It\u2019s basically impossible to argue that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is past its sell-by date. Written at a time without standing armies, when the militia consisted of a state mandate of authority and training over every able-bodied man with a gun, and at a time when a gun was something you could fire once a minute if you were lucky, when a large city was measured in the tens of thousands – it\u2019s almost impossible to make a case for ownership of military-style weapons in a 21st century urban environment.<\/p>\n
After all, what is the point? Sporting use? Most states won\u2019t let you use the NATO-standard 5.56mm cartridge for hunting because it\u2019s too light, so that AR-15 clone has to scale up to something heavier, and besides, how many shots do you need to take at the deer without reloading? Two? Three? Unless that deer manages to return fire, anything over five is bullshit. OK, so how about the ever-popular \u201cbullet box\u201d as last resort of freedom? The United States has a standing army, and it\u2019s huge even before you add in the Navy, Air Force and Marines. Consider things like Ruby Ridge, Waco, and contemplate the words \u201ctactical airpower\u201d. The people who want to need the guns don\u2019t seem to grasp the level of asymmetry a modern government can bring to bear. Don\u2019t forget, at the end of Red Dawn<\/em>, all the boys were dead.<\/p>\n Yes, there is a case for sporting weapons and certain personal-defense options. The necessary tools for that basically peaked around the mid-20th century, and they\u2019re just as effective as they ever were. (The sidearm of Marine Force Recon, for instance, was designed originally in 1911.) Time was, you could enforce the law just fine with a heavy revolver and a pump shotgun. Probably still could, probably still should in a lot of cases. But in the last fifty years, the net result of the Second Amendment has been to flood the country with endless semi-automatic weapons and bottomless magazines of ammo that have as their intended function the killing of troops on a battlefield. The time to stand up for the Second Amendment was when people were ignoring the \u201cwell-regulated militia\u201d part of it and using the rest to legalize M4-geries and SKS imports and 100 rounds in a clip.<\/p>\n This is of concern not because of the Second Amendment, but because of the First.<\/p>\n The First Amendment absolutists are coming out of the woodwork in defense of Nazis. White supremacists, anti-Semites, racists and bigots have somehow managed to become a larger, louder, more cohesive force in American life than in the last fifty years combined, and almost 100% of that can be put down to the use of social media and electronic communication. Infamously, the first email spam I ever received – over twenty years ago – was some sort of white nationalist screed, at a time when it really took some effort to deploy spam over email rather than just saturation-bombing USENET groups. In the ensuing decades – and especially with the rise of Facebook and Twitter – it\u2019s become incredibly easy to find like-minded people, and in a lot of cases, to rally them to attack unlike-minded people with the same tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n The \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d argument in the First Amendment was made at a time when speech was just that: speech. Or written letters. Or published books or newspapers. You had to go pick up the printed matter and read it, or speak to the person, and if they wanted to force their speech on you, they had to follow you around yelling at you – at which point, things being how they were in the 18th Century, you could probably take a swing at them and be just fine. Now, though, technology means that if you are on social media at all, it is possible for literally thousands of people to bombard you with their speech 24\/7\/365, and your options are either to get offline or make a career out of blocking them. As it stands, most of these companies – Twitter and Facebook most egregiously – have gone to great lengths to paint themselves as \u201cthe free speech wing of the free speech party,\u201d and view this kind of amorphous perpetual harassment as merely the price of doing business.<\/p>\n Which is insane<\/em>.<\/p>\n Back in the day, that kind of harassment was simply impossible. If a person comes up to you and starts spewing racist invective, they\u2019re right in front of you to confront and deal with and be known to you. Now, the opportunity cost for tens of thousands of people to target you<\/em>, personally and directly, is effectively nil. If it has been possible for the entire population of Philadelphia in 1787 to materialize in Ben Franklin\u2019s house, masked and anonymous, to abuse him as a Francophile libertine pervert who spent all his time laying pipe on old broads, and vanish as soon as he looked at them only to continue the moment his head turned, I suspect there would have been a slightly different conversation around the Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n If you want to defend free speech, fine. If you want to say the cure for abuse of free speech is more free speech, fine. But you\u2019d better have a plan for allowing free speech without facilitating abuse, harassment, and physical violence, and mitigating them when they do happen. The alternative is the risk that after years and years of a surfeit of utter libertarianism-without-consequence bullshit, the First Amendment will prove itself as obsolete as the Second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s basically impossible to argue that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is past its sell-by date. Written at a time without standing armies, when the militia consisted of a state mandate of authority and training over every able-bodied man with a gun, and at a time when a gun was something you … <\/p>\n