THE Gun Thread

[Brian37]

Muskets were lethal as all get out- they greatly expanded the carnage and intensity of the battlefield and people took note of how horrific its invention was.

Further, the entire bit was one of the many compromises they made with the slaveholding class which very much depended on private militias to do business.

Point being, I don’t think we need to impart more compassion, foresight, and prudent reason to the founders than their dead dead document demonstrates.  They had a lot of really shitty opinions on a lot of things.  It really doesn’t matter what they could have foreseen…and you’d probably be disappointed by the reactions of those men, as opposed to their legends.

Nobody should ever paint the founders as the cast of Leave It To Beaver. Franklin fucked anything that moved and would make Bill Clinton look like a celibate monk. And yes, the worst of it is that many of them did own slaves. But there was even at that time abolitionists. The language used in the early versions of the Constitution did speak of ending slavery, but the language was taken out because of the social norms of it's time, but mainly from the south. Slavery had actually ended in most locations in the north by the time Jefferson and Adams died. Now nobody can argue that was for 100% moral reasons, but more along the lines that the industrial age took a lot of necessity for labor out of it. The South had not kept up with the changing technology and didn't want to loose their free labor. 

But even with all the nasty shit that happened with not only blacks, but natives, and even with women having little to no rights. It was because of the principles of redress of grievance, assembly, and free speech, that allowed future minorities to break those chains and become more a part of mainstream society. You cannot blame the founders for example, for the ignorance of those who followed Susan B's example for still having a ban on women having credit cards until 1970. Susan B Anthony used those same principles to rail against white Christian sexism by using free speech to say, "I distrust those people who know so  well what God wants them to do, because I always notice it coincides with their own desires". And she also used the principle of redress of grievance to get women the right to vote. 

The founders too, of many were very skeptical of magical mythology and insisted on keeping religious law out of common law. No, the founders were far from squeaky clean, but some of their principles are still useful today. Not all, but many. I would bet my life that most, if not all of the founders would have left out the 2nd Amendment precisely because there are assholes who don't understand today that "well regulated" is also part of that Amendment. 

But you are absolutely correct GN, that there is a gross distortion by the right as to what the founders said and meant, and the right wants to paint them as magic super heros whose shit never stank. If Jefferson and Paine were to run for President today, there is absolutely no way they could run on the Republican ticket and get passed the primaries with the way they railed against superstition and pulpit politics. 

The same people who blindly worship the founders would have to define Washington as evil because he once threatened to go after whiskey maker tax dodgers and he would have used the Militia to enforce them to pay taxes. And yes, back then the "well regulated" militia was used by slave owners to capture and return escaped slaves. But, what they call "militia" we now call the national guard. And they can be used for lots of good reasons, like dispersing life saving necessities during  natural disaster, or even distributing vaccines during a pandemic. 

So they are not heros, no, but they did still set the stage for more and more people over decades and almost 2 and a half centuries for more and more people to be part of our better national motto, "E-Pluribus Unum".