CDFingers wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 6:31 pm
A motivated writer can support any thesis. That does not make the thesis true. It's just supported. Sometimes readers are thereby persuaded.
Guns can be used, and certainly have been used, to dominate others. Naturally, this is one reason people fear guns. It's visceral.
QFT.
So, a thing. Shortly after the shiny new Constitution got ratified and all, there was a fun little rebellion out Pennsylvania-ways. You might've heard of it. It involved whiskey. Wait, let me go get a dram. Okay. So. Discontented yokels raise up arms against their new federal government over taxes they don't like, because dude, didn't we just fight a whole goddamn war over this? Anyways, the former commander of the Continental Army and first elected President of the United States of America, one General Geo. Washington - you might've heard of him - raised up the militias and marched into central PA with more men than he'd had at Valley Forge.
Thing is, the Bill of RIghts had already been ratified by this point.
Now, a lot of the rights we take for granted weren't necessarily meant for us. They were written into law under the assumption that they applied only to white men of English descent who happened to own property - but the laws weren't written as racist or elitist as the culture was at the time. So when people started to look at the text of the law in detail, and realized that maybe it could just possibly be applied to freed Black men, or for heaven's sake women - who retained the right to vote in New Jersey into the 19th Century before men stripped it away! - well, the Republic we aspire to is the product of literal interpretation of carelessly written laws that assumed certain levels of privilege that were not explicitly enshrined.
Now, down South, those privileges were maybe a little more enshriny. But if you ever want your hair raised, read up on New York's slave rebellions in the colonial period. There ain't a damn thing about the people we used to be as a country what're worth defending on moral grounds. It's the ideal that we could be better, we should be better, that we all stand for. You know, progressive-like.