Right to bear arms provides means to stop future wars

[struggle4progress]

The ideas interview: Elaine Scarry

Americans' right to bear arms also provides the means for them to stop future wars

John Sutherland
Monday November 7, 2005
The Guardian

<snip> And can Americans who feel the same way as Scarry confront that problem using the law as a tool? She believes so. "Two provisions within the US constitution are starkly out of line with this kind of arrangement. One is the requirement for congressional assent to a state of war. Since the invention of nuclear weapons we have never in the US had such a declaration - even when we went to war. Presidents feel they can single- handedly, or with the consent of a few others, kill millions of people. Richard Nixon said during Watergate, when he was being impeached, 'I can go into the next room and pick up the phone and 25 minutes later, 75 million people will be dead.' If a president can do that why on earth would they feel they need to stop and get authorisation for merely invading some country like Iraq? <snip>

Even the second amendment, upholding the right to bear arms, can be used to steer the White House away from war, Scarry argues. The key is to read it metaphorically, as well as literally. "What it means is that you leave the obligation to distribute weaponry, and the constitutional decision to use it, to the country at large. It endows the people, not the president, with the right to decide on military action."

That would surely be disastrously cumbersome given the nature of modern conflict - isn't democratic decision-making simply too slow for geopolitical crises? Scarry counters by pointing to the example of the passengers on United Airlines flight 93 above Pennsylvania, on 9/11. "Within 23 minutes the passengers got information, checked it out, debated with each other, voted, and acted to take back their plane."

And how did those entrusted with the nation's protection react to the same threats? "That really contrasts with the fact that the Pentagon, with all its weaponry, could not defend the Pentagon. Bush, meanwhile, was flying round the country rather than coming back to Washington"

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,9959,1636051,00.html

[depakid]

1. That's a very misleading headline

Considering that she's speaking metaphorically here.

[struggle4progress]

2. Maybe. Foreign press and so on. But I don't think she's speaking ..

.. metaphorically: I think she's arguing for a legal theory regarding the second amendment, namely that it means the national weaponry should be distributed, around the nation, in the actual hands of the citizenry. If it were possible to get this theory accepted (only after some decades, I'm sure) unpopular wars would become difficult to prosecute and everyone would be damn eager to get rid of nukes immediately and completely ...

[depakid]

3. I read it a bit differently, but

there's only so much you can glean from a newspaper article.

But even if I accept that interpretation, it doesn't comport with evidence nations around the world where arms are more or less held in the hands of the "citizenry."

Places like Liberia for example- or Yugoslavia in the mid 90's, and many others would seem to me to belie that theory.