What if I told you…
…that nearly everything you learned about the Revolutionary War, including a hopelessly impotently incorrect idea of what a militia is – is wrong?
‘Not so!’ you say. ‘I distinctly remember many days in grade school spent on this subject, learning about the Boston Tea Party and the Sons of Liberty and Paul Revere and how the militia repelled the British forces and saved freedom, democracy, and apple pie!’
Do you? Do you really remember that? Or do you remember the movie, “Johnny Tremain”?
Johnny Tremain was a 1957 Disney fictional movie that was presented relentlessly to several generations of impressionably young students in an attempt to engage their interest in learning about the Revolutionary War. Most of us over, say, 35 (yes, pulling that guess out of thin air) have seen it, and multiple times. Many who have, skip back to that movie as the automatic bookmark in our minds that conjures up and represents a comfortably-secure synopsis of the topic, including what patriotism, a militia, and ideal global-conflict resolution are.
We certainly don’t skip back to notable snooze-fest lessons that we tried to stay awake through in the history portions of our classes, it’s the treat represented by eschewing the droning lesson plan for an afternoon to sit together in the dark and watch this movie that stands out. Lessons packed with fact are gone forever, never having successfully made a dent in that painfully bored grade-school apathy and, instead, this fictional movie stands as the foundation of multi-generational misunderstanding.
There were only a handful of channels on TV, we didn’t have smartphones, the internet didn’t exist. Movies in class or a school auditorium were a very big deal and they were memorable.
If you know nothing of the Revolutionary War at all, you will learn from this movie that a militia is a well-regulated standing force of patriots willing to come together to overthrow the government.
Does that sound familiar? That’s the current misunderstanding of the intent of the 2nd Amendment. Right there. And guess what? Do a little math, and you see that the gun rights argument itself, based largely on that misunderstanding or total lack thereof, begins to flower into a socially-invasive weed right around the time young kids seeing that movie for the first time after it was released grew into adulthood.
In fact, to use another movie reference to ease the discomfort of reconciling historical truth because we are an infotainment culture since Kennedy defeated Nixon thanks to TV coverage of their debate, consider the movie, “Last of the Mohicans”. In the fort, the militia has been called together – for the common defense of the homeland against a domestic enemy. Not to overthrow the government, but to stand as part of its last line of defense.
That little nagging feeling trying to eat away at your God-given right to suspension of disbelief is called, “cognitive dissonance”. Surely, those two things can’t both be true, it just doesn’t feel right, so it’s a good thing we’re just talking about movies and movies, of course, take liberties with accuracy for something we vaguely understand is called something like “poetic license”, and it’s okay for them to be incompatible. It’s how movies work. Duh.
So… Which one of them is canon? Which is the correct version of the idea? Are either of them? Wait, how did we get to the point of wondering if our foundational basic understanding of this word is real? That violates decades of patriotic bias and can’t be right.
Well, this is what happens when movies define our worldview. It’s uncomfortable, it threatens our sense of that aforementioned God-given right to the suspension of disbelief, and through the murky dichotomous layers of half-digested but determined preconceptions, there seems to stand in the fog a figure that surely must be un-American waiting for the unreconciled to reconcile.
The crib notes version of the truth of the word is that the 2nd Amendment was written by people that understood what it was like to have the homeland outside your front door turned into a warzone and they took steps right in nearly the very beginning of what’s become a practically deified document to make sure a fundamental part of the freedom and liberty they were designing was a provision to make sure that, when all else fails, the People are enabled to stand together as a last, potent, line of defense.
That’s what patriotism is, spelled-out in a few brief sentences – we will not lay down our right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness though every instrument of organized governmental defense be engaged nor even overrun. We will stand as free people to the last.
This is why the idea of repealing the 2nd amendment is worse than foolish.
While we’re on the subject, consider the 3rd amendment, as well, since these amendments are a set. The 3rd amendment is why your home is your castle.
Taken together, the intent of both is that you have the right to defend your castle and, therefore, that any enemy that ever seeks to invade and conquer the United States must factor into their planning not just the capture of strategic points, not just the defeat of a mobilized army, but also 300+ million people resisting from every direction simultaneously to the last of their patriotic, Constitutionally-enabled, ability.
This is a far cry from the idea of a government-overthrowing militia that generations of citizens learned from a fictional Disney movie.
The entire gun-rights argument is framed completely wrong. The 2nd-amendment was never intended to dictate how to regulate the militia, only that the right – and responsibility – for the components of a militia must always exist because, considered and understood properly, it truly is the ultimate guarantee behind the entire concept of the nation.
Since the 2nd amendment was never intended to dictate what “well-regulated” means, and thanks to another fundamental Constitutional principle built-in as infinite ability to amend and grow the document, there actually is no universal standard by which we have given ourselves the right to dictate to people what they can stock or carry and how.
It is, actually, entirely arguable that such regulation is the right of each state. The lack of codified federal regulation does seem to imply that in a separation of state and federal power, it is left to the states. Ultimately, it’s always been meant to reflect what The People want and know what? There’s not even an attempt to figure out what that even universally is, just a whole lot of people mistaking being loud with being right.
What well-regulated means, what one has the right to stock and carry, the framers left to future generations to decide, not knowing that someday a company built on the strength of a squeaky-voiced cartoon mouse and peoples’ willingness to embrace suspension of disbelief would take lessons learned at the expense of their still-fresh grief for lost comrades-in-arms, ie fathers, sons, neighbors, and inspire a national fight over something that nearly 100% of those in government and in the voting age wholly misunderstand.
So while we look like the fools we actually are to the rest of the world, arguing over these things instead of finding consensus and instituting change that settles these issues according to the process we’re supposed to be all about loving to flag-waving death, and the framers are turning in their graves, it all has to start with one thing:
Get a grip. The first step to getting out of a hole one’s dug for themselves is to stop digging.
Accept that the 2nd amendment is being stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for. It has not failed.
Let’s stop using an idea of what it all means garnered from a fictional Disney movie as the basis for disarming The People. I don’t care who you are or, with deep sympathy, what you may have lost, there’s no scenario whereby that makes any sense at all.
New regulation is necessary to settle the massive dispute over what gun rights are and where the boundaries of the right lay. Instead of mindlessly calling for abolition on one side and no restriction whatsoever on the other, advocate for what you feel is personally reasonable.
That’s how it works.
Too bad Disney never made a movie about how not to be a self-entitled spoiled-brat US citizen that thinks having an opinion means everyone has to abide by it, be it on one side or the other.
It seems the preferred way of absorbing information about important things is to digest them in cartoon or movie form.
Firefly Uprising 