You are arguing yourself in circles. 1) You seem dead set as casting the Republicans as the good guys at all times in U.S. history, and in doing so you are grasping at straws to pretend that the Republican party post-1968 is the same as the Republican party pre-1968. Trying to argue that the radical Republicans of Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln have any bearing on today’s Republican Party is like arguing that a titmouse is a mammal. It’s not even a revisionist argument, it’s just a bad one that ignores how U.S. political parties have transformed over time. I’m getting the sense that you’re leaning heavily on Dinesh D’souza’s analyses — which are superficial at best, and absolutely and willfully ignorant of primary sources at worst.
2) It seems to me that you are arguing that I’m wrong in part because you believe that the Second Amendment is really there in case of tyrannical government. Talk about revisionism. Even Scalia had to dig into an obscure anti-federalist paper from Pennsylvania (arguing against Pennsylvania ratifying the U.S. Constitution) to find any justification for an individual right to bear arms as codified in the 2010 Heller decision. The Heller decision is as thin, legally, as the Roe decision.
3) You state plainly that the police (the executive arm of the government, tyrannical or not) would put down an attempt at an armed uprising. Great. That is my point. Go now and tell that to everyone who is falsely arguing that the Second Amendment has anything to do with an individual’s right to bear arms vis a vis a tyrannical government, or corporation, or any sort of tyranny.
4) You are mistaking a historical analysis for an ax that needs ground. Airing a hypothetical, and then laying out the plain historical evidence for why I think my hypothetical is correct, is not the same as seeking “to level the playing field.” It’s interesting that you are projecting any sort of policy prescriptions onto an article that is making a very simple point — and one that you still haven’t disagreed with directly.
5) You continue to misstate arguments from me, as my hypothetical plainly has to do with teachers and other public sector workers, and the historical analysis has to do with coal miners. We do not need to wonder about what would happen if coal miners took up arms to fight for an existence beyond subsistence — that actually happened. What happened was that the federal government deployed soldiers to support the companies and put down the worker uprising, and union miners (exclusively) were disarmed under martial law. You haven’t convinced anyone that you’ve read more than the first four paragraphs of my article.
6) In your original comment you seem to have confused my statement about what the NRA’s membership does (fly Confederate flags), with what the NRA’s leadership says. I was very clear to refer to the membership’s actions and not the leadership’s rhetoric. You responded as though I did not make that clear, which tells me that you thought you understood what I wrote, but in fact you understood only what you thought you read.
Again. This is an important conversation — but only if you are actually addressing the arguments I’ve made and the history I’ve presented.
A few other points from yesterday…
7) On the Mulford Act, you seem to be hung up on the fact that it wasn’t ONLY Republicans who drafted and passed it into law. That’s fine, but it also wasn’t ONLY Democrats who gave the majority ruling in Roe v Wade — in fact, the majority opinion was written by a lifelong Republican. It doesn’t stop folks like you from saying that abortion is a “democrat” ruling. So. the Mulford Act was drafted, in part, by Republicans — passed in both chambers, in part, by Republicans. And then signed by Ronny Reagan, who was at that time a Republican. Gonna go ahead and say that it’s not revisionist to call it a Republican law.
8) More for my own curiosity…. Reagan is widely considered the father of the modern (pre-Trump) Republican party. You seem to dismiss him as an opportunistic Democrat-turned-Republican. Who then, in your mind, is the model Republican president in the 20th or 21st century? I like Eisenhower, but that’s because his platform included bolstering the Postal Service, expanding union rolls, and expanding Social Security — all of which are things that today’s Republican Party opposes.
