of when the ACLU did not do what it should, in some opinions, have done.
You offered post-Katrina. I think that it's as reasonable to think that the ACLU would have regarded that interference as being as justified as the interference in free speech embodied in prohibitions on child pornography. I'm not saying that was their position; just that it could be.
As you may know, I agree that the second amendment protects a collective right, I'm just not sure what collective right the ACLU thinks it protects. I think it plainly protects the collective right to a secure and free state. Your founders & framers thought that individual weapons possession was essential to that end and thus protected the individual right to possess weapons. I think that is nonsense in the 21st century. All reasonable people think it is nonsense.
A collective right to possess firearms makes no sense. I have never disagreed with that position. I don't know whether the ACLU has expanded on its position in this, and would be interested to see what else it may have said, if anything.
If you happen to know where the underlined bit here can be found these days (it's a dead link, as is the one for the ACLU lower down the page):
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96mar/guns/guns.htmTHE tension at the heart of the Second Amendment, which makes it so difficult to construe, is the tension between republicanism and liberal individualism. (To put it very simply, republicanism calls for the subordination of individual interests to the public good; liberalism focuses on protecting individuals against popular conceptions of the good.) A growing body of scholarly literature on the Second Amendment locates the right to bear arms in republican theories of governance. In a 1989 article in the Yale Law Journal that helped animate the Second Amendment debate, the University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson argued that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms so that, in the republican tradition, armed citizens might rise up against an oppressive state. Wendy Brown, a professor of women's studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and David C. Williams, a law professor at Cornell University, have questioned the validity of a republican right to bear arms in a society that lacks the republican virtue of being willing to put communal interests first. Pro-gun activists don't generally acknowledge the challenge posed by republicanism to the individualist culture that many gun owners inhabit. They embrace republican justifications for gun ownership, stressing the use of arms in defending the community, at the same time that they stress the importance of guns in protecting individual autonomy.
I'd be interested in reading it. I know that Levinson has been cited in this forum in the past.
That article itself seems interesting, although I have not had a chance to read it all yet. Another snippet:
DURING the two-day seminar held by Academics for the Second Amendment, we argue equanimously about nearly everything--crime control, constitutional rights, and the fairness and feasibility of gun controls--until I question whether, 200 years after the Revolution, citizens armed with rifles and handguns can effectively resist the federal government. I ask, If Nixon had staged a military coup in 1974--assuming he had military support--instead of resigning the presidency, could the NRA and the nation's unaffiliated gun owners have stopped him? For the first time in two days Don Kates flares up in anger, and the room is incandescent.
"Give me one example from history of a successful government oppression of an armed populace," he demands. The FBI raid on David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas, doesn't count, he says, because Koresh's group was a small, isolated minority. The Civil War doesn't count either. (I can't remember why.) Neither do uprisings in Malaysia and the Philippines.
People like me think it is possible to oppose the government only with nuclear weapons, Kates rages, because we're stupid; we don't understand military strategy and the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare, and we underestimate the hesitancy of troops to engage their fellow citizens in armed conflict. Millions of Americans armed only with pistols and long guns could turn a bloodless coup into a prolonged civil war.
Perhaps. I am almost persuaded that Kates might have a point, until he brings up the Holocaust. ...
Goodness. Kates sounds less appealing all the time.
And:
The irony of the Second Amendment debate is that acknowledging an individual right to bear arms might facilitate gun control more than denying it ever could.
Heh.
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