I don't understand because its a crazy idea. If you need guns to shoot people in your back yard, than why are you still paying taxes to your goverment and living in that country?

My point is that guns don't protect people, guns are a symbol of a fail state. A healthy functional state would not need guns because they were be no need for it. If you need them, its already too late. You might save your life, but country is gone.

As for difference between America and most other countries, in terms of gun ownership its linked to all the reasons most Americans either don't want to admit or are not aware off. So I would suggest people read more about it, since its not for self protection or protection from the goverment. Those are symptoms not causes.

One should ask, why is the country with gun rights such as America, historically been plagued with such high levels of crime and is the gun culture that grew out of gun ownership really the best way to go or just the American way to go?

@Krunoslav We did not have the crime problem when I was young, crime only became a problem when the "Left Wing", "Socialist". call them what you will, got enough control that CRIMINALS are not punished!!!!! When the criminals knew what to expect, we had very little crime!!!!! Now criminals do not expect PUNISHMENT for committing crimes!!!!!!! I know how thing were and how they are now!!! I spent 30 years in Law Enforcement, I know!!!!!

@Serg97 Where did you live and what decades are we talking about?

@Serg97 My point was that correlation and causation is the problem I see with the argument of A2 in America.

"If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. " ― Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)

In other words, having constitutional right to bear arms, does not protect one from tyrannical goverment and offers no valid solutions to failed country that is riddled with crime, because of cultural decay and corruption.

Crimes do happen in other countries, and crimes are rare in other countries, and yet they do not have constitutional legal rights to own weapons.

You said; "When the criminals knew what to expect, we had very little crime!!!!! Now criminals do not expect PUNISHMENT for committing crimes!!!!!!! I know how thing were and how they are now!!! "

Hence, 2A did little to stop the problem of crime, did it?

So 2A rights to me make very little logical sense. They are not what most Americans claim they are, they are not protection, they are false sense of security against problems that one cannot fight against with only guns.

But when society does fall apart as it does in the US, guns availability is like adding oil to fire.

Here is an interesting book to read...

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Armed Citizens: The Road From Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment, 2020 by Noah Shusterman

Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the founding fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive―and racist―domestic forces.

In Armed Citizens, Noah Shusterman explains for a general reader what eighteenth-century militias were and why the authors of the Constitution believed them to be necessary to the security of a free state. Suggesting that the question was never whether there was a right to bear arms, but rather, who had the right to bear arms, Shusterman begins with the lessons that the founding generation took from the history of Ancient Rome and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of those myths during the Renaissance. He then turns to the rise of France’s professional army during seventeenth-century Europe and the fear that it inspired in England. Shusterman shows how this fear led British writers to begin praising citizens’ militias, at the same time that colonial America had come to rely on those militias as a means of defense and as a system to police enslaved peoples. Thus the start of the Revolution allowed Americans to portray their struggle as a war of citizens against professional soldiers, leading the authors of the Constitution to place their trust in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," an idea that persists to this day.

Categories: History - European History
Year: 2020
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Language: english
ISBN 10: 110190304X
ISBN 13: 9781101903049
ISBN: OXRDWAAQBAJ
File: EPUB, 352 KB

Free eBook: [ug1lib.org]

Introduction: The Long Road to the Second Amendment

THE SECOND Amendment to the US Constitution no longer makes sense.

"It no longer makes sense not because today’s weapons are more powerful or because American gun violence is out of control (although both of those statements are true). The Second Amendment no longer makes sense in a much more basic way: people no longer understand what it means. Nor do they understand what it meant to the generation that created it. The first half of the amendment—“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state”—has become a cryptic phrase, waving at us across the centuries.

The amendment’s second half still makes sense. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Some Americans like that phrase more than others, but everyone understands what the words mean. In 1791, though, when the states ratified the Bill of Rights, the entire amendment made sense. Contemporaries understood what the framers of the Constitution meant by a “militia,” and they knew how important it was that those militias be regulated. And they knew why, for eighteenth-century republicans, a state without such a militia could never be truly free.

Above all, this is a work of historical research and historical writing. It is history with political stakes and political implications, but the methods used here are historical, and the message is also historical. The Second Amendment was and remains an eighteenth-century text. The best way to understand it is to come as close as possible to understanding it in the conditions and terms in which it first appeared. The most fundamental message is that the men who wrote it lived in a very different world than our own, and they had very different concerns than we do. To those men, the Second Amendment made sense."

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I think he makes strong argument that second Amendment makes no sense anymore, tyranny in America is at all time high and so is crime and situation that is making civil war number two, very possible. And gun ownership still makes sense for those reasons, but militia part as written in original second Amendment does not. Question for me, is does gun ownership solves the problems it argues for? I don't think it does. It has in effect became a tool of survival rather than useful aspect of organized civil society. In the event of civil war , the so called conservatives in America would be in advantage for owning guns, and that is probably the main reason why the left in America is trying to take away the guns. They can sense the civil war danger and they want to be the ones with the guns and only them.

Bottom line is that for me, I don't think second Amendment in its original form and intent makes sense, but there is arguments to be made for owning guns in America. Although those arguments point to a failed country more than anything else.

@Krunoslav DAmn, I wish I could type as fast as you!!!!!!
Bottom line. you are saying your country never experienced a time when citizens with guns was a good idea, right!!!!

@Krunoslav I lived in the Pacific Northwest, mostly Idaho and Washington states. I wore a badge and gun from 1970 to 2000!!!

@Serg97 "Damn, I wish I could type as fast as you!!!!!! Bottom line. you are saying your country never experienced a time when citizens with guns was a good idea, right!!!!"

As far as I know, this was mostly the case when Croatia was invaded by other military forces and in the 1991 we had virtually no weapons, only some hunting rifles and we were being shelled with artillery and Yugoslavian, (Serbian) army was attacking us. Before that I think it was the Italian Fascist. German Nazis and again not much weapons. off course USA was never invaded by other country like virtually everyone else has, so it is part of Americans collective consciousness I imagine to not think about these things the same way.

As for personal protection with firearms, there are occasional domestic violence cases or criminals fighting each other, and they don't wait for goverment to give them permission to use guns.

I still think that if you need guns to protect yourself from fellow citizens, you are living in a failed and dysfunctional country. And at that point, personal firearms are of no use to save the country, they may only save your life at the expense of failed community. That is not a good reason for firearms to be part of something like a constitution.

As for fighting the goverment with guns, that clearly didn't work since the start, and much less now. The Whisky rebellion.

From the book.

Epilogue: The Long Road from the Second Amendment

IN SEPTEMBER 1791, a tax collector named Robert Johnson was making his rounds in western Pennsylvania’s Washington County. It was a time when it was difficult to be a tax collector anywhere west of the Appalachian Mountains, but western Pennsylvania was especially hostile to men like Johnson. As Alexander Hamilton would later describe it, “A party of men armed and disguised way-laid him . . . seized, tarred and feathered him, cut off his hair, and deprived him of his horse, obliging him to travel on foot a considerable distance in that mortifying and painfull situation.” Johnson could not have been completely surprised. At the time, “the people in general in the Western part of the state” were “in such a ferment on Account of the Act of Congress for laying a duty on distilled Spirits & so much opposed to the execution of the said Act.”

Hamilton had initiated that whiskey tax as a way to raise revenue during Washington’s presidency. Like many economic policies formulated during the colonial era had done, it hit Americans closer to the frontier harder than it did those living closer to the Atlantic, and it hit rural folks harder than those in the cities. In those western communities many people were angry about the tax. That anger had spread to enough of the community that even after Johnson identified his attackers, local government officials had a difficult time punishing them. One man who attempted to serve the papers fared no better than Johnson had and was himself “seized whipped tarred and feathered and after having his Money and horse taken from him was blindfolded and tied in the Woods, in which condition he remained for five hours.”

These attacks on tax collectors were part of the events that, together, would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion—the latest uprising of white citizens from frontier counties against their own governments. The parallels to Shays’s Rebellion were many: both were in the western part of the state, both concerned economic policy, and both were insurrections that the community itself could not—or would not—suppress. Officially, the task of suppressing such rebellions still fell to the local militia, but that militia was made up of men who were taking part in the insurrection. Or, as one of western Pennsylvania’s leading men at the time wrote, the fear was that “government would call out the militia, and we were the militia ourselves, and have to be at war with one another.” It was the same dilemma that the Massachusetts governor had faced in Shays’s Rebellion, and it was the same dilemma Berkeley had faced in Bacon’s Rebellion. Robert Johnson had tried to collect taxes from men who were poor, indebted, discontented, and armed, and it had not gone well. As Saul Cornell notes, the rebels even went to great pains to present themselves as a militia, using militia rituals and rhetoric. Though people outside the region looked at the rebels as a “mob,” the rebels themselves tried to “convince the government that we are no mob, but a regular army, and can preserve discipline, and pass thro’ a town, like the French and American armies, in the course of the last war, without doing the least injury to persons or property.”

It took the national government several years to resolve the problems in the region. Eventually, George Washington would come to the same conclusion that Hamilton had come to years earlier: the national government had to call out troops to put down the rebellion once and for all. In September 1794, Washington issued a proclamation in which he stated that “the moment is now come when . . . every form of conciliation not inconsistent with the being of Government has been adopted without effect.” The “serious consequences of a treasonable opposition” had led him to use the powers he had and to summon into service the militia from not only Pennsylvania but New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia as well.

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And in recent times it didn't do anything to stop goverment violating all kinds of rights on Jan 6th to American citizens.

@Serg97 "I lived in the Pacific Northwest, mostly Idaho and Washington states. I wore a badge and gun from 1970 to 2000!!!"

Kudos. I don't know the details of that era, but if I'm not mistaken some cities, like NYC was notorious almost as it is now for high crime rate, was it in the 1980's?

United States Index Crime Rate, 1933–1998

Changes in the overall incidence of crime are most often measured by examining the index crime rate, which includes the reported crimes of murder/nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. The reported crime rate was fairly level during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, before sharply increasing until the early 1970s. Although the crime rate plateaued during the last quarter of the century, the rate has dropped and climbed by as much as 900 crimes per 100,000 population over the last 20 years. The United States is currently in the midst of the longest period of decline over the entire period shown, with a 1998 crime rate of 4,615 per 100,000 population, the lowest since 1973, when the rate was 4,155.

United States Murder Rate, 1900–1998

Across the country, and even internationally, the U.S. murder rate receives more attention than any other crime rate. The trend chart below shows the murder rate as a recurring flow of sustained increases and decreases spread over the 20th century. The rate increased through the early 1900s, peaking in 1933 at 9.7 murders per 100,000 population. The rate then decreased until 1960, followed by a sharp increase until the mid-1970s. The murder rate fluctuated over the last 25 years at a historically high level, as did the overall index crime rate, but has declined rapidly during the 1990s. The murder rate in 1998, the last full year of available data, hit a 30-year low of 6.9
murders per 100,000 population. Preliminary FBI statistics show this downward trend continuing into 1999.

[jrsa.org]

@Krunoslav For the las thirty years I live in a state that is about the same size as your Country!!!! That state had a total population of less than 1,000,000!!!!! I am not sure if you understand what that means to Police response time, but trust me, if you are not prepared to protect you and your, you are SOL!!!!!!!!!!