1/ 100% this. Discussions around the Second Amendment usually make the implicit assumption that handguns & rifles can still function as a sufficient “check & balance” against central government. The 2A was written in a different, long-outdated context.https://twitter.com/santisiri/status/978357209724747776 …
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2/ Nation states’ weapons of today: biological, informational, economic, etc. can threaten democracies without even deploying a single soldier, airplane or tank.
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3/ Not to mention that 2A was written with “state militias” in mind, not “individual rights”. The Founding Fathers intended the US to be a confederation of sovereign states & not a single super state. Hence the state militias.
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4/ “As recently as 1988, a federal court maintained that ‘for at least 100 years [courts] have analyzed the 2A purely in terms of protecting state militias, rather than individual rights.’ The subsequent shift toward individual rights can be traced back to [Marion] Hammer.”
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5/ “1977 is really a key moment … because that’s when the National Rifle Association went from being a largely apolitical gun-safety organization to a mobilized political operation that was dedicated to fighting gun control."
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6/ For those who are obsessed with the guns aspect of 2A, you need to update 2A to give state militias (not the individuals) the right to own drones, biological weapons, WMDs, etc. It means a larger portion of society’s resources dedicated to advanced weaponry. Do we want that?
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7/ Taking a step back, one has to wonder if it is still a good idea to “fight force with force”? In an arms race, the one with possession of the means & technologies to produce advanced weaponry gets the upper hand. That usually means the central government.
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8/ So the scale was never truly balanced to begin with, and increasingly becomes unbalanced.
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9/ If “fight force with force” might be a losing proposition, are there other ways to fight force? Encryption & more generally the fight over control/flow of information. Uncensorable money. These are things that might be more effective in terms of rebalancing the scale.
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10/ Sources for 4 & 5: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/how-conservatives-reinvented-the-second-amendment …https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/the-nra-lobbyist-behind-floridas-pro-gun-policies …
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or colombia
where guerrillas did have guns and fought the government.