Quote of the day—Zack Beauchamp

There is no longer any defensible argument for a constitutional right to own a firearm, if there ever was.

Zack Beauchamp
February 20, 2014
Ban the Second Amendment: Imagine the Second Amendment didn’t exist, and try arguing for a constitutional right to gun ownership. You will fail.
[H/T to Kurt Hofmann.

Self defense, one of the easiest ways to argue it to most people is dismissed with:

The second argument in favor of untrammeled gun ownership, a right to self-defense, is equally incoherent. For starters, there’s no reason that, in a civil society, the right to defend yourself implies the right to defend yourself however you’d like. A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others; assuming the absolute right to self-defense constitutes, in Alan Jacobs’ evocative phrasing, “the absolute abandonment of civil society.”

Here you can see some of his incredibly scary mindset. “A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others”. Wow!

It’s that same old prevention instead of punishment argument. In my mind one of the characteristics of a free society is that you are free to make mistake, or be evil, it’s just that you will suffer the consequences of your actions if you do. Except in extreme outlier cases, such as true weapons of mass destruction, the government should not ever be granted the power to prevent ordinary people from doing whatever it is they want to do. In terms of citizen/citizen interaction government power is only granted to punish those that infringe upon the rights of others.

Beauchamp’s mindset is that of one who yearns for an all powerful, all seeing, all protective government. A government with widespread informants which interrogates and tortures people in response to anonymous or torture induced testimony. That is the only way you can even hope to approach a preventive model for citizens hurting others.

Beauchamp should study history rather than yearn for an utopia who’s quest has resulted in the murder of 10’s of millions by their own government in the 20th Century.—Joe]

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25 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Zack Beauchamp

  1. Well, in the absence of the 2nd amendment there would be the 9th, which says the same thing only more broadly. And in the absence of the entire Bill of Rights, there would be Article 1 Section 8, which does not list the power to limit the right to arms as one of the powers of government, therefore no such power is granted.
    What part of “all powers HEREIN GRANTED” does he not understand?

  2. Shorter Beauchamp: I want the Second Amendment and indeed all govermental restrictions gone so agents of the State can take guns, and more, away from millions of people I don’t like.

    Oh but no one’s after your guns.

  3. He apparently is figuring that he will be one of the “limiters” rather than one of the “Limitees”. The only pleasure there will be watching the expression on his face as he and his family(I know, that’s a stretch) are led into the boxcars.

  4. The funny/scary part is that it is people with his mindset, people so blinded by their ignorance of a vast array of topics and data, who manage to think they they are the ones with sufficient knowledge and intelligence to make decisions for everyone else, about everything, and have things work out better than adults making their own informed decision. They think everyone else have the mindset of kids, even as they use logic many teens would laugh at.
    Dunning-Kruger, dialed up to eleven.

    • It’s always like that. The most ignorant person in the room assumes that everyone else’s job is super easy, they’re doing it wrong, and that HE could totally do it better.

      Come to think of it, Obama has actually said so. It’s in the record. Come to think of it a little more; that’s pretty much the Progressive/communist/authoritarian viewpoint in a nutshell.

  5. ” A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others”
    So he is fine with outlawing drugs that facilitate this harming of others?
    I somehow doubt he thinks any drugs should be prohibited.

  6. And doesn’t having every ability and tool for self defense facilitate the self-preservation that is the very first principle of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”?

    • One of my favorite quotes:
      “Victim disarmament types are sick, sick people, who’d rather see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own pantyhose than see her with a gun in her hand.” — T. D. Melrose (as quoted by Neil Smith)

  7. I disagree with you on WMDs. The 2A as written allows ARMS. All of them, and that includes tanks, warships, and even nukes. The way to constitutionally prohibit a class of weapons is not to do as the gun banners advocate and simply ignore the parts we don’t like. I am sure that you would have no problem amending the Constitution to prohibit nuclear and biological weapons using the Constitutional mechanism for amending it, rather than amending the document by fiat or consensus.
    You would just have to be careful about wording it: after all, an Amendment that outlaws chemical weapons could be problematic, if the banners get involved, because gunpowder is, after all, a chemical.

    • I understand your point. I just don’t want it brought into the debate at this time. It’s too distracting.

      • I’ve seen it pointed out (probably by Neil Smith) that most Revolutionary War cannon were private property, not “issued” by any government. I don’t know the merit of the notion that cannon are not “arms” but if that observation is accurate, it clearly means that cannon have to be included under the protections of the 2nd Amendment.
        And of course, as I pointed out before, with or without the 2nd Amendment, the Federal government has no Constitutional power to limit private ownership of weapons.

    • “Arms” had a specific meaning in the 18th Century — and it meant the _individual_ weapons and equipment of a soldier, but DID NOT include crew served stuff or support weapons — those were called “pieces of ordnance”. That’s why muskets, bayonets, swords, and cartridge boxes were issued to individual _soldiers_, while cannon were issued to gun _teams_ (the individual members of which were also individually issued the appropriate “arms” for artillerymen. . . and the cannon itself had “arms” that were associated with that specific gun – the gun tools, etc., to maintain and fire the piece.)

      Things that were used for support weapons but manned by a single gunner like wall guns (big ass muskets designed to be fired from pintles) and grenade launchers (yup, they had Brown Bess muskets with stubby GL barrels, much like an M79) were allocated to UNITS and INSTALLATIONS as “ordnance” as well, not individual soldiers as “arms”.

      Things like grenades were neither “arms” nor “ordnace” — they were “munitions”. Just as we issue hand grenades and disposable rocket launchers today as individual rounds of ammunition, not serialized weapons permanetly assigned to a specific soldier.

      Long and short of it — if it’s a unit support weapon (LMG, GL, etc.), expendable munition (M136 AT4), or crew served (GPMG, HMG, mortars, howitzers, WMDs, etc.), it isn’t an “arm” under honest originalist interpretation (using the words as defined in 1791, but applied to account for historical development since then).

      So, you _should_ be allowed to keep and bear a modern selective fire assault rifle, bayonet, semiautomatic service caliber pistol, military body armor, gas mask, webbing, etc., without infringement, because all of these things are the 21st Century direct analogs to the 18th Century “arms”. But an M2HB MG, B61 gravity bomb, M198 howitzer, or Patriot missile battery are not “arms” in a Constitutional meaning.

      The fact that Colonial and founding era legislatures had no problem with personal ownership of ordnance, that doesn’t mean that they were arms protected by the Second Amendment. They didn’t have any problems with people owning checked shirts, either, and THOSE aren’t protected by the Second Amendment, either.

      • History would prove you wrong. The Constitution grants Congress the power to grant letters of marque. If there were no right to own armed warships, just who are those letters of marque going to be issued to?

        HINT: Read the following books, and you will find your answer:
        Patriot Pirates
        George Washington’s Secret Navy
        Blue Water Patriots

        • Again, just because they were allowed, doesn’t mean they were protected by the SECOND Amendment.

          The semantic distinction between “arms”, “pieces of ordnance”, and “munitions” is historical.

          “Arms” _ALWAYS_ referred (in that period) to the weapons and military equipment of the INDIVIDUAL soldier, or the civilian equivalents. It _NEVER_ referred to crew-served weapons or fire support weapons when used in a legal, military, or technical sense. (“Munitions” is a fuzzier term – basically, military-specific supplies, whether arms, ordnance, ammunition, etc. It even included things like uniforms.)

          The Founding Fathers were quite literate, well eductaed, and understood that words have meanings – had they mean to say “any and all weapons”, or even “arms and ordnance”, they would have.

          I would say that the NINTH and TENTH Amendments protect the right to possess heavier ordnance, although not as extensively as the Second protects arms.

  8. “…[I]n a civil society…”

    I guess this jackass hasn’t spent much time on the west or south sides of Chicago.

    • “We do not distrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we distrust each other.”

  9. “There is no longer any defensible argument for a constitutional right to own a firearm to which I will listen, if there ever was, because LA-LA-LA-LA-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU!”

    Fixed that for him. 😉

    • Oops, I didn’t realize that this blog didn’t accept the HTML tag. Still, I’m sure everyone here is literate enough to recognize the parts I added, and at least the HTML tag worked (although I should have included “any” in the strike-through)…. 😉

  10. Except that people DID own artillery. And ship owners were free to arm their ships with guns for defense against pirates and such. Just because artillery was issued to troops in the military doesn’t mean individuals could not own them.

    • Letters of Marque and Reprisal were authorizations to outfit as large an armed ship with as many cannon as the owners could afford, to go hunting for ships of enemies of the USA. US Constitution, Article I, Section 8.

    • Reported from above:

      Again, just because they were allowed, doesn’t mean they were protected by the SECOND Amendment.

      The semantic distinction between “arms”, “pieces of ordnance”, and “munitions” is historical.

      “Arms” _ALWAYS_ referred (in that period) to the weapons and military equipment of the INDIVIDUAL soldier, or the civilian equivalents. It _NEVER_ referred to crew-served weapons or fire support weapons when used in a legal, military, or technical sense. (“Munitions” is a fuzzier term – basically, military-specific supplies, whether arms, ordnance, ammunition, etc. It even included things like uniforms.)

      The Founding Fathers were quite literate, well eductaed, and understood that words have meanings – had they mean to say “any and all weapons”, or even “arms and ordnance”, they would have.

      I would say that the NINTH and TENTH Amendments protect the right to possess heavier ordnance, although not as extensively as the Second protects arms.

  11. This assclown needs to be hunted down and beaten to within an inch of his life…
    then we’ll see if he still feels the same about “limiting self defense”. And if he does then he’s a Darwinian candidate in need of removal from the gene pool….as if he wasn’t already.

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