(urth) The Politics of Gene Wolfe

[David Stockhoff]

Below.

Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 7/4/2010 6:48 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>> Of course fascism hadn't been invented yet. Nor had lynching and armed
>> race riots.
>
> I'm not sure how much of this is humor or rhetoric.
Neither. Just the facts.
>
>
>> But I agree that the 2A did not have individual self-defense against
>> muggers and burglars in mind, any more than it was intended to secure
>> only the state's right to defend itself. It addresses the right of the
>> People. Not persons. Not states.
>
> I'm not sure how you distinguish between persons and People. The 4th 
> amendment, introduced at the same time on the same piece of paper, 
> uses the identical wording "the right of the people". Does this mean 
> that persons, houses, papers, and effects are also held under 
> government regulation as a collective rather than an individual right? 
> Of course, in the idiom of the time, "person" had a much stronger 
> connotation than today of the individual's objective physical 
> presence, their physical body and the artifacts and space immediately 
> proximate to it. This would make it a poorer term of reference for 
> establishing abstract, inalienable rights that endure even if the 
> "person" had business physically far afield.
I agree that it is a tricky question and one central to any serious 
debate about the 2A. But the People plainly are thought to defend 
themselves with an organized militia based on universal individual 
long-gun ownership, because that's what a militia is. (I suppose a 
militia armed with pistols could be effective if mounted, but hardly 
otherwise. And such could keep order against minor disruptions, just as 
cops with .38s can. But there is probably no precedent for an 
all-handgun militia, because generally handguns have been more 
controlled than rifles. With good reason.)

Any reading regarding individuals acting outside of an organized group, 
or regarding either pistols or machine guns, or defense against muggers 
and burglars, has to connect with this basic idea or fail to ground 
itself in the 2A. Thus, it's hard to see how it spells out my right to 
carry a concealed pocket revolver in a club at 2:00 AM in a city whose 
residents fear handguns enough to collectively decide to ban them, let 
alone my right to have several machine gun nests positioned around my 
house. But it certainly lets me defend my property on my own as I see 
fit, and that's where I think most Americans do overwhelmingly agree. 
It's just too bad that handguns kill more handgun owners and their 
children than they do burglars.

Although one could argue that absent any police force or guard at all, 
either of these "rights" may suddenly become useful. And that's what SF 
is good for---exploring such  situations. Zombies, for example. Don't 
take that argument to the SC, though.
>
> I'm pretty sure that Wolfe would agree that the People is made of 
> individuals, and while a state can be a sovereign person and not their 
> subjects, a literally democratic state is made of individual persons. 
> Given his prodigious, endlessly elaborate convolutions of notional 
> languages and expressions historic and posthistoric, one can expect 
> him to be more than sufficiently informed to take the Constitution as 
> it was intended to be read in its time, as a document of its time.
>
>
Sure. See above.