Posts Tagged the atlantic magazine

Columnist Proves Sheep Can’t Tell The Difference Between Wolves And Sheepdogs

From The Atlantic:

Most people in the United States, allowing for wild variation in race, class, and education, are victims of violence only very rarely. Watching the videos, however, invites you to simulate violence at an extraordinary rate, much higher than we are mentally equipped to manage. (Correia himself has seen tens of thousands of them, and he posts a new one to his channel about once or twice a day.) The effect of these videos is to habituate viewers to that violence, to train them to imagine themselves in it. Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully.

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The Atlantic: Any Display Of A Gun Is A Threat

From The Atlantic:

The freedom to buy, own, and carry firearms, whatever its scope, is in no respect like the freedom of speech. Speech consists of words and launches ideas. “Symbolic speech” refers to signs, flags, photographs, and gestures that express those words and ideas. A gun is not merely a symbol; it is not like words or ideas. It is an instrument of violence and death, and its display amid a crowd is a threat.

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Law Students Argue Against The Second Amendment

From The Atlantic:

Gun-control advocates need their own constitutional narrative, one that incorporates a broader conception of self-defense into its vision. Since Heller, the Court has drawn a straight line connecting the broader, constitutionally grounded right to self-defense to the more specific right to individual gun ownership. But defense of oneself and one’s family can be pursued in a variety of ways. An individual right to gun ownership offers one path, deputizing all people to defend themselves with a firearm at their side. Gun regulation offers another such path to self-defense, one vastly more efficacious and preferred by the American public. It represents a mode of preemptive self-defense, whereby the state is tasked by its citizens with limiting access to deadly force.

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The Atlantic: Gun Rights Are Racist

The Atlantic:

Public-carry advocates like to cite historical court opinions to support their constitutional vision, but those opinions are, to put it mildly, highly problematic. The supportive precedent they rely on comes from the antebellum South and represented less a national consensus than a regional exception rooted in the unique culture of slavery and honor. By focusing only on sympathetic precedent, and ignoring the national picture, gun-rights advocates find themselves venerating a moment at which slavery, honor, violence, and the public carrying of weapons were intertwined.

The NRA’s response:
The authors of this piece are correct in their sense that our current gun debate has its roots in the 19th-century American South—but they managed to get the true alignment of things completely backwards. It is the modern gun control movement that is absolutely a product of racist legislators trying to deprive black Americans of the ability to defend themselves.

When the Civil War ended and the Reconstruction Amendments freed the slaves and assigned them equal rights under the law, the white landowners at the top of the socio-economic ladder found themselves in a predicament. Not only were they deprived of their resource pool of unfree labor, but they now lived side by side with a black population that outnumbered them—and was about to enjoy equal access to both ballot boxes and firearms. These landowners acted swiftly to defend their dominant position. Encouraging poor whites to cling to a sense of racial identity and despise their black neighbors was part of their strategy. The other part was an explosion of new legislation that spat in the face of the Constitution’s clear intention to guarantee the rights of the former slaves.

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