
The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47 - byjess
http://byjess.net/the-2nd-amendment-should-protect-the-internet-not-your-ak47/
======
edyang
"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

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
Those are quotations from really instructed people in the current state of the
art.

> the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference

Any data on this, all data suggests that were there are more guns there are
more deaths, apparently evil interferes can buy guns too.

~~~
pc86
Unless you exclude suicide, in which case you see as more and more millions of
guns are produced every year, murder (and even homicide overall, which
includes self defense and accidental homicide) rates are at their lowest point
since any time between 1998 and 2004 depending on which specific metric you
look at.

It is intellectually dishonest to include suicide when talking about "gun
deaths."

~~~
edyang
Furthermore, the suicide rate in “gun-free” Japan, at Number 7 on the global
list of national suicide rates with 23.8 per 100,000, dwarfing the comparable
rate of 11.8 in the heavily-armed United States, which comes in at Number 41.

~~~
pc86
This is an interesting statistic. What is the source, the WHO?

------
jwb119
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.

~~~
rdl
There is a long history of cryptography-as-munition (ITAR, Wassenaar, etc.),
and during the crypto wars of the 1990s, a second amendment defense was
something people discussed many times.

------
ImprovedSilence
"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."

~~~
pyre
Because IEDs couldn't be fashioned from ingredients found at your local
hardware store...

~~~
therobot24
based on the quote, assuming a lack of internet, would the average person know
how to fashion a basic bomb?

------
Zimahl
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).

------
zrail
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.

------
gregcohn
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.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
It also stretches credulity to argue that the right of citizens to defend
themselves from tyranny in a militia means it's acceptable to own and keep a
semiautomatic high-calibre firearm with a 50-round magazine for personal use.

~~~
mindcrime
_It also stretches credulity to argue that the right of citizens to defend
themselves from tyranny in a militia means it's acceptable to own and keep a
semiautomatic high-calibre firearm with a 50-round magazine for personal use._

No, it really doesn't. Especially when you consider that the SCOTUS has found
the 2nd Amendment to refer to an _individual_ right[1]. The "militia" stuff is
a red-herring these days.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller>

~~~
RyanMcGreal
A respectful note from the rest of the world: the current, conventional
interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is _batshit crazy_.

It would be hilarious if it didn't predictably result in over 30,000 gun
deaths a year.

~~~
refurb
I'm going to guess that Switzerland doesn't share the opinion that America's
gun laws are "batshit crazy".

Every citizen who has served in the military (most of them due to compulsory
duty), is required to keep a fully automatic weapon in their house.

You have a country where a young man can do his grocery shopping with a
military rifle across his back and no one bats an eye:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Car...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Caroline-
Migros-p1000507.jpg/450px-Caroline-Migros-p1000507.jpg)

I'll also guess that Israel has similar feelings too.

~~~
pyre
I'm sure that military service:

1) Is a better filter of those that shouldn't own a gun.

2) Trains a certain level of responsibility / respect for the weapon.

------
astrodust
"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."

~~~
DennisP
That makes the point pretty well. Also, sounds like the start of a good 28th
Amendment.

~~~
astrodust
If the British were overthrown with Facebook and Twitter rather than an armed
revolution, I'm pretty sure this _would_ be the 2nd Amendment.

You know the alternate universe where it was "One click by land, two clicks by
sea" and Paul Revere's Ride consisted of opening at least two dozen tabs to
post in different forums, plus a half dozen IRC channels...

------
ef4
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.

------
aetherson
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.

------
gcv
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...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/07/04/881431/-Why-liberals-
should-love-the-Second-Amendment)

~~~
refurb
The media like to paint gun owners as far-right republicans, but I've always
been amazed by the number of left-leaning folks who have a positive opinion of
firearm ownership.

The folk singer Bruce Cockburn (he did "If I had a rocket-launcher") is a big
supporter of firearm ownership. I saw a documentary about him a few years
back. It was funny to see a hippy with pierced ears, blonde hair and an
alternative fashion sense hanging out with a bunch of rural, plaid wearing
red-necks.

------
cpr
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.

~~~
beatgammit
I agree 100%. If needed, I'm sure the NRA could get 500 million or so to start
a militia. They may not be in the best state physically, but that's not needed
for guerilla-style warfare. But I think we're a long way off before that
happens (even though the gov't is already pretty corrupt).

I agree with the author that the Internet is a much more powerful tool in
terms of affecting policy in Congress. We saw that with SOPA/PIPA, and I bet
we'll see it again if there's another bill that similarly tries to restrict
our freedoms. It's not perfect, but it effectively amplifies a single voice
and can even replace physical organization.

~~~
ef4
> If needed, I'm sure the NRA could get 500 million or so to start a militia.

There are only 309 million people in the United States, so that would be quite
a feat.

~~~
beatgammit
Type-o, I meant 500 thousand...

------
kabdib
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.

~~~
rapala
When the police starts going door to door, collecting guns, how many you think
would be left from the 300M?

~~~
refurb
How do the police know that you have guns? In most US states, there is no
registration of guns.

When you purchase a gun from a gun store, you fill out a form 4473, for the
purposes of a background check. The ATF has a record of gun transfers, but not
a list of who currently owns a gun. If they recover a gun from a crime scene,
then can go through the records to see who was the last owner.

The kink in this system is that private sales of guns is legal in most states
as well. No background check, no record keeping required, just a good faith
effort to ensure that the person you're selling it to can legally own a
firearm.

So if the police come knocking on your door and ask for your guns, you can
simply say "I sold it 2 years ago, but unfortunately I didn't keep any
information on the new owner." The police would then need to have probable
cause to search your residence for the weapon (which they very well could get
depending on the evidence they have).

Collecting all the guns in the US won't be an easy task.

~~~
rapala
My question was sincere. I'm quite sure that some share of the guns would be
voluntarily handed over. I was after a estimate on this share.

"Collecting all the guns in the US won't be an easy task."

Definitely not, but I would think that to be something an oppressive
government would try to do. In that case, the police might not ask nicely.

------
rdl
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.

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

~~~
mindcrime
I don't know... given that the US government has classified crypto as
"munitions" in some situations, I'm not so sure that it doesn't make sense to
consider the Internet as "arms" in a sense. OK maybe it's a _bit_ of a
stretch, but it's not completely implausible.

~~~
beatgammit
From a Google search (using the noun version):

> Munition: Military weapons, ammunition, equipment, and stores.

I already think that classifying crypto as "munitions" is a pretty big
stretch, and if they try to lump the entire Internet in the same group, then
we might need to use the 2nd amendment in it's original meaning (call up the
NRA and get a real militia going).

------
viggity
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.

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

------
ianstallings
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.

~~~
vanattab
"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."

"more important" why must it be one or the other and not both?

------
michaelochurch
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.

------
jQueryIsAwesome
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).

~~~
viggity
1\. I think you mean parable. not parabola. 2\. You can give the second
amendment any meaning you want, but unless it is the same meaning as the
authors of the amendment, you're wrong.

(from another HN comment) "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

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
> unless it is the same meaning as the authors of the amendment, you're wrong

Yeah, lets ask them what they mean... Oh wait, well, we will have to ask you
right?

~~~
vanattab
At least in regards to the 2nd amendment what the authors meant is very, very
clear. See the top HN comment.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
No, is not very clear, they don't even mention firearm calibres, gun power,
machine guns, the drug war, automatic weapons, chemical weapons, missiles,
nuclear artifacts, criminals with guns, tanks and other kinds of military
vehicles, grenades; basically because back then those things didn't even
existed or where not considered relevant. Today is a very different world that
they didn't imagine even in their wildest dreams; is a romantic but childish
illusion that their words can be literally applied to a world so different to
the one they saw.

~~~
sarvinc
I'm nitpicking, and/or don't understand what you've written, it appears that
you're making an argument for repealing the second amendment rather than
making an argument that it isn't clear what was meant by the second amendment.

