Who do they really think are the tyrants?
by digby
Ed Kilgore asks an important question every “second amendment remedy” believer should have to answer: who decides?
Who gets to decide when “it’s necessary”—when the police officer patrolling one’s neighborhood or the neighbors at the local Guard armory become not objects of respect but targets? James Yeager? Kevin Williamson? Wayne LaPierre? You or me? Certainly the normal mechanisms of the legal or political systems—you know, the systems that have produced and enforced the “tyranny” of Obamacare or the “injustice” of “confiscatory” taxes cannot be trusted to protect any right of revolution, can they? So apparently it’s up to heavily armed, seething-with-rage individuals and groups to figure out when “it’s necessary” to start shooting cops and members of the armed forces, and presumably advocates or beneficiaries of “tyranny.”
This is the fundamental problem not only with Second Amendment absolutists but with the Tea Party Movement’s “constitutional conservative” stand that there is a permanent—perhaps even divinely instituted and eternal—scheme for self-government that electoral majorities and legislative deliberations and court decisions cannot be allowed to modify. When those are dismissed as “tyrannical,” who gets to decide when “it’s necessary” to take extralegal action? Add in the hard (but still respectable) Right’s taste for military and revolutionary metaphors and the tendency to treat fellow-citizens as enemies of every fundamental liberty, and you’ve got a dangerous playground for the James Yeagers of the world.
I’m going to guess here that I won’t have a vote. In fact, I’m going to guess that the majority of the country won’t have a vote. It will be decided based upon some zealot’s perception that the government has become tyrannical because it won’t do everything the zealots insist it must do. Others would be neutral or take the opposite view. Democracy is how civilized nations deal with these impasses, not insurrection.
So, let’s be clear about what these folks are really talking about. They’re not advocating insurrection. They’re advocating civil war.
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