The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47

http://byjess.net/the-2nd-amendment-should-protect-the-internet-not-your-ak47/

by byjess • 14 years ago

31 75 14 years ago

gregcohn3• 14 years ago

Great concept. I think it stretches credulity to call the internet a form of "arms", but the point is very well taken -- open access to information and unrestricted communications, along with the right to assembly in its online forms -- should be a basic part of U.S. freedoms.

RyanMcGreal2• 14 years ago

It also stretches credulity to argue that the right of citizens to defend themselves from tyranny in a militia means it's acceptable to own and keep a semiautomatic high-calibre firearm with a 50-round magazine for personal use.

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

No, it really doesn't. Especially when you consider that the SCOTUS has found the 2nd Amendment to refer to an individual right[1]. The "militia" stuff is a red-herring these days.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

gregcohn3• 14 years ago

100% agree. IANAL or constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that history plays a big part in the interpretation of this as an individual right. It seems more likely to me that we could get new laws on the books, or perhaps expand the definitions of the 1st amendment to include electronic communications, that get a radical new interpretation that the internet is a weapon.

"The pen is mightier than the sword" has been around a long time -- tell that to the gun nuts though.

njharman• 14 years ago

I assume "defend themselves from tyranny" means revolution. Most revolutions require guns (bigger and/or more than the tyranny has) Killing the tyranny's people until the tyranny gives up or is destroyed.

To me it stretches credulity that it's constitutional to deprive U.S. citizens the ability to overthrow their government. That is deprive them of weapons capable of that overthrow.

rdl3• 14 years ago

The line is a bit fuzzier when it's not simply mathematical equations or stuff for websites but tactical encrypted radio or whatever.

Some hardware crypto implementations are still export-restricted. http://www.bis.doc.gov/encryption/default.htm

gregcohn3• 14 years ago

interesting point! so let's say the US gov't passes a law restricting individual citizens from having and/or distributing a cryptography technology. as a citizen who is prosecuted under this law, I call the ACLU and EFF for help, and they agree to jointly defend me.

Which amendment(s) form the basis of our claim that this law is unconstitutional?

cpr• 14 years ago

The author is overlooking the point that, even with all the military might of the US, if it truly becomes tyrannical and rolls into parts of the country it deems "rebellious," there's a lot of firepower out there (ca. 300M guns) to overcome, and a lot of loss of life involved.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

As Iraq and Afghanistan have surely proven, guns are not the primary weapons of a revolutionary force. It's improvised explosives and plain old sabotage that will make an occupier's life exceedingly difficult.

People with guns are just convenient targets. They're the ones that get shot first.

beatgammit3• 14 years ago

I agree 100%. If needed, I'm sure the NRA could get 500 million or so to start a militia. They may not be in the best state physically, but that's not needed for guerilla-style warfare. But I think we're a long way off before that happens (even though the gov't is already pretty corrupt).

I agree with the author that the Internet is a much more powerful tool in terms of affecting policy in Congress. We saw that with SOPA/PIPA, and I bet we'll see it again if there's another bill that similarly tries to restrict our freedoms. It's not perfect, but it effectively amplifies a single voice and can even replace physical organization.

ef42• 14 years ago

> If needed, I'm sure the NRA could get 500 million or so to start a militia.

There are only 309 million people in the United States, so that would be quite a feat.

arscan• 14 years ago

Interesting idea -- the pen is mightier than the sword after all, right?

rdl3• 14 years ago

I basically agree -- even if all guns were banned, I'd probably confine myself to voting, organizing, pushing for legal changes, etc. If it ultimately failed, I'd move somewhere with more liberal gun laws, like Canada.

If cryptography and free speech were banned, and the legal routes were exhausted, I'd use cryptography and guns or other energetic chemical reactions to resist what were clearly "all enemies, foreign and domestic".

Guns and crypto: better together.

SkyAtWork• 14 years ago

This seems (to me) more a 1st amendment issue - freedom of speech/press/petition?

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

I don't know... given that the US government has classified crypto as "munitions" in some situations, I'm not so sure that it doesn't make sense to consider the Internet as "arms" in a sense. OK maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but it's not completely implausible.

beatgammit3• 14 years ago

From a Google search (using the noun version):

> Munition: Military weapons, ammunition, equipment, and stores.

I already think that classifying crypto as "munitions" is a pretty big stretch, and if they try to lump the entire Internet in the same group, then we might need to use the 2nd amendment in it's original meaning (call up the NRA and get a real militia going).

edyang5• 14 years ago

"I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." George Mason Co-author of the Second Amendment during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution, 1788

"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence . from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable . the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good." George Washington

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them." Thomas Paine

"Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not." Thomas Jefferson

"The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that . it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. " Thomas Jefferson

"The best we can help for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." Alexander Hamilton

jQueryIsAwesome7• 14 years ago

Those are quotations from really instructed people in the current state of the art.

> the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference

Any data on this, all data suggests that were there are more guns there are more deaths, apparently evil interferes can buy guns too.

richcollins• 14 years ago

http://mygunculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Ireland_m...

http://www.justfacts.com/images/guncontrol/england.png

http://politisite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/dc-gun-ban-...

http://www.justfacts.com/images/guncontrol/chicago_handguns....

felipemnoa• 14 years ago

>>Any data on this, all data suggests that were there are more guns there are more deaths, apparently evil interferes can buy guns too.

Le me give you a different perspective on the matter. Free Speech means that you can be critical of the government. It also means that you can spout hatred against something you dislike [1].

I believe most people agree that criticizing your government is what free speech was meant for and not for attacking some harmless group. But to control one kind of speech is to control the other which is why it is not done. In essence, you cannot have it both ways. It is a necessary evil.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States

pc863• 14 years ago

Unless you exclude suicide, in which case you see as more and more millions of guns are produced every year, murder (and even homicide overall, which includes self defense and accidental homicide) rates are at their lowest point since any time between 1998 and 2004 depending on which specific metric you look at.

It is intellectually dishonest to include suicide when talking about "gun deaths."

edyang5• 14 years ago

If the hypothesis that "more guns = more crime" were true, then as the number of guns increased, violent crime should also increase. However, we see the opposite is true. US violent crime is down for the fifth straight year since 2006: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/29/justice/us-violent-crime/index...

But since 2006, gun sales have soared: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/01/05/9983727-fbi-firea...

"Purchases of handguns and rifles, which had held steady throughout the early part of the decade, began to surge in 2006 and have nearly doubled since then, according to FBI data."

So a doubling of gun sales coupled with a declining violent crime rate over a 5 year period should handily dispatch the notion that "more guns = more crime", correct?

hindsightbias• 14 years ago

Given that a militia in their context is a completely obsolete concept, the validity of their ancient beliefs should be considered as current as their dire fears of a ginormous standing Army.

Get rid of the Army & Marines, and we can go back to such quaint times.

ckluis2• 14 years ago

Ah, but even semi-armed insurgents can cause massive casualties.

To argue that guns in the hands of many cannot affect a modern government military is a farce.

Had Europeans had as many guns as their American counterparts would Hitler have conquered Europe?

Making pithy statements is easy. Try putting some thoughts into your answers.

edyang5• 14 years ago

I'm sure the citizens suffering the aftermath of Katrina and Sandy know how quick and responsive the federal government is, right? Or the shop keepers in Koreatown during the LA riots. Bottom line is, why on earth would I want to rely solely on the government for my own safety and self-defense?

gruseom• 14 years ago

These quotes are bogus. The Jefferson doesn't exist:

http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/those-who-hammer-th...

The Hamilton has been mangled:

http://www.foundingfathers.info/federalistpapers/fed29.htm

And so on. Shoddy fabrication is not debate.

gmoore• 14 years ago

Thanks gruseom - I'm so tired of seeing those bogus quotes thrown around by pro-gun fanatics....

jwb119• 14 years ago

This argument would make a lot more sense in terms of the First Amendment.

Conflating it with a media topic du jour (gun control) just weakens the argument, for me at least.

rdl3• 14 years ago

There is a long history of cryptography-as-munition (ITAR, Wassenaar, etc.), and during the crypto wars of the 1990s, a second amendment defense was something people discussed many times.

zrail• 14 years ago

Isn't this what Freedom of the Press is supposed to guarantee? And Freedom of Assembly? I don't see why we have to stretch the 2nd Amendment when there's one right before it that does what we want.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

"A well informed populace being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to access the internet shall not be infringed."

DennisP• 14 years ago

That makes the point pretty well. Also, sounds like the start of a good 28th Amendment.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

If the British were overthrown with Facebook and Twitter rather than an armed revolution, I'm pretty sure this would be the 2nd Amendment.

You know the alternate universe where it was "One click by land, two clicks by sea" and Paul Revere's Ride consisted of opening at least two dozen tabs to post in different forums, plus a half dozen IRC channels...

viggity4• 14 years ago

the author thinks (incorrectly) that the prefatory clause overrides the operative clause. The operative clause being that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"

But, for the record, at the time the "militia" was considered to be every able bodied male in the country.

jQueryIsAwesome7• 14 years ago

The 2nd amendment is like a parabola from the bible, you can give it any meaning you want. I am pretty sure nuclear bombs are arms but nobody is crazy enough to pretend it includes those. But those would destroy a tyranny for sure (along with anything else).

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

You should read Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned". (The implicit spoiler in my reply is that nuclear weapons do play a part in the story.)

viggity4• 14 years ago

1. I think you mean parable. not parabola. 2. You can give the second amendment any meaning you want, but unless it is the same meaning as the authors of the amendment, you're wrong.

(from another HN comment) "I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." George Mason Co-author of the Second Amendment during Virginia's Convention to Ratify the Constitution, 1788

jQueryIsAwesome7• 14 years ago

> unless it is the same meaning as the authors of the amendment, you're wrong

Yeah, lets ask them what they mean... Oh wait, well, we will have to ask you right?

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

"first they came for guns, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a gun owner. Then they came for the internet, and there was nothing I could do to stop them."

pyre2• 14 years ago

Because IEDs couldn't be fashioned from ingredients found at your local hardware store...

therobot24• 14 years ago

based on the quote, assuming a lack of internet, would the average person know how to fashion a basic bomb?

gcv• 14 years ago

The Daily Kos (of all places!) published a wonderful defense of the Second Amendment. Regardless of its application to the Internet.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/07/04/881431/-Why-liberal...

refurb3• 14 years ago

The media like to paint gun owners as far-right republicans, but I've always been amazed by the number of left-leaning folks who have a positive opinion of firearm ownership.

The folk singer Bruce Cockburn (he did "If I had a rocket-launcher") is a big supporter of firearm ownership. I saw a documentary about him a few years back. It was funny to see a hippy with pierced ears, blonde hair and an alternative fashion sense hanging out with a bunch of rural, plaid wearing red-necks.

Zimahl• 14 years ago

I get the metaphor but the argument is flawed. The Internet should be protected under the first amendment, specifically freedom of speech and freedom of the press. There should be no reason that what someone publishes on a blog should not be afforded the same protections as what is published at a newspaper (within reason wrt slander/libel/defamation).

kabdib2• 14 years ago

You can turn the internet off with a little reconfiguration. Or cut some cables; it's not /that/ redundant.

You can't turn off 300M firearms, or (guessing) millions of people willing to use them.

Anyway, the 1st amendment is the one he wants.

rapala3• 14 years ago

When the police starts going door to door, collecting guns, how many you think would be left from the 300M?

refurb3• 14 years ago

How do the police know that you have guns? In most US states, there is no registration of guns.

When you purchase a gun from a gun store, you fill out a form 4473, for the purposes of a background check. The ATF has a record of gun transfers, but not a list of who currently owns a gun. If they recover a gun from a crime scene, then can go through the records to see who was the last owner.

The kink in this system is that private sales of guns is legal in most states as well. No background check, no record keeping required, just a good faith effort to ensure that the person you're selling it to can legally own a firearm.

So if the police come knocking on your door and ask for your guns, you can simply say "I sold it 2 years ago, but unfortunately I didn't keep any information on the new owner." The police would then need to have probable cause to search your residence for the weapon (which they very well could get depending on the evidence they have).

Collecting all the guns in the US won't be an easy task.

vaadu• 14 years ago

If the first 100 shoot back the government will back off or quickly run out of police.

How long would the Nazis have kept it up if every Jew they came for had met them with a gun in his hand?

kabdib2• 14 years ago

Compliance with California's required registration of "assault weapons", in the 1990s, was estimated at about ten percent. The official assessment by the CA Dept of Justice was that the registration effort had been a failure.

You might get a few. Very quickly, cops would refuse to go door to door (being fired from your job is better than being dead). Maybe you could get the military to do it.

There's a paper on this somewhere (I'll see if I can dig it up) that estimates the lifetime of firearms in the US at about 300 years, if we stopped selling them today and banned their transfer. I forget what the "confiscation" estimate was -- I don't think it changed much.

Hacker News relevance? Legislation doesn't solve a damned thing. Remember the crypto wars of the 90s? Imagine taking crypto away from people now.

[edit: not half-life, but lifetime]

ianstallings• 14 years ago

I tend to agree because I feel like we've moved to a point where influencing the masses is more important than having militias or arming ourselves to fight a tyrannical government. I think the protests and resulting ongoing changes in the arab world these days proves the power of communication and the spread of information.

I actually owned an AK-47 and a lot of other weapons and I did enjoy shooting them but I got rid of them when I moved to NYC. Part of living in a community is making sacrifices. If it scares the crap out of my neighbors that I have weapons I'm okay with getting rid of them as long as we all agree that we will work together to fight crime and any tyranny we might encounter, however rare. I believe in that unspoken agreement.

vanattab2• 14 years ago

"I tend to agree because I feel like we've moved to a point where influencing the masses is more important than having militias or arming ourselves to fight a tyrannical government."

"more important" why must it be one or the other and not both?

aetherson• 14 years ago

The writer commits a common fallacy:

" In 1791, that check meant arming the citizens with rifles and muskets. Those were the effective tools of the revolution back then. But since we started rolling tanks, bombers, and aircraft carries off the assembly lines, the citizens ability to match power with our potentially 'tyrannical' government is nil."

To be clear, a bunch of farmers with muskets in the late 18th Century were not capable of beating a late 18th Century military in the field, or "match power" with it. Armies weren't formed for kicks, guys: they were by far the most powerful means of projecting force of the day. We mythologize the American Revolution as being a bunch of sharp-shooters who beat the dumb redcoats by not being an army, but that's not true. We had to form an army, with artillery and cavalry support, with discipline, that formed into ranks and did army things, to win the Revolution. We also used people with experience in the British Army to form the Colonial Army, and got plenty of help from the French and the Germans.

What a militia of disorganized people with guns could do, then and just as much now, is provide a visible, nettling presence to occupiers that allowed an actual rebellion to form around them (or, more likely, fail to form around them). Our disastrous adventure in Iraq should make it perfectly clear to anyone doubting it that tanks, aircraft, and cruise missiles do NOT make a militia irrelevant to the occupation of a country.

ef42• 14 years ago

The author is incorrect when he assumes that tanks/aircraft/artillery have any bearing on how easy it is to control a population armed with rifles.

If you're outnumbered 10-to-1 by people with AR-15s and AK-47s and IEDs who can fade in and out of the civilian population, you simply aren't going to be able to maintain control over a vast land area like America. At best you will have fortified "Green Zones" with tenuous control over some major metropolitan areas.

All the firepower a modern state can bring to bear is only useful if you want to destroy whole cities. If you want to control them, it's still very much a street-level game of rifles and IEDs.

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

The Second Amendment is controversial and deserves to be. These were men who just overthrew their British government, violently. They were maltreated, but their government was far from the most tyrannical at the time. In 1775, you'd rather be an average American colonist (healthier, richer, taller, more literate) than an average European. Now the Irish... they had something to complain about regarding British tyranny. For the Americans, it was more gray. They had to "invent" the right to overthrow an oppressive or ineffective government because that's exactly what they were doing.

The Second Amendment is the right to violently oppose government if it becomes tyrannical and violent, and it's the right to use the most effective weapons available. (In 1789, they were muskets and swords. Problem: in 2012, they're much more powerful and frequently used for illegal and harmful purposes.) It's a bizarre construct, because it's unclear where the line between personal violence (objectively illegal) and overthrow (which would be treated as illegal, even if it's held as abstractly legitimate) is. We also learned in the 1860s that this whole idea (of legitimate overthrow) is extremely dangerous.

In 2012, governments are less powerful. We have a relatively libertarian government, despite protest to the contrary. Consequently, there is absolutely no good reason for a violent revolution against in the US against the government. (Corporations, especially in the multinational theater, require a separate debate.) In fact, we have a legitimate, effective mechanism for firing bad government officials and the problem is that we don't use it. Incumbent politicians have more job security (< 2% firing rate per year) than Silicon Valley software engineers. That's on us.

I agree that the best way to "revolt" against bad government is to use nonviolent tools to delegitimize incompetent or crooked leaders. Right now, the political structures that exist to enable that (periodic elections, removal from office by the people) work. They work well, and no one is violently preventing them from doing so, so violence is neither necessary nor morally acceptable. What we should be doing is using legitimate means (e.g. Internet) to remove incompetent leaders from office. If, however, the U.S. turned into Syria (which is extremely unlikely) I'd disagree.

The problem right now is that a gun that is fired on a person in the US is, statistically, more likely to be used in suicide, by accident, or on an innocent person, than on a criminal. We don't have a tyrannical government, nor do we have that much crime.

Ultimately, I'd say that "government" itself doesn't have the right to make certain firearms illegal, but that the people have the right (as an aggregate) to give up that right and to take it back. Personally, I'm willing not to have the right to own an AK-47 (seeing as I don't have one, and have no desire ever to own one) if it will prevent senseless massacres like last week's. But the distinction is important. The people are giving up the right to have one, in exchange for increased safety.

The 2nd Amendment should protect the Internet, not your AK47

Related Stories