Changing the subject now. Can you tell me the argument against
registration?
I think you have to understand the mentality of the times then and now.
Don't forget, we had just come out of a revolution which we won in large part because of an armed populance. The Minutemen were entirely a volunteer, not a government, body. If the British had had gun laws in place and enforced, we would probably still be speaking English. If they British had every gun registered and could pop over to the citizen's house and confiscate the guns, ditto.
Today, for better or worse, liberals in particular have a much more benign view of government. It's hard to see a single liberal agreeing with the proposition that when a government goes bad it is not only your right but your duty to overthrow it by force. Liberals tend to like what government does, and if they don't they tend to prefer peaceful, democratic means of addressing their grievances. In that context, the concept of an armed citizen militia seems anachronistic.
But there are still a lot of people who think government is overstepping its limits and can't be kept under control by peaceful means, and that (see the Declaration of Independence) the population has both the right and the duty to be prepared to overthrow it by force. This requires being armed, and being armed with weapons that the government may not know about and aren't in a tidy government file.
I tend to dismiss this as close to paranoia until I look around at modern day nations under the grip of tyrannies and realize that if the population were armed, a lot of this might well not be happening. Would apartheid have survived as long as it did if the black population had been armed?
Not that I'm advocating armed revolution. It's a nasty business, as we can see in the Middle East. But OTOH, our country exists primarily because of an armed population, and I can see the other side of this argument. |
