Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

I’ve been following what’s going on in Lebanon at a few places, notably Michael Totten along with Google News.  What I find interesting about this situation is less the geopolitical effects of Hezbollah successfully making their point regarding their strength in relation to the strength of the Lebanese government - this is neither the first, nor, I am sure, will it be the last time that Lebanon is completely and totally screwed - but how a situation like this might be handled in our own society.

Many hard-core Libertarians and gun rights advocates will be more than happy to tell you that, yes, indeed, American citizens have the right to purchase any weapon they want (nuclear, biological, whatever), a right that’s protected by the 2nd Amendment.  According to this argument, the 2nd amendment isn’t about maintaining a militia, recreational hunting, or anything of that sort - it’s about providing people with the means they need to defend themselves against an unjust government.  To a point, I agree with this - I believe that American citizens have the right to self-defense, albeit not necessarily the right to mutually assured destruction (guns=okay, nuclear/biological/missile weapons=nyet).  It’s true that, with our military’s current hardware, it would be nearly impossible to fight it without using something more powerful than an automatic rifle, but, at the same time, I’m not exactly comfortable with the idea of my neighbor being able to wipe out an entire neighborhood with a careless push of a button.  The government is at least halfway accountable; my neighbor isn’t.  Besides, if our government was truly that unjust, I doubt it would matter what the 2nd Amendment said or what is considered an acceptable exercise of that right; the government would undoubtedly pretend it didn’t exist and the people would hopefully drive home the point that they have other ideas.

That said, think about Lebanon in this context.  It is living the Libertarian gun control dream - non-government agents have the right (whether de facto or de jure) to whatever weapons they can afford, and they’re using them against, for various reasons, they believe to be an unjust government.  Granted, “unjust” in this instance relates to “not letting us kill the Jews and turn Lebanon into an Iranian-Syrian proxy state”, but the point still stands - Hezbollah is, for better or worse, exercising its right to bear arms quite effectively against the Lebanese government.

Here’s the question, then:  How do we balance our right to bear arms with the right to not have an exceedingly well armed minority effectively take over our country against the consent of the majority?

There are a number of possible answers to this question, of course:

1. Arm the majority.  Sounds great on paper until you’re dealing with a minority, like Hezbollah or the old CSA, that thinks they have a realistic chance of attaining their goals through force of arms.  Generally speaking, any solution where plan A is “Wait for the country to devolve into civil war and hope everybody’s ready” is not a viable solution.
2. Seize the guns!  Sounds great on paper until you remember that Hezbollah isn’t supposed to have any of the weapons it has.  They’re a very nice and powerful example illustrating the fact that a government can ban whatever it wants, but there always people willing to break the law.
3. Realize it’s not a policy problem, it’s a philosophy problem.

What many people forget is that our rights are predicated on a single assumption - that a vast majority of American citizens will all share some basic common values (liberty and justice for all), and the rest will either learn to deal with that or leave.  If that ever fails, it won’t matter what’s on paper - if a large, well-armed political minority chooses to seize control of the government through force of arms, we’re not going to handle it much better than Lebanon.  The best we could do is hope our opponents haven’t completely corrupted the military and make a go of it.  That said, because the vast majority of our citizens believe in the basic principles on which the United States is founded (or, at least, enough of the basic principles to get along - one nation under God or otherwise), it will hopefully be a long, long time before we even have to think seriously about something like this happening to us.

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