modern gun control movement was practically invented by the NRA and conservative icon Ronald Reagan in 1967. They did not do it to stop crime. They did it to disarm the Black Panther Party.
Black Panthers in Oakland had begun “cop-watching,” patrolling their neighborhoods armed with shotguns and law books to monitor police brutality. They were following the letter of the law, which allowed open carry.
This assertion of constitutional rights by Black men terrified the white establishment. Don Mulford, a conservative assemblyman, introduced a bill to ban the open carry of loaded weapons.
The NRA supported the Mulford Act. Then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed it without hesitation, stating there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
The racism was the point. When Black citizens exercised the right to bear arms to check government tyranny, the “tyranny” suddenly decided that gun control was a moral imperative.
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🎯🎯🎯 the whole conservative spiel is built on a house of cards!!
They are a cherry picking bunch !!
Let every able bodied brown and black person begin to carry legalized weapons, shit will change immediately!!
Fascinating...let's get started .