Politics, Rights, Guns (ePub)

In all the cascade of news reporting and comment on the tragic event in Aurora, Co., no one has

observed that the Parker court (2007) concluded that we can have "registration ... for militia

service if called up." There is no contradiction of that in the Supreme Court rulings.

Registration is the only way guns can be effectively regulated. That is where policy making

begins. Registration, that is, accountability to a governing authority, accountability to the very

legitimacy of a governing authority, is the one point of policy the gun lobby's childish political

fantasy cannot accommodate and what the NRA works hardest to defeat. That childish political

fantasy is that the purpose of all those gun in private hands, outside of accountability to a

governing authority is to maintain the "armed populace at large," a collection of sovereign

individuals who made a treaty based on no more than word of honor and promise of good faith

and not a government which in the words of Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers was

about "POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY" (caps in original).

Militia call up resurrects the original civic purposes of military obligation and military

preparedness. Militia duty in the colonies, the early Republic, the Constitution, the Second

Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792 was conscript duty. The Militia Act required gun

ownership, required militia officers to maintain inventories of privately owned weapons and

report them to the state governors and the president of the United States.

The original state based military obligation became national in the twentieth century

selective service acts.

All that is missing in the midst of national tragedies is long-overdue political leadership.

That can start in the 2012 election season. This treatise makes a simple provocative proposal.

When we lose our moorings and purposes the consequences are devastating. We have a crisis

not only of gun violence mostly in the cities and of sovereignty on the Southwest border but in

our political purpose.

Gun rights ideologies cannot be limited to simply anti-government posturing. They are

part of a much broader political and intellectual movement, which is called here the "Libertarian

Right" that has very cynically never accepted the expansion of a governing authority, particularly,

the authority of the Federal Government to make the twentieth century social contract. This

movement does not accept that the United States in the twentieth century became a modern nation

state and national community with national interests which required an expansion of a national

governing authority.

We start with the proposition that the Constitution is a frame of government not a treaty

among sovereign individuals. The consent to be governed has serious implications for private gun

ownership. We can argue the contours of the modern state policy by policy what we cannot do is

throw out constitutional state baby with the modern state bath water. Fortunately the courts have

not done that.