The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 (opens in new tab)

"I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." George Mason Co-author of the Second Amendment during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution, 1788

"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence . from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable . the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." George Washington

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them." Thomas Paine

"Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not." Thomas Jefferson

"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that . it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. " Thomas Jefferson

"The best we can help for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." Alexander Hamilton

Great concept. I think it stretches credulity to call the internet a form of "arms", but the point is very well taken -- open access to information and unrestricted communications, along with the right to assembly in its online forms -- should be a basic part of U.S. freedoms.

You can turn the internet off with a little reconfiguration. Or cut some cables; it's not /that/ redundant.

You can't turn off 300M firearms, or (guessing) millions of people willing to use them.

Anyway, the 1st amendment is the one he wants.

The author is overlooking the point that, even with all the military might of the US, if it truly becomes tyrannical and rolls into parts of the country it deems "rebellious," there's a lot of firepower out there (ca. 300M guns) to overcome, and a lot of loss of life involved.

The 2nd amendment is like a parabola from the bible, you can give it any meaning you want. I am pretty sure nuclear bombs are arms but nobody is crazy enough to pretend it includes those. But those would destroy a tyranny for sure (along with anything else).

"first they came for guns, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a gun owner. Then they came for the internet, and there was nothing I could do to stop them."

"A well informed populace being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to access the internet shall not be infringed."

This seems (to me) more a 1st amendment issue - freedom of speech/press/petition?

This argument would make a lot more sense in terms of the First Amendment.

Conflating it with a media topic du jour (gun control) just weakens the argument, for me at least.

The Daily Kos (of all places!) published a wonderful defense of the Second Amendment. Regardless of its application to the Internet.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/07/04/881431/-Why-liberal...

I tend to agree because I feel like we've moved to a point where influencing the masses is more important than having militias or arming ourselves to fight a tyrannical government. I think the protests and resulting ongoing changes in the arab world these days proves the power of communication and the spread of information.

I actually owned an AK-47 and a lot of other weapons and I did enjoy shooting them but I got rid of them when I moved to NYC. Part of living in a community is making sacrifices. If it scares the crap out of my neighbors that I have weapons I'm okay with getting rid of them as long as we all agree that we will work together to fight crime and any tyranny we might encounter, however rare. I believe in that unspoken agreement.

I get the metaphor but the argument is flawed. The Internet should be protected under the first amendment, specifically freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There should be no reason that what someone publishes on a blog should not be afforded the same protections as what is published at a newspaper (within reason wrt slander/libel/defamation).

Isn't this what Freedom of the Press is supposed to guarantee? And Freedom of Assembly? I don't see why we have to stretch the 2nd Amendment when there's one right before it that does what we want.

The author is incorrect when he assumes that tanks/aircraft/artillery have any bearing on how easy it is to control a population armed with rifles.

If you're outnumbered 10-to-1 by people with AR-15s and AK-47s and IEDs who can fade in and out of the civilian population, you simply aren't going to be able to maintain control over a vast land area like America. At best you will have fortified "Green Zones" with tenuous control over some major metropolitan areas.

All the firepower a modern state can bring to bear is only useful if you want to destroy whole cities. If you want to control them, it's still very much a street-level game of rifles and IEDs.

The writer commits a common fallacy:

" In 1791, that check meant arming the citizens with rifles and muskets. Those were the effective tools of the revolution back then. But since we started rolling tanks, bombers, and aircraft carries off the assembly lines, the citizens ability to match power with our potentially 'tyrannical' government is nil."

To be clear, a bunch of farmers with muskets in the late 18th Century were not capable of beating a late 18th Century military in the field, or "match power" with it. Armies weren't formed for kicks, guys: they were by far the most powerful means of projecting force of the day. We mythologize the American Revolution as being a bunch of sharp-shooters who beat the dumb redcoats by not being an army, but that's not true. We had to form an army, with artillery and cavalry support, with discipline, that formed into ranks and did army things, to win the Revolution. We also used people with experience in the British Army to form the Colonial Army, and got plenty of help from the French and the Germans.

What a militia of disorganized people with guns could do, then and just as much now, is provide a visible, nettling presence to occupiers that allowed an actual rebellion to form around them (or, more likely, fail to form around them). Our disastrous adventure in Iraq should make it perfectly clear to anyone doubting it that tanks, aircraft, and cruise missiles do NOT make a militia irrelevant to the occupation of a country.

I basically agree -- even if all guns were banned, I'd probably confine myself to voting, organizing, pushing for legal changes, etc. If it ultimately failed, I'd move somewhere with more liberal gun laws, like Canada.

If cryptography and free speech were banned, and the legal routes were exhausted, I'd use cryptography and guns or other energetic chemical reactions to resist what were clearly "all enemies, foreign and domestic".

Guns and crypto: better together.

the author thinks (incorrectly) that the prefatory clause overrides the operative clause. The operative clause being that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

But, for the record, at the time the "militia" was considered to be every able bodied male in the country.

Interesting idea -- the pen is mightier than the sword after all, right?

The Second Amendment is controversial and deserves to be. These were men who just overthrew their British government, violently. They were maltreated, but their government was far from the most tyrannical at the time. In 1775, you'd rather be an average American colonist (healthier, richer, taller, more literate) than an average European. Now the Irish... they had something to complain about regarding British tyranny. For the Americans, it was more gray. They had to "invent" the right to overthrow an oppressive or ineffective government because that's exactly what they were doing.

The Second Amendment is the right to violently oppose government if it becomes tyrannical and violent, and it's the right to use the most effective weapons available. (In 1789, they were muskets and swords. Problem: in 2012, they're much more powerful and frequently used for illegal and harmful purposes.) It's a bizarre construct, because it's unclear where the line between personal violence (objectively illegal) and overthrow (which would be treated as illegal, even if it's held as abstractly legitimate) is. We also learned in the 1860s that this whole idea (of legitimate overthrow) is extremely dangerous.

In 2012, governments are less powerful. We have a relatively libertarian government, despite protest to the contrary. Consequently, there is absolutely no good reason for a violent revolution against in the US against the government. (Corporations, especially in the multinational theater, require a separate debate.) In fact, we have a legitimate, effective mechanism for firing bad government officials and the problem is that we don't use it. Incumbent politicians have more job security (< 2% firing rate per year) than Silicon Valley software engineers. That's on us.

I agree that the best way to "revolt" against bad government is to use nonviolent tools to delegitimize incompetent or crooked leaders. Right now, the political structures that exist to enable that (periodic elections, removal from office by the people) work. They work well, and no one is violently preventing them from doing so, so violence is neither necessary nor morally acceptable. What we should be doing is using legitimate means (e.g. Internet) to remove incompetent leaders from office. If, however, the U.S. turned into Syria (which is extremely unlikely) I'd disagree.

The problem right now is that a gun that is fired on a person in the US is, statistically, more likely to be used in suicide, by accident, or on an innocent person, than on a criminal. We don't have a tyrannical government, nor do we have that much crime.

Ultimately, I'd say that "government" itself doesn't have the right to make certain firearms illegal, but that the people have the right (as an aggregate) to give up that right and to take it back. Personally, I'm willing not to have the right to own an AK-47 (seeing as I don't have one, and have no desire ever to own one) if it will prevent senseless massacres like last week's. But the distinction is important. The people are giving up the right to have one, in exchange for increased safety.