Do gun rights have anything to do with democracy?

So there is no good reason to restrict access to type of guns that make criminal activity more easy? I guess I have to in future argue that USA should restrict hand guns while still allow big guns.

edited 25th Apr '12 4:23:28 AM by SpookyMask

While I agree that addressing criminals' motives is important, I'm not sure Canada's gun laws are necessarily going to be all that effective at being restrictive. Yes, you're supposed to register your guns; but if someone smuggles a gun into Canada and another hides the gun in their home, they could very likely get away with not registering it. Not unlike certain drugs being against the law and yet many of them being often used anyway.

edited 25th Apr '12 4:30:24 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

Pretty much. Long guns have a negliglbe effect on our crime rate, while handguns are over 90 percent of it. Yet there's virtually no handgun legislation in california besides a quick DOJ background check to make sure you aren't a felon and a 10 day waiting period.

Buuuuuut I'm going off the rails. I like this subject a lot, but it's Off-Topic. :(

It's semi relevant. If we're discussing guns and democracy and someone brings up the perceived increase in crime in regards to that, then it's at least partially relevant to discuss it.

@breadloaf

Bastille Day has little to do with guns at all: the French rebelled due to widespread poverty and inequality and started slaughtering folks. Then Napoleon showed up and I guess he did a few notable things.

The American Revolution, on the other hand, became a shooting war when the British sent troops to confiscate guns and ammunition from the colonists for the express purpose of preventing armed rebellion. Their entire stance towards the colonies had become a military occupation, essentially. Had the British succeeded in securing arms and munitions from the colonists, the revolution might never have taken off - or would at least have become that much harder.

Now, I didn't seriously mean to suggest that guns deter crime as fact, rather that trends suggest differently than there is no effect. As I said, we see those states with higher firearms ownership have less crime than states with less. Washington D.C. saw a drop in crime after lifting its handgun ban.

You are correct in that poverty plays much more into it than anything else. The single biggest deciding factor in crime is the size of the poor population.

Now, non-crime deaths are about 20,000 per year in the US. Less if you don't want to count justified homicide as negative (I wouldn't, but for the sake of argument let's use the larger number). There are around 80 million gun owners in the US, probably more since many states - like my own - don't keep track of firearms owners. The number of people killed in suicides, accidents, and justified homicide by guns is 0.025% of the total number of gun owners. They are 0.0064% of the general population. The number of people that die in car accidents is much, much greater.

You'd have a hard time convincing me that non-crime gun deaths amount to a significant negative impact.

Now, I do agree that the military is highly relevant, but consider Libya. If not for college students and shop owners picking up guns to join the fight, the rebellion would have been crushed in days - maybe weeks - by the bombers, tanks and infantry of the government. There was a significant gap in time before larger portions of the military started to defect - and then Gadaffi resorted to using mercenaries.

@ Shepard

Napoleon did a few notable things :P

But in any case, I don't think that anybody outside of USA learns about the independence war in such a manner. Most people saw it as:

• British were fighting the French at the time, and in general, didn't have resources to deploy that many troops into the USA
• The British government was largely receptive to the complaints by Americans but chose the basic colonial decision of holding onto USA. It was a ripe time for Americans to resist because any resistance would cause the British parliament to basically shift in favour of independence.
• Taxation was the primary motivation behind the revolution, not loss of guns.

The argument is that gun rights "helped" but there were no gun rights. Just like there were no gun rights in pre-Republic France. The people took up arms that you could easily acquire, or were too hard to police. In Libya, people took up arms but they didn't have gun rights before hand. Gadhafi didn't hand out weapons like candy before hand. They were all illicitly acquired.

The thing is that, I'm not finding it a very convincing argument that gun rights help. Arguing that guns help doesn't mean anything. Unless they got those weapons through gun rights then enshrining gun rights in a constitution does nothing to abet democracy.

As for the non-crime related deaths, arguing about cars is irrelevant. The purpose of the gun is to deter crime (for the sake of this argument). Did it deter enough crime to justify 20 000 deaths per year?

edited 25th Apr '12 8:14:27 PM by breadloaf

The Bastille got stormed because besides being a noble prison it also happened to be a royal armory, from which the people then equipped themselves. So, the symbolical start of the French Revolution, the day France celebrates as national holiday, had in fact much to do with guns.

Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken. Unrelated ME1 Fanfic

@breadloaf

I didn't mean to suggest that guns were a major motivation for the war. The anger over taxation led to the British deciding to secure the colonists' militia weaponry to stave off open insurrection. That led directly to the battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the war, and turned the American Revolution into a shooting war.

The British government, to my understanding, was not receptive to colonial grievances - that's why we have the First Amendment right to redress of grievances - parliament did a token job of addressing colonial complaints, but more or less decided to assert their authority over the Empire as a whole. American colonists had no representation in parliament, after all.

And the French only supported America in earnest when it was apparent we had a fighting chance. We had to win at Saratoga to prove this, and so the first two or so years of the war were the US vs Britain.

Now, I think you're really splitting hairs with your definition of gun rights. The whole American concept stems from this era, and "gun rights" back then consisted of darn near everyone armed for the purposes of hunting, defense, and participation in the militia. The Second Amendment stipulates that the people's right to bear arms cannot be infringed, due in part to efforts from the British to disarm the populace to prevent their ability to oppose the government.

Anyways, I think Libya is the perfect modern example. As you say, they were not armed, not in large quantities, and the early days of the rebellion saw them being pummeled until they barely held a foothold in a single town. Then the UN stepped in to support and arm the rebels, and more and more Libyan soldiers defected to join the fight. Had the populace been armed, they might not have suffered as many casualties or had as tough a fight (or had as much difficulty getting support on multiple fronts) or they might even had been able to prevent the outright civil war.

And seeing as 20,000 deaths is miniscule compared to the number of total gun owners and the total populace, and because the annual number of defensive gun uses is an order of magnitude more than the number of deaths, I would say that yes, it is worth it.

@Octo

Good point, but not quite what either of us meant. I was merely agreeing that the lack of a right to own firearms was not a major contributing factor to the French Revolution as a whole.

@Octo: Nonetheless, the number one reason ironically for the French Revolution, is because the royals depleted the french economy trying to help america win the revolutionary war.

The examples of the French Revolution and the Libyan civil war actually point in the direction of gun rights not having anything to do with democracy - both show that if the people really need guns to take on a tyrannical regime, they will get them somehow (in France, by raiding the Bastille; in Libya, by looting Kaddhafi's weapons depots), even if they don't have any in their homes.

edited 26th Apr '12 2:06:17 PM by MidnightRambler

Mache dich, mein Herze, rein...

And I think if a rebellion starts armed it's less likely to gain support because if they're armed from the beginning they're more likely to be viewed as terrorists than freedom fighters internationally and by their own military.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

Very, very good point.

On the issue of the military siding for or against rebels:

As a soldier, I can say that whichever of these happened first would really set the stage for what I, as an individual, decided to do:

1. If I was ordered to bring harm to innocent civilians who do not display a probable cause for trying to harm myself or government assets.

2. If myself or any of my comrades were shot at by rebels.

If I've never had any activity to warrant being shot at by locals, and the government hasn't done some seriously heinous shit to them to deserve lethal levels of anger en masse, any half-baked asshole militia that tries to hurt me or my friends is going to straight up die. No questions asked. I don't care how right you think you are to rebel against our country, but once some extremist asshat snipes a soldier from a rooftop, it's game on: Time to pillage and burn a bit.

Now on the opposite spectrum, if my Guard unit suddenly got orders to confiscate weapons without cause or round up civilians to be shipped out elsewhere with no regard for their background, or anything else that is clearly a bad deal(not to mention an illegal order) then I'll straight up AWOL at the first chance I get, rest of the unit be damned. Though I doubt it would come to that, because being in the Guard means that we're fighting in our own neighborhoods and homes. We would never screw with the tri-county area, because it's home and any abuse by the government on our family and friends via an illegal order is a no-go.

Of course if my whole unit defected, then they'd go grab a few companies of federal active duty troops, which would make for a real mess. Better morale against civilians because of no attachments to the local area, and better support and training because they are active duty. Meshed with our unit having the home field advantage and local support, it'd be a really bloody fight and there would be no telling who would win.

If I wanted to incite a military crackdown on civilians in the United States, I'd use a few agent provocateurs to provoke exactly what Barkey described, and then let the papers lap it up. Gun rights don't protect you from bullshitting in the media.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

That's a worry that sits in the back of my mind as well. If something like that is staged to lock in our loyalty.

I feel that an open and free press is more essential to democracy than the armaments of the populace; I suspect you'd agree.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Agreed. The Armed Forces can't bitch slap a corrupt government if they don't know that it's corrupt.

As time goes on, units would obviously figure stuff out and start to defect. But a slow and compartmentalized defection means loyalist units and defector units have to fight eachother like in Libya.

The only consolation is that when the dust settled and the truth became known, there would literally be no place on earth for conspirators behind such an action to hide. The entire surviving remnants of the U.S. military's special forces units - all of them - would be willing to kill those people for free. To say nothing, admittedly, of a heavily armed population bereaved by such an event.

Which relates interestingly to the topic, because it raises the points that the biggest threats to democracy in America and elsewhere are not the kind of threats you fight with guns. I am not allowed to take a rifle and go off to peg the Koch Brothers, and that's a good thing, because it wouldn't help at all (and because I don't have the right to murder human beings, and the Koch Brothers do qualify as human beings, really).

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

No, but I think it would make my day if I found out someone killed them. They're scum of the highest degree, and I would not miss them a bit, even though yes, they are human in the same way hitler was human*

. I'd realize how bad it was and the unfortunate implications sometime the next day.

I think anyone who pulls a stunt like that won't be alive long when (if) the truth comes out. Or, ya know, it would be like any of the other horrible things our government has done and it would be quietly brushed under the rug with the government using coercion to keep the media from picking it up.

edited 26th Apr '12 7:03:57 PM by Vehudur

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I could do it and sleep well the same night. Those guys fuck things up so much.

@ Shephard

Yeah, I can agree that guns provided one of many flashpoints between the British and Americans.

It's just that the notion of gun rights is very different from mere possession. Americans owned a lot of weapons, but so did Canadians and so do many other kinds of people, but did it really help with democracy? I think that with or without gun rights, revolutions don't succeed or fail on that concept. Americans didn't have enshrined gun rights, they merely had access to guns.

But it's not just access to any kind of guns. It's access to weapons that can actually resist the powers that be. In France, they stormed the Royal Armoury, and then the Libyans were being fed weapons by the Libyan military. Also, it wasn't the UN that gave Libyan weapons, it was NATO forces but that's not really relevant to the discussion.

Even then, I think it's more around access to "power" in general that can resist the oppressive forces. If a group of rebels rapidly got a lot of arms and equipment to fight a huge conflict, it says nothing about whether they "should win" (as in, their victory makes the society more democratic) and so I don't think military strength is a particularly good method or indication of democratic intent. In that vein, I don't think gun rights helps or hinders democracy, it doesn't have anything to do with it.

edited 26th Apr '12 8:10:49 PM by breadloaf

In my personal, nobody-but-my-own-self-affiliated opinion, "gun rights" have nothing whatsoever to do with modern democracy. During the Revolutionary War? Sure. Now? No. Outside of a few isolated situations involving aggressive dictatorships and the like, I don't even see the point of violence in any capacity being part of a democracy.

I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.

@breadloaf

I don't think you're taking into account the nuances of those democratic movements. Canadians didn't need to use violence to secure independence; they were essentially granted it. In fact, there were attempts at violent rebellion in that country that were stamped out, perhaps leading to a more restrictive view of gun rights.

Now, I don't see why it's important as to whether or not "gun rights" were enshrined in America at the time. We have our modern rights to firearms because of the experiences of that era. Many, many Americans had guns for self-defense, militia service and, as it turned out, for the securing of liberty.

We could get into the minutia of firearms and how my AK-47 isn't appreciably different from any sort of other military AK rifle, but I think it'd be simpler to say that there are no "wonder weapons" for defeating a partisan effort. Or else Iraq and Afghanistan would have been cakewalks for the US. Even Hitler found that having the strongest army in the world to that date did little to protect from partisan operations in occupied territories. The Belorussian partisans were referred to as another army by the Soviets for a reason.

And to your last point I'll say this; I've never equated military power with democracy, nor gun ownership to democracy. It's all about who has the guns. Democracy, in this instance, would be the people - the private citizens intrinsic to the democratic government. If the US were to pull a Nazi Germany and become a fascist dictatorship I'd gladly take up arms to defeat that government and restore the old one. If there were a military coup I'd take up arms. If there were a civilian insurrection - a communist, fascist, anarchist or anarcho-fascistic communist regime - I'd defend the democracy of my country.

And, finally, to you and to JHM, I'll leave the case of the Battle of Athens, also called the Mc Minn County War. Many WWII veterans, returning to the States, found that their county was plagued with voting fraud and voter intimidation. The local sheriff and his deputies were essentially running a racketeering scheme: arresting folks and charging them for things like drunk and disorderly conduct, fining heavily and receiving a cut of the payment. When the locals decided to throw in their own candidates for the election for sheriff, the corrupt cops took the ballot box to the local jail and locked it up, under the guise of preventing tampering with the vote count.

So, these G Is and some other locals gathered up rifles and dynamite and shot it out with the corrupt police until they surrendered the ballot box and fair and free elections were held.

So, the idea that firearms deter corruption need not be so gallant as a Second American Revolution. It can be also on the local and state level.

tl;dr/Thread Hop:

There is no reason why they cannot be related or mutually exclusive. Gun rights have just as much, or as little, relevance to democracy as the constituents allow.

"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian

@ Shepard

What of South American countries then? Not a single one enshrined gun rights after revolution.

I think it important to differentiate gun rights with the simple acquisition of guns for a revolution. The issue at hand is simply that having gun rights does nothing. If you need guns to win a revolution, you'll get guns. If you don't need guns to win a revolution, then gun rights didn't matter. In either case, the gun rights never did anything to help.

Now, the main argument really is whether or not in the case of needing guns to help win the revolution whether gun rights helped. However, I think that if we were to analyse in detail every single revolution, we'd find that gun rights didn't help at all.

For instance, in your case of the returning G Is blowing out the cops and getting the ballot box, the claim here is that they did this through guns and they had those guns because of gun rights. Sure okay. But, did that actually have to happen? The point was that people knew there was corruption and they were willing to do something about it. If the people did a peaceful march to acquire the ballot box and the cops started shooting people, what would have been the result? The same thing... and the same thing if they didn't shoot anybody. The primary reason for the elimination of corruption was the will of the people to stand up against the oppression.

The Arab Spring is basically the best example of how gun rights don't matter. Where they could win through doing nothing but standing in Tahrir Square, they did so, and where they needed to take up arms after being killed en masse by their oppression regimes, like Libya, they did so. Nowhere did they have gun rights. All that really matters is if the populace stands up. All else follows.

(And to be more poignant about how surprising the Arab Spring should be to everyone, it's a place where 10 years of bullshit Al Qaeda violence didn't topple a single government, and a bunch of people wearing bread hats in Egypt took down Mubarak, or the suicide of a grocer brought down the Tunisian royal family)

edited 27th Apr '12 12:22:40 AM by breadloaf

@breadloaf

I think you're very much simplifying the issue. It seems to me your argument is that a revolution will obtain guns when it needs them, well that's hugely idealistic and just a bit naive. The whole purpose of allowing the citizenry to maintain arms is to deter governmental abuse of power in the first place. What happens when the would-be revolution is halted by nothing more than an increased guard at whatever munitions depot was available?

And I think you're also forgetting that those same South American countries have, over the years, suffered strings of coups and revolutions and not all of them democratic. If the original question was "What do guns have to do with democracy" then we should at least acknowledge that countries in South America, and Mexico, are hardly bastions of democracy and freedom even with limited gun ownership (and a well-armed criminal element).

As far as analysis of revolution goes, I think we'd find that many places with revolutions lacked widespread gun ownership to begin with. The United States, being a distant frontier, was lucky in that regard. And I think we'd find that gun rights - the civilian ownership of guns - played into it heavily.

To answer your question of peaceful protest vs violent revolt, I'd ask you what the people are to do when peace isn't an option. You say they will find weapons, as in Libya, and you say peace is as capable a force as violence, as in Egypt and Tunisia. That's all well and good but what about the multiple instances where brutal or undesirable regimes would not or could not be toppled through peace without the option of violence? What about the Tiananmen Squares or the Syrias or the Burmas? Here we see instances of people who have no option for peace and no ability for violence be oppressed and murdered.

For that matter, look at the American Revolution. Peace didn't work there; the British preferred to send troops and make demands. The only recourse was violence and we only succeeded in the end because we had guns aplenty. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I think you'd find seven million or so folks in Nazi Germany that sure would have liked to have some firepower.

The US is fortunate in that regard; we have an undeniable, incontestable right to peaceful protest - and the legally enforced option of violent revolution should that fail.

To return to the case of the Battle of Athens, these G Is who had fought under the banner of democracy in Europe and the Pacific returned home to find that there was no democracy where they lived. They did petition the government to crack down on voter fraud, intimidation and police corruption. They received no help. Possibly because it was a senator from that state who was offering the police kickbacks for tickets and arrests. They decided to put their own candidates up for vote. The result? The corrupt government, in this instance represented by local sheriff's deputies, used force and violence to prevent democracy. So the G Is took matters into their own hands and used their right to bear arms to protect all their other rights.

Could peaceful demonstration have worked? Maybe. I suspect no, but it is a moot point. I do find it a bit odd, however, that you seem to find it to be an equally good outcome (or an outright better one) if the change occurred as a result of civilian massacre as through a revolution in which no one died.

Now, all that said, I think the point needs to be made that the reason the Arab Spring was so surprising, that the level of peaceful change was so startling, is all due to the fact that we have never seen oppressive, belligerent regimes toppled by peace. Libya is far more typical of such change and Syria is way more typical of how these events usually turn out.