Political Liberal Christopher Ketcham’s Essay in Favor of Bearing Arms — Is a Thoughtfully Core Defense of the Second Amendment

© 2014 Peter Free

 

01 August 2014

 

 

The Second Amendment’s applicability to modern America boils down to the fact that . . .

 

Most of us do not trust power-hungry people, including those in government.

 

With the increasingly totalitarian and corporatist trend in the United States, essayist Christopher Ketchum’s reasoning makes persuasive sense.  Especially to those of us, who live in the open spaces of the American west:

 

 

Gun nuts aren't always creatures of the political right.

 

Consider your heavily-armed author's position: I say gun ownership is a necessary line of defense against investment bankers, Wall Street lawyers, big business, the corporatized wing of the Democratic Party, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, Nazis, gangbangers, meth fiends, cops and politicos who cut welfare and education programs while refusing to downsize the military or raise taxes on the rich.

 

I want single-payer healthcare and free public higher education and a carbon tax and the end of the warfare-surveillance-killer drone state – and I want the Second Amendment protected.

 

The tribe of liberal gun nuts I've gotten to know over the years includes writers, activists, musicians, schoolteachers, professors, rock-climbers, wilderness guides, environmentalist lawyers and at least one shaman.

 

If I'd venture to pin down the unifying ideological bent of these folks, I'd say it's anti-statist socialism – communitarian, decentralist, anarchist.

 

Colorado-based cartoonist and writer Travis Kelly, explains his position about liberal gun nuttery on his website.

 

"I'm sure the whole sordid, shocking saga of the Bush administration spurred many more liberals to reevaluate the Second Amendment and the enduring wisdom of the Founding Fathers," he writes.

 

"That's when I started buying guns. Tyranny can be left or right handed, and a case could be made that it's ambidextrous now."

 

© 2014 Christopher Ketcham, Confessions of a Liberal Gun Lover, Rolling Stone (14 July 2014)

 

 

The tyranny thing

 

The anti-tyranny argument favoring of the Second Amendment may not be as stupid as the anti-gun lobby would have it.  These folk reason that an untrained and lightly armed folk are no match for the military.

 

That is true.  But it leaves out the trained portion of the population that is.

 

U.S. military experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan easily counter arguments that inferior armaments and the lack of highly trained brigades inevitably lead to irretrievable losses on the opposing side.  Small portions of the population in both places successfully held off our massively armed and trained might.

 

Note

 

When one sees concrete evidence of overwhelming American military power, as I do every day, one cannot help but be reluctantly impressed with what determined (usually philosophically repulsive) insurgents have been able to do against it.

 

The same asymmetric balancing of power would happen Stateside, I suspect, if push came to anti-authoritarian shove.

 

Insurgents anywhere just need arms and awareness enough to avoid being immediately freighted to the gulag or concentration camp.  After that, it “merely” becomes a war of attrition that eventually decides which side is willing to sacrifice more blood than the other.

 

 

The moral? — The Second Amendment survives, long after its militia reasoning should have expired, because a high proportion of Americans believe that power corrupts

 

Writing from Germany, as I am at the moment — where people seem curiously complacent about allowing authority to boot them around — I find that Mr. Ketcham’s perspective on the Second Amendment essentially mirrors my own.

 

It is more difficult to imprison or reduce to serfdom an armed and awake people than it is a weaponless and asleep one.  This is, in my estimation, the single most persuasive defense of the non-militia justifications for the Second Amendment.

 

Readers will notice that nowhere have I argued against the ability to regulate (a) who gets arms and (b) what those might be. Although I have implied what the limits of those parameters may be.