How much political and social turmoil would we have been spared if the so-called “Founding Fathers” had been bothered to write that one up as clearly as the First or the Fourth Amendments?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/sep/21/to-keep-and-bear-arms/?pagination=false

Latin, colonial history, classical military history, historiography, it’s all there.

The names of the children slain Friday in the school were released today.

To carry out the identifications, [Chief Medical Examiner H. Wayne] Carver [II] said they “did not bring the families and the bodies into contact.” He said the identifications were made through photographs of the children’s faces.

“It’s easier on the families,” he said.

In my personal countermyth, part of the reason both second-wave feminism and emancipation worked was WWII arming both women and blacks — with guns they took *home*. Being trained to see yourself as a vital part of society in its defense — even if you never fired a shot in anger — counterprograms one against prejudice. The post-WWII fracturing of the polis (which started with HUAC, in my countermyth…) had the primary goal of dismantling the New Deal, but if it could also undo momentum for further human rights initiatives, it was a bonus to the real enemies of democracy — profiteers, modern slavers, and their bootlicking capitalist lackeys.

And hacking voting machines is so high-tech, compared to firebombing a home, or simply letting other criminals pin neighborhoods down until a group of protected renegades get what they want. It’s the ur-story of the A-Team, the lonesome Western rider with a six-shooter and long-gun, or heroic bank robbers and gangsters: If you don’t have a gun, or are protected by those brutal white male experts with it, you are nothing. Truly, if American TV had to de-program its networks every week a mass violence event occurred, they’d go dark.

To be blunt, Negroes had the vote, impotently, for a century, and it only took a periodic lynching to keep them in line. And, as always, women’s influence in the public sphere could easily be controlled by the head of household’s fist. That’s why elections at this point serve as window dressing for ruling class intentions — they won’t become more unless the populace becomes more of a threat than lobbyists’ bosses.

The whole thing makes me sick. Of course, all damage inflicted by the US strength-through-violence culture makes me sick. I was encouraged to see the President clearly emotional about the events of this week and to hear him connect together the headline-grabbing spectacle with more mundane gun violence. I wish he felt the same about the violence of his drone policy.

(And let’s not even get into the money that can be mobilized against pols who differ even a smidge from the NRA’s party line.) Maybe what MAIG & the Brady Campaign, etc. should do is start a SuperPAC and start raising some serious coin in order to support pro-gun control politicians.

I hope its not going to take a Chechenya to sort this out.