Thread by @17cShyteposter

One of the most basic reasons the Founding Fathers fought for the 2nd Amendment is because they were extremely wary of the new standing armies that could be used to oppress the people

I would say that issue is even more pressing now than when they made it law for themselves

Standing armies have always been extremely expensive. But as commerce and thus state wealth took off in the 17th and 18th centuries, they became more feasible for regents to maintain

Obviously they deployed these armies against enemies external and internal

The US may have by necessity later adopted a standing army as the world became truly international

But if the premise of the 2A was, from the beginning, to check the state army's power vs its citizens, then when the US adopted a standing army, the 2A only becomes *more* critical

When you have just the most basic understanding of history, and why these laws were codified by the guys who established the republic, the logic snaps into place immediately

Again, to undo the logic of the laws we live under, you have to erase the history that led to them

One way to understand the American Revolution is that, even as colonies separated by an ocean, the increasing financial/technological power of Nations made them more and more vulnerable to what they thought they'd escaped from, at great personal cost

They were reacting to not just "muh kings" or whatever new age of progress the Fathers embodied, but also the "progressive" historical processes that allowed kings to suddenly wield more power than they ever had across the entire feudal era

So the Revolution can be seen as a reaction *against* this centralization of power. "For as long as you can keep it."

A core part of that, since the very start, was that the ultimate body of force would lie not in the new King's army, but in the people and its underlying will

This might seem self-evident

But with just a bit of added history of the then very-modern standing army, that none of us are taught in school, all attempts to undo the underlying historical logic of *why* our Founders needed the 2A are seen in a very different light

One that, applied to the conditions we now live within—under the largest standing army in the world, under the largest bureaucracy in the world, under the world's imperial power—

It becomes far, far easier to understand why the people who've since stolen control over all those conditions to insist the 2nd Amendment now has to be dismantled

Since it remains the only real American right, alongside the 1st