Throughout most of our nation’s history, gun control was a relatively rare thing. It existed, but it was an oppressive system designed to disarm groups that were viewed unfavorably by the public at large. Those included black men and women, Native Americans, and Catholics. Because “Catholic” was a race or something. I don’t understand it, either.
Still, those laws were there specifically to keep certain groups from exercising their civil liberties. This is well known and well documented.
Also well documented, though not as well known, was that the so-called Wild West was one of the times and places where you’d find more systematic gun control efforts. You also saw a lot more violence than you’d see in more settled places, though there’s also a lot of hype about how dangerous it really was.
Throughout time, though, the Second Amendment was intended to stop this sort of thing.
However, some modern anti-gunners are more interested in hysterics than actually looking at that history.
At The Daily Kos, we’ve got this wonderfully rational piece whose headline argues that Republicans and the Supreme Court are “Imposing Gun Anarchy as ‘Rights’.”
With a headline like that, you just know it’s gonna be good.
Republicans have spent decades branding gun chaos as gun rights. Democrats should stop accepting that lie.
A movement that wants to erase background checks, weaken red-flag laws, strike down concealed-carry limits, and override local safety rules is not defending freedom. It is selling gun anarchy.
Republicans aren’t defending freedom; they’re dismantling the very public safety that makes freedom possible.
In any functioning system — a data network, a supply chain, a city, or a constitutional republic — stability depends on rules, feedback loops, and guardrails. Remove them, and the system does not become freer. It enters a runaway state.
That is what happened to the firearms debate. The gun lobby rewrote the code: it isolated “the right of the people,” buried “well regulated,” and sold a corrupted version of the Second Amendment in which regulation became the enemy instead of the operating condition.
Democrats helped lose the definition battle by accepting the other side’s vocabulary. “Gun control” made public safety sound like coercion. “Gun rights” made deregulation sound like liberty.
It is time to debug the language and call the Republican position what it is: gun anarchy dressed up as freedom.
Oh, boy. Where do we start?
First, let’s understand that no one has buried “well regulated.” We just know what it meant when the Founding Fathers included it in the Second Amendment. It meant “properly functioning,” such as a well-regulated clock. It wasn’t about gun control, and we know that because guess what the Founding Fathers never passed? If you said “gun control,” then give yourself a cookie.
Additionally, he completely ignores the whole “shall not be infringed” thing that follows “the right of the people.” That’s pretty telling, especially as it really does make it clear that the Founders were talking about a properly functioning militia, rather than a tightly controlled system of gun access.
Now, you may notice that the author keeps looking at our country like some kind of system. He (or she, or whatever) expressly says so in this passage, then talks about “debugging” the language.
But the problem is that the language isn’t the problem.
Yes, gun control sounds like oppression, but that’s because it is. Look again at the long history of gun control in this country. Even when passed in the South during Reconstruction, it might have lacked language focusing on the newly freed black people, but it was also passed with the understanding that no white sheriff would impose such a rule on a white man. They counted on racist enforcement.
It’s pretty clear here that the author believes that the language has been intentionally manipulated, and that anti-gun advocates fell into a trap on that basis, though it was they who pushed the idea of “gun control” from the get-go.
The author wants it reframed as “order versus anarchy,” as opposed to control versus liberty.
Unfortunately for him (or her, or it), the issue isn’t order versus anarchy. You can’t frame it that way because it’s simply not the case. A lack of regulation in one aspect of people’s lives does not create anarchy. Refusal to enforce the law is more akin to anarchy. Refusal to punish those who break the law is anarchy. Cities burning due to riots, where our so-called leaders argue that the rioters are the good guys, is far more like anarchy than exercising the right to keep and bear arms.
Especially since, as has been repeated so many times that it sounds trite, the criminals aren’t the ones being impacted by these laws.
All we have here is someone engaging in absolute hysterics and pretending they have an argument.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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