I live in the United States and I was born in a rural area. Rural areas of the United States have a higher percentage of gun owners, and from growing up there I have native appreciation for the culture of gun rights. There was a passionate minority among the gun-owning culture who had what I now feel is a strange reason for owning a gun – the gun would protect them from the riots at the end of the world. I want to share that ideology with others who may never have heard it.
One may say that the United States has a problem with firearms. The country is unusual for having civilian gun ownership. Talks about the school shootings and every other kind of shooting have continually happened, with some people wanting regulation of firearms and other people wanting less regulation. What I see in America is a demographic of people who want guns regulated, because quite rightly they see regular violence which regulation would prevent. The demographic that wants regulation has data and statistics which back up their claims about guns as a public health concern. The demographic which opposes regulation is ideological, and often talks about freedom, responsibility, and personal rights, all of which things are difficult to quantify and compare to statistics. Because each side uses fundamentally different arguments which do not overlap in the debate space, I feel like there is a lot of misunderstanding between the sides.
The source of modern US gun culture is the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. That amendment 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.” This is a confusing statement using words in an archaic way, but it is interpreted as meaning that the government should recognize that the right of citizens to have weapons is good for the country. Why put this in a constitution? Why make this Rule #2 for founding a country?
When America was founded it was because of tension with the British. The British were ruling America, and the citizens here had no right in the government. England was an ocean away and could not be involved in the daily government here. The British colonists – the Americans – claimed that the British treated them unfairly, including through taxation without representation. When the Americans complained, the British responded by trying to suppress dissidents with violence. The Americans were mostly helpless and had to endure this violence. If the Americans could have defended themselves, the British would have had to have been diplomatic and negotiate for fair government rather than rely on force to exploit the Americans. When the constitution was written – and perhaps this interpretation is local to my region of birth but this is the culture I knew from my rural home – the reason why the Founding Fathers wanted the citizens to have guns is so that if their government ever oppressed them by turning the military, the police, and all government-controlled institutions against the will of the majority, then the citizens should be as empowered to protect themselves as the government is to use illegal violence. A government threat of violence in response to complaints about taxation without representation is – so they say – justification for brandishing weapons.
I want to explore the concept of giving citizens a channel for protesting taxation without representation, or more broadly, any government injustice. My home culture’s interpretation of the rights to gun ownership is about capturing a right to be heard in the midst of anarchy. If for some reason in modern times, wild British run the streets killing Americans again, then they would be stopped when they encounter an American with a gun, whereas last time the British went wild the Americans could not stop them except for by the guns provided by the French as rivals to the British. Gun ownership is not about routine necessity. To a small extent it is a bit of insurance against an improbable random violent attack, such as the sort which happen in countries with lots of guns. Mostly it is like a tool to cheat death for a while should the horrors come to be in the wake of mass government oppression, the next World War, or Armageddon. Many people want a gun to protect themselves in the failure of the government should it begin to attack its people, but just having a gun for a while makes people think of outrageous new reasons to have them and that is how less likely scenarios begin to be imagined. My personality makes me disinclined to violence so now I would like to leave the gun talk aside, and I will not be saying more about guns. I want to direct the conversation to wondering if there could ever be such a thing as a takeover of government by comparably wicked powerbrokers who might take actions contrary to the will of the majority. Is it possible that it could ever happen that there could be another “king of England” who would want to enact an exploitive economic situation on the public which the majority would oppose, but which they would be powerless to change due to manipulation of the democratic process?
My opinion is that this is unlikely. However, just because I trust the government, I still like for it to function according to law. Right now the US government has a series what it calls “checks and balances“, which say that all of the powers of government should be divided so that no one entity should overpower any of the others, and so that the citizens can watch each entity with its own power. The US has long had this system and I think that everyone likes it and wants to preserve it.
A person named Edward Snowden recently revealed that he leaked some information about government surveillance. Other people will present their own views of this person and what happened. Regardless of what this person did, since I am a person from a paranoid gun-loving culture, my first thought about this is that there are many things in this world more dangerous than guns. The intention of the 2nd Amendment is not about guns, but about giving the United States people the collective ability to communicate as a group on equal terms with the central government of the country. I am disturbed to think that within the central government, there could be a faction of tens of thousands of people – leadership and low-level office workers together – who all know that they are using a military sort of surveillance on the American people and world. Whatever Snowden knew, tens of thousands of people also knew, and somehow none of them shared their knowledge with the media. I do not even think that elected representatives knew about the surveillance programs Snowden described. Who is behind this? Do the American people need to be spied on? What is the regulation of this? Will everyone play dumb and not discuss this perpetually?
How can any oversight committee, like among elected officials, get access to the data from these surveillance programs? What assurances can there be that surveillance might only be used for protection from violent crime, and not for things like promoting trendy ideology, controlling businesses or economic sectors, or just weird human passions? The accusations are crazy. If the government has a weapon, whether guns or digital weapons, which have such overbearing control and influence on individuals’ lives that they might feel threatened, then I wish that citizens could have whatever tools of defense they need to counter that and live freely. I think this is a 2nd Amendment right. The kind of tool that I might imagine is privacy and encryption for individuals’ information, whatever that looks like, and more checks and balances in elected offices to monitor whatever is being done.
This bothers me so much. It is beyond any surveillance described in 1984, or East Germany, or any other horrible narrative about the worst situations imaginable.