Thread by @davidfrum

A footnote to my @TheAtlantic on the hazards of individual gun ownership. 1/x theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

@TheAtlantic As the article details, the vast majority of American gun buyers buy their guns with a view to protecting themselves or their families. Very few entertain fantasies of waging private war on the government. They mostly buy handguns, not rifles, let alone military-style rifles. 2/x

@TheAtlantic Yet here on Twitter (and in the email I get), there is a lot of talk about the private gun as bulwark against state tyranny. If the Nazis come to power in the United States, gun carriers will mobilize to do battle for the liberties of us all. So let's talk about that idea. 3/x

@TheAtlantic Specifically, let's talk about Herman Presser, the German-born labor activist at the center of one of the US Supreme Court's landmark Second Amendment cases. 4/x

Like many Chicago working men, Presser was radicalized by the sharp downturn in the US economy after the return to the gold standard in 1873.

As prices plunged, factory owners cut wages. Workers resisted. Factory owners recruited armed enforcers against their workers. 5/x

Presser became convinced that the US was lurching toward a cataclysmic battle between Labor and Capitol. He recruited 30 fellow German and Czech immigrants into a militia against the coming class war. They got hold of Civil War surplus rifles and began to practice with them. 6/x

Appalled, the Illinois legislature in 1879 passed a law creating a National Guard as its state militia - and requiring any other would-be militias to request a license from the state governor.

Presser's little group applied and was refused. 7/x

Presser's group defied the ban. In December 1879, they shouldered rifles and marched in Chicago.

They were all promptly arrested - including Presser himself, who was armed only with a saber, an exemption specifically allowed by state law.

Presser was tried and convicted. 8/x

Presser appealed his conviction all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Presser's lawyers there argued that Illinois could not ban Presser's militia because US citizens possessed a Second Amendment right to bear arms and to practice together. 9/x

The Supreme Court ruled against Presser law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/t… on two main grounds:

1) The 2nd Amendment protects US citizens only against federal action, not state. (That part of the Presser holding was over-ruled in the 2010 case McDonald v. City of Chicago.)

But also 10/x

2) that states had near-absolute authority to define who and what counted as a "militia" under the 2nd amendment.

Presser's socialist group was a challenge to state authority, properly suppressed by state power. *THAT* part of Presser remains law even after McDonald. 11/x

It's now interesting to contrast Presser to the US Supreme Court's previous excursion into 2nd amendment law, US v. Cruikshank, in 1876. That case arose from the horrible Colfax massacre in Louisiana. blackpast.org/african-americ… 12/x

The Reconstruction government of Louisiana had recruited black men into the legal state militia. In 1872, illegal white militias attacked a unit of the legal militia. The legal militia lost the fight and surrendered. The illegal white militia massacred the survivors. 13/x

The US government prosecuted the killers. The US Supreme Court dismissed the case against the killers as not properly a federal matter. law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/t… 14/x

Let's leave aside the technical legal issues and just notice this:

Herman Presser's socialist band in Chicago 1879: wrong kind of militia, properly suppressed.

Knights of the White Camellia and Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana 1872: not the wrong kind of militia, not suppressed. 15/x

Gun rights in the US have never been a tool for the powerless.

Gun rights in the US have often been a tool for the locally powerful.

16/x

This remains true today. Everybody understands what would happen if a group of Muslim Americans shouldered AR-15s and marched to the legislature of a "Constitutional Carry" state under green flags and chanting "Allahu Akbar." 17/x

Today's armed groups likewise enjoy the tacit - or even explicit - permission of local power-holders to intimidate or even terrorize the locally disfavored. 18/x

I say all this with zero sympathy for any kind of armed dissident against legal power in a constitutional society like the United States. Got a beef against authority? Use your words and your vote.

19/x

A gun to protect yourself against criminal threats? For most people in most places, it's at best a waste of money, at worst a tragedy in the making. For those who truly need it, there should be some system of proper training and licensing.

20/x

But for those who imagine the private gun as their defense against state oppression - the sad record of American history is that the private gun has much more often been used by local tyrants to oppress neighbors peacefully exercising *their* legitimate rights. END.