I have always been somewhat troubled by the idea that the right to speech originates with the threat of violence. I concede that the willingness to defend — to the death, if necessary — is what the framer’s risked their lives over, and I have never been particularly troubled by an expansive reading of the 2nd Amendment, but at some point threats of coercion yield to a basic commitment to rule of law, doesn’t it?

My point about guns and speech is mainly that guns are tools: they can protect property, or the right to freedom of movement or speech, but they can also be tools of coercion. Likewise, speech can be used to utter eternal truths or damnable slander. We don’t protect people in the service of lies, and we should offer blanket protection to people who use guns to break the law. Members of Congress in the pre-Civil War period who placed dueling pistols on their podiums weren’t exactly opening the floor to free wheeling debate, were they?

In modern society, the capacity of armed militia’s to resist the tyranny of the state has necessarily yielded to the power of people collectively to resist unlawful force by symbolic protests. The correlation of force as it relates to gunpowder and lead has long since been decisively tilted toward the state. Ghandi and MLK demonstrated that non-violent protest can exert power pressure on states. It may not be as satisfying as the buck of a Colt ’45, but nonviolent action in the service of what Judith Shklar described as the “sense of injustice” can offer a more stable path to correcting injustices.

But then, I’m just an old librul college professor.

Certainly, if I thought you were crazy I would merely be lurking at your site, not engaging with you on issues of your choosing.

And I never said you were crazy. Should I assume you think I am?

Just so long as you know that I am not advocating a “take all the guns” policy, and I don’t really know of many liberals that are interested in doing anything more than returning to “Brady’s” restrictions on certain kinds of ammunition and automatic weapons. I acknowledge the primordial role that guns play in the American political cultural view of freedom, and have no interest in butting my head against that particular wall.

Seriously, you fall into the old trap of believing that criminals won’t do something (or possess something, in this case) merely because it’s illegal. They are, by definition, law breakers.

RE: The Constitution. We have found common ground! Hallelujah! Let’s do lunch sometime

RE: The Constitution. It is a human document, with a defined method of modification if and when the people determine that it has a mistake that should be corrected. That was exactly my point. Typically those who cannot convince the people to change the document or the law run to the courts and attempt (often successfully) to get a sympathetic judge to read something new into the document. That is not the proper method of fixing mistakes.

Did I mention that gun control is a wedge issue between red and blue-state Democrats? Why impose a self-wedgie when you have tons of other issues that could gain broad support from Democrats and independents? I realize that Nancy Pelosi is as barking liberal as they come, but she has to manage a pretty broad coalition that includes Henry Waxman on the left and Heath Shuler on the right.

By the way, it was the bank heist in Bakersfield, CA in 1992 that was a major motivation for the Brady Bill, and most sheriff’s depts and police unions supported it because they were being outgunned in the streets.

And I’m not a liberal activist when it comes to judicial interpretation. I doubt that if you read through all my posts on this or any other site that you find any reference to a “living constitutition.” I like the basic rules of the game to be firm and fixed to the extent that any rules governing human behavior can be fixed. I just don’t take an evangelical view of the Constitution as the perfect and immutable word of God. It’s a human document, with human mistakes, and society should be able to correct mistakes when they become clear enough to a consensus of the community.

So we are in similar legal territory in expressing a distaste for obiter dicta and pursuing political goals through the federal courts. In that, I think a lot of liberals — and now, a lot of conservatives — learned the wrong lessons from the civil rights movements: just because African-Americans were compelled to seek a legal remedy for decades of discrimination does not mean that everyone should parade along down that path.