this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
888 points (98.8% liked)

News

23367 readers
3454 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 88 points 6 months ago (5 children)

It may be in the constitution, but I doubt the founding fathers envisaged that you'd all be such fuckwits.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It isn't in there. What is in there is a legal provision allowing states to quickly raise an army to deal with a crisis.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I'm not American, so I could be wrong, but wasn't it something about a well-regulated militia?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It was, those three words aren't there by mistake.

Standing domestic armies were controversial at the time. They needed a way if a state was a facing a crisis it could grab a bunch of armed citizens, declare it a militia, and deal with the issue. Most of the signers were lawyers and they knew that there had to be a legally established procedure for this.

This is me being nice to them btw the issue was slavery and the fear of slave revolts.

And a few decades ago it got reimagined as a civil liberty. Which is clear from the text that it is not and is clear from the debates around the amendment at the time.

[–] FryHyde 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I was always under the impression that the militia bit was because they didn't want the USA to form a government army. The army instead would be all citizens, armed, that would act in case of a national threat, then like... go back to farming or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah a standing army was controversial at the time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Regulation had a different interpretation back then. It had to do with training and equipment. It's why professional soldiers were called "Regulars." They wanted civilian militias to be equipped and have the ability to train on their weapons.

In order for civilian militias to exist, be effective, and be able to respond instantly the citizens need to have weapons.

Somebody who doesn't have a gun and has never used one isn't going to be effective in civil defense.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Yet there is little to no training before people are allowed to own guns. Seems to me like it doesn't follow either the modern definition or the supposed definition of old.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but dumbasses think that part is optional (not joking)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

WELL REGULATED back in the day meant something DIFFERENT then it does today! But ARMS back in the day refers to the EXACT ARMS we have Today!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Worse, we seem absolutely proud of our stupidity.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Here's the laugh though. Read "Democracy in America" by Alex de Tocqueville. A large part of it is observations amounting to "these fuckwits need to be aware of what they're doing and in many cases they are not"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I have read it and have a copy on my bookshelve. Where did you get that impression?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's all through the book. I also have a copy on my bookshelf and have read it.

I guess to be clear, I'm not referring to America alone in my response and even though his observations were largely on America what he writes about can be applied generally.

One simple example is how he states something like "I don't know if America would vote the best people if they ran for office. We know they exist but they clearly don't enter politics."

It's an extremely polite way to say "we aren't getting the best or brightest running for office but that's ok cause we're so fucking dumb we probably wouldn't vote for them anyways."

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago

It sounds like the man was writing in English, no? Why assume his meaning was other than what he said?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The constitution should be changed. Or better: Thrown out and written from scratch

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe we could ammend it or something. Just spitballin here

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

No, because the Founding Fathers were so scared of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority instead, and they will never let it change.