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1. You didn't address my initial point, which was that the proposition that there were two separate thoughts in your second amendment is a nonsense. No comment? If they are not two separate thoughts, what might they be?
2. As you know, my interest in your second amendment is a matter of almost pure idle curiosity, and it is therefore difficult to sustain it.
You plainly do not agree with the "sophisticated collective rights" position, and I didn't actually say that I do, either. A difference of opinion doesn't make yours correct, nonetheless. But, and more importantly, nor does it make the subject, on which there is a difference of opinion, matter.
There is much dispute in some quarters over the meaning of the direction in the Hippocratic Oath that a physician not give a woman a pessary to induce miscarriage. One school of thought is that it is an admonishment against abortion, and that the noble author must be understood as having been anti-abortion, abortion being a "harm" that a physician shall do none of. Another school of thought is that it is an admonishment against sticking dung (the common active ingredient in the pessary in question) into a patient's vagina, and that the noble author was, rather, advocating not practising the sort of "medicine" that killed patients, that being the harm that was being denounced.
The real question, I submit is: who the hell cares? We don't need Hippocrates to tell us either what the rights and wrongs of abortion are or what the rights and wrongs of using dung as medicine are.
We know a hell of a lot more about medicine than Hippocrates did, so he is no authority on that aspect. And we, the whole great diverse male/female white/black theistic/atheistic rich/poor etc. etc. we, can make up our own individual minds about the rights and wrongs of things, abortion included, and our own collective minds about rules of conduct -- there simply are no authorities on that aspect.
And your second amendment is absolutely no different. You founders & framers are only authorities in that respect if you choose to appoint them as such. I don't. I see them as what they were: a tiny group of propertied, male, European occupants of one small part of the earth for one brief moment in human history, adherents of a quite homogeneous world view that they did not invent out of whole cloth and that was largely determined by the circumstances of their lives, and architects of a set of rules that they chose in order to arrange the affairs of themselves and other people as they thought they should be arranged.
Much has happened since then, and many other people, including those who were and are not propertied, male or European, have had thoughts worth thinking. And circumstances have very definitely changed.
The rest of the world moves on, the US slides farther into a sinkhole of poverty and violence. If you think that the rejection, in the US, of the world views that are widely held outside the US has nothing to do with this, I will say you're mistaken, but there's not much I can do to persuade you, just as no one seems to be able to persuade a huge segment of the US electorate that George W. Bush and his cabal are monsters.
The rest of the world (I speak, of course, not literally, but about the broad process of human evolution and development and our the stages in that process that "we" currently straddle) has rejected the individual-vs-society world view of the US, as our societies have developed. We have developed more sophisticated understandings of the relationships of individuals and societies and the responsibilities inherent in those relationships, and implemented measures to meet those responsibilities. As our societies become healthier and happier and more tolerant and respectful, yours becomes sicker and more fearful and suspicious and hateful. I'm sad for the people who are harmed by your country's official/popular world view, but I can't do a whole lot about it.
Out here, we don't worship our dead ancestors. We don't parse their words for centuries and spend our time mumbling about what they might have meant when they wrote them. We use our own heads and hearts and organize our own affairs as we want them. You have your ways, we have ours. I find the minute examination of your old ways, as expressed in your second amendment, to be about as interesting and worthwhile as the minute examination of pig entrails, when done for the purpose of deciding how to operate a modern society.
I didn't say that I accept the "sophisticated collective rights" model, and in fact I don't think I would say that I do. I simply don't take a position on the interpretation of that bit of prose, because I can see no point in doing so. For all I care, it can mean exactly what the NRA wants it to mean. The point is that if it were my society being governed by it, I would simply want it burnt. No matter what it might mean, it is utterly irrelevant to a modern society, and virtually any interpretation of it will be a negative thing for a modern society to have.
I think you know what my own position on collective rights is. We discussed the right to vote as an instance of the individual exercise of a collective right, I believe.
The basic individual rights are the right of the individual to life (existence) and liberty (self-determination). The basic collective rights are the right of the collectivity to existence and self-determination. But collective rights and individual rights are simply not the same species of thing, since individuals and collectivities are not the same species of thing.
In order to exercise the right to life, and individual may need to defend him/herself. Ditto for a collectivity.
In the exercise of the right of self-determination, individuals may need to do a variety of things, and it will not be legitimate, as a general rule, to prohibit the doing of them. A wide range of activities -- from practising birth control to speaking in one's native language -- must be protected. An individual must not be (unjustifiably) prevented from determining the course of his/her own life.
Collectivities -- peoples, on about the largest scale -- also must not be prevented from determining the course of their collective lives. To that end, they must not be prevented from organizing themselves as they choose (sovereign states, at the highest level) and governing themselves as they choose.
In order for the collectivity to do those things, individuals must be able to do certain things. In order for the collectivity to defend its existence, individuals must be able to perform the necessary acts (using force, at the extreme). In order for the collectivity to govern itself, individuals (in the highest-level collectivity, and at many lower levels) usually need to be able to vote for a representative government, at least in our current state of development.
The collective right is the self-determination of a people; the individual right that is its corollary is the right to vote. But individuals simply do not have a right to vote willy-nilly, when and where they please. They vote in elections organized by the collectivity. They determine the government of the collectivity in accordance with the rules adopted by that collectivity.
And you know where we're going. The collective right is the existence of a people as a people, a distinct group with its own distinctive nature. In our present state of development, this very often calls for the people to exist within a "free state": one not governed from the outside by another people, where such governance will intentionally or effectively (e.g. by suppressing or supplanting its language and customs and values, or at the extreme by all the acts recognized as genocide) cause it to cease to exist as a people. And the individual right that is the corollary is the right to use force to defend the collectivity.
But again, this does not mean that individuals have the right to use force willy-nilly, at their own discretion and according to whatever definition they apply to the collectivity's distinctive features or to a threat to the collectivity's ability to perpetuate its existence.
There is no more a set of hard and fast rules for how this works than there is for individuals' own actions. We have devised the concept of majority rule with minority rights as one way of expressing how it works, and we recognize the right of oppressed minorities, collectivities in themselves, to use force to defend their existence, but we are far from agreeing on when it is justified. (The Palestinians? African-Americans? The Confederate States?)
Obviously, collectivities act through the agency of individuals, but the individuals' acts are subject to direction by the collectivity -- whatever that collectivity might be.
So as you know, that is exactly what your second amendment looks like to me. The revolution that resulted in the creation of the USofA was an exercise of the collective right of what had evidently and arguably become a new people, a collectivity distinct from the one out of which it grew, with its own values, customs, etc. And your founders & framers were fundamentally concerned with maintaining the existence and independence of the new collectivity ("security of a free state"). And the acts of individuals to defend that free state were potentially crucial to that end.
I'm sure your founders & framers also believed firmly in the entitlement of individuals (well, some individuals) to defend their own lives, as an exercise of the right to life and doubtless also liberty. They would undoubtedly never have dreamed that anyone would suggest otherwise, or had any notion that there was reason to restrict access to the then-common instruments for doing so, which were also needed for various other purposes (acquiring food, protecting food sources, and of course collective defence); they would obviously have thought that this "right" was, at the least, one of those other rights "retained by the people", had any question arisen.
But your second amendment just doesn't say "the instruments of force being necessary to the security of a free individual, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed", it says "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed".
And me, I just don't think it is remotely reasonable to say that those are two separate thoughts.
So all in all, it seems that I would most likely agree with the "limited individual rights" model, except that I see no basis for arguing, in modern circumstances, that just about any limitation at all on the possession of firearms would not be justified in the context of your second amendment, which is essentially irrelevant in a modern society since arming individuals willy-nilly for the purpose of collective defence makes little sense.
Arguing that such limitations are not justified, i.e. that indidual acquisition/possession and use ("carrying") of firearms should be left essentially to individual discretion looks to me no different from arguing that a citizen should be permitted to go and cast a vote for a (new) congressional representative whenever s/he likes. Permitting individuals to exercise "rights" of this nature, which are in essence the individual acts that are necessary for the exercise of collective rights and to secure collective existence and self-determination, at their own discretion, is simply a recipe for chaos and, predictably, widespread conflict and violence and the loss of collective security and freedom.
That leaves limitations on the possession of firearms for other purposes, such as acquiring food / protecting food sources, self-defence and simple amusement, subject to the same basic rules as limitations on the possession of anything else that individuals might want to possess and use. The right to possess any particular things, and the right to use them in any particular way, may be restricted and regulated in ways that are, as my constitution expresses it, demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. And that applies to firearms just as it applies to motor vehicles or mountain lions. If you're asking me.
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