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Prof. Levinson on the Second Amendment & militia
Prof. Sandy Levinson has a post over at Balkanization.
His ending: "gain, to be absolutely clear: I would much prefer a world in which Hezbollah devoted itself only to doing good works for Lebanese citizens and where the Mahdi militia laid down its arms and acquiesced to the sovereignty of an Iraqi government that indeed fairly represented all of the groups within Iraqi society. But this is to engage in fantasy, alas. One might at least try to understand why control over the means of violence is perhaps the central political issue in any serious design of a constitution for a divided society. This is why the Second Amendment should be front and center in any consideration of the nature of our own original constitutional system, whatever it should mean today, and how our own history might lead us to a more complex and nuanced view of what we can plausibly demand and expect to receive from the deadly serious political groups in such countries as Lebanon and Iraq."
[Hat tip to Saul Cornell]
Sorry to be contrary, but the issue at hand is simple, and doesn't take any nuance to speak of. The 2nd Amendment places significant political power in the hands of the citizens, offseting the central power the government's army. Some here in the US do not trust this distribution of power, and that is why the legal fiction created by the "collective rights" crowd. They want rule by a "virtuous" minority, irrespective of the desires of the majority, and are willing to ignore the plain text of the Constitution to get their way.
With respect to the situation in other countries, and the middle east in particular, we would do well to remember the generations of internicene warfare between the various tribes and sects living there. The best we can hope for is to arm the citizens generally, instead of selective disarmament (which is often the case in these countries). This won't make the government's job easier, but then the 2nd Amendment wasn't supposed to do that here, either. Rather, it should give majorities pause when considering the cost of violence against minorities - as the 14th Amendment should have done with the right to armed self-defense in the ante-bellum South. We want to avoid the case where the government owns all the guns, or uses the equivalent of "Jim Crow" laws to expose minorities to the unrestrained will of the state. That would be a real and positive change in the state of affairs.