Gangs and right-wing militias and mass shooters. I didn’t even want to bother with that point because it’s so overwhelmingly obvious, but yes, that too is an issue. And notice how we have a serious gang problem in the society with the most guns on the planet. Empirically, guns neither consistently prevent tyrannies from emerging (they certainly haven’t stopped the increasing fascist trends of the party defending the gun rights) nor consistently deter crime at anything beyond an individual level. But conservatives bury their failures and ignore all experiments, social or otherwise, that disprove their beliefs.

My experience interacting with ordinary people is that even among them the rhetoric is puffery. It’s one of those thought-terminating cliches that sounds good and virtue signals Americana, but the problem is that everyone just puts the thing they want the feds to do as being the exception to the norm. That’s how the Tea Party could form (even Astroturfed) even after eight years of Bush trampling over the Constitution. Some people will feel uncomfortable at the cognitive dissonance when you point it out, but it’s not in my experience been a lasting hook.

But the point about the Court is fair, though not hugely relevant in this context. We have to get state-based gun rights through in the first place, which requires getting voters to care. Only then can the fact of federalism be used to defend a test case from a particular state against a Fourteenth Amendment challenge. By then the partisan configuration of the Court may have changed anyways.

We should note that we have illegal gun-toting rebel armies aplenty in the U.S. They’re called gangs. Many are actually well-organized and well-funded international organizations. And the effort to disarm them has been conspicuously hindered by loose gun laws.

It is certainly the case that “states rights” is a dogwhistle, not an actual belief, among most of the conservative elite. But I do believe a percentage of rank-and-file voters really do believe in it, maybe just enough to have an electoral effect in the right circumstances.

More importantly, depending on the composition of the Supreme Court at the time posed, “states rights” could prevail as a legal argument even against bias. Alito and Thomas are frauds and would never actually allow a states rights argument prevail against their real agendas; but Gorsuch and Roberts are principled enough that they just might. Though Barrett and Kavanaugh are ciphers on this point, we don’t need to convince them. All we need is five votes. Three liberals and two conservatives takes the ruling.

Sure!

Broadly speaking, think of the following.

1) Heavily armed gangs, like the gangs in Prohibition-era America.
2) Warlords who, for whatever reason (political failure counts because it does the same thing in practice as excessively open gun laws), can get together armed thugs.
3) Racist, religious, nationalistic, or separatist militias.

Think the FARC, Somali warlords, Hindu terrorists, the Northern Alliance, etc.

Essentially, most people trying to defend guns as safeguards of liberty have a deeply Eurocentric (and often in fact Americocentric) viewpoint. They look at societies with stability, power and functioning democratic or at least proto-democratic norms (e.g. even when America split off from England it was splitting off of a society that had a Parliament, and indeed “No taxation without representation” was arguably pretty silly as a slogan given how proportional representation systems work), and then just ignore the entire history of the planet, especially the developing world.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Blood_Gun_Money/_Ar7DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=private+gun+ownership+and+warlords+and+mobs&printsec=frontcover is a good indication of the danger of open gun traffic and the association between free gun exchange and arms dealing. Really, a huge part of this entire issue is that arms companies want to be able to sell arms domestically and internationally.

https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/rr-human-cost-uncontrolled-arms-africa-080317-en.pdf is specifically about the African context.

Basically, start thinking about the gun debate not in the narrow American context where we think about societies that have pretty well-policed property laws and think about what increasing the net number of guns and ease of access to guns has tended to do globally. That change in the framing of the issue may shock you in terms of how naive it makes the pro-gun lobby actually sound.

Avery: Having tried the states’ rights argument several times, I am convinced it will move the needle essentially not at all. Of all the conservative arguments that are offered as an ex post facto justification for their beliefs, the importance of states’ rights is, and have been since the Confederacy, the most shallow and obviously disbelieved. States rights as an appeal has never changed the opinion of even a tiny minority of conservatives on everything from drug policy to immigration policy (e.g. sanctuary cities) to abortion to gay marriage. Even in the past, slave-holding states were quite happy to battle at the federal level to protect their peculiar institution. They wax poetic about federalism, but federalism as a concept inherently has too much vagueness within it to get virtually anyone to change their mind, because if you are convinced that an issue is important, you are almost certainly going to be convinced that it is important enough to be a federal issue.

Thank you. That’s a helpful clarification and I appreciate the links.

I made a small emendation to the corresponding paragraph.

I recommend the detailed arguments in this blog:
https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6094

But, your blog persuades me that registration of firearms at the state level is an idea with a lot of merit. This opens up the possibility of a “states rights!” argument to persuade some conservatives to the idea of registration and licensing of firearms.

Hi Fred,

You mentioned that:

And, of course, we know from numerous cases across history that an armed populace is rather more likely to lead to roving gangs, warlords, criminals and brutal civil wars rather than organized just rebellions.

Do you mind pointing out some examples? I would like to take a deeper look in this subject.

Steven: I’m an anarchist and a libertarian socialist and I largely agree with Richard’s general take. So does Noam Chomsky. So I really am not sure which church you’re talking about.

The distinction between democracy and republic is middle school civics armchair crap. Everyone in political science calls what we have “democracies”. And, no, democracies are no more necessarily caustic than oligarchies. Your accounting not only conflates behavior undertaken in what is effectively a capitalist oligarchy with highly limited actual freedom and democracy with an actual democracy, but also disparages the people while cutting oligarchy a blank check. The problem isn’t democracy. It’s figuring out how to create healthy political cultures and institutions that properly balance minority and majority rights and balance the needs and values we have. As an anarchist, pareconist, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQIA+ ally, and polyculturalist, my values are freedom, equality, diversity, efficiency, sustainability, prosociality and solidarity, health, prosperity and wellbeing.

And you upbraid Richard for elitism while rejecting “corrosive informal democracy” and “social media”. You don’t have a leg to stand on, Steve.

When you say, “Only you are right. Put you in government and I suspect you would soon be excusing the rope!”, this is classic bad faith bullshit. Richard has an opinion. He shouldn’t have to apologize for it. He shouldn’t need to constantly say (even though he actually did – every time he talks about politics he makes clear that politics is one of the areas where he is relatively least informed and so his opinions have changed over time) that this is his position. It’s not elitist and it’s not authoritarian to make policy proposals. Respond to his policy suggestions or don’t. This nonsense is below contempt.

When you say “In a world where were there are no malicious actors gaming the electoral; judicial legislative; and executive processes, sure”, first of all, nice vague unfalsifiable conditions for us to come up with policy to protect ourselves. Until Steven Watson is convinced that we have no malicious actors, better let mass shootings keep happen unabated! (Hey, Steve. See the thing I just did there? Implying that you having an opinion is tyrannical? See why that’s shitty? Maybe don’t do it again?) But more importantly, that’s just a lame ass excuse. If we have that problem, then we need to deal with it. And we also need gun reform. The only argument would be that we would wait on the gun reform until we had made progress there, but you don’t even justify that claim so it doesn’t matter. This is classic right-wing obstructionist rhetoric. I don’t know if you are conservative or not and it doesn’t matter: We do not need perfect institutions before we can solve things. Indeed, solving things is part of how we improve institutions. If you’re right, we’ll find that the solutions can’t even be implemented until we deal with the problems you identify. Which means it’s moot to bring them up.

Back in high school policy debate, there was an accepted implicit rule we called “fiat”. It basically was the idea that we were allowed to assume the essentials behind a policy being passed. No one had to say “Your policy couldn’t pass right now because the Republicans would block it!” Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.

You say, “Umm… you just destroyed you own argument. “They’ll roll over you like a squad of Texas militia over a battalion of the Ist Infantry Division of the United States Army” is surely not your intended meaning; but Ukraine’s farmers and their tractors have frayed your argument just a mite”. Uh, dude, the Ukrainians have not been beating the Russians with sticks, stones and hunting rifles. They have an actual military and actual hardware. This is incredibly silly. Why did you even bother to make this argument? In any case, I hope you can see that there’s a distinction between the success of an insurgency against an invading army and the success of a rebellion against a nation’s own army. Russia can afford to lose Ukraine. America can’t afford to lose America. Get it?

And constantly talking about “collectivist” and “socialist” arguments, as if there’s no justification against gun rights from an individualist perspective (and as if you saying “I DISAGREE WITH YOUR PHILOSOPHY!” is an argument), is just dumb rhetoric, again. Your right to move your arm ends at my face. Your right to fire your gun ends at my body. And the fact that you so quickly gave up on any Constitutional intent and law argument because of your own personal biases shows a contempt for law, precedent and freedom but not much else. The fact that the Framers did not intend for gun ownership to be unrestricted and unconnected from militia membership is relevant. I’d be happy to replace the Constitution as an anarchist, but until we do that, that’s the law, that’s the collective social contract, and we gain no freedom by ignoring it willy-nilly.