(I feel like a broken record with you. YOU DID IT AGAIN. From now on I'm just sending you my draft post, and you send me back one to two paragraphs that says it better than my five thousand words. Hey, I've got two novels that have kind of run over my estimated length. Can I send them to you and you can just restate them both as five-paragraph essays? Awesome, thanks!)
More seriously: you hit on something that I'd not really been able to suss out, but I think it's a huge part of it -- the notion that if the citizenry isn't allowed to have guns, suddenly we're subjects, not citizens. And I do think much of that is because, however unspoken it is most of the time, there really is an assumption of state = people. So if the state is armed = people are armed. And so on.
Overall, this gets tempers up as much as my mother once told me tempers rose over the question of whether or not it should be made an illegal act to burn the American flag. Talk about a symbol in six different ways, both the having/flying and the burning, and all else.
no subject
Date: 17 Dec 2012 02:18 am (UTC)More seriously: you hit on something that I'd not really been able to suss out, but I think it's a huge part of it -- the notion that if the citizenry isn't allowed to have guns, suddenly we're subjects, not citizens. And I do think much of that is because, however unspoken it is most of the time, there really is an assumption of state = people. So if the state is armed = people are armed. And so on.
Overall, this gets tempers up as much as my mother once told me tempers rose over the question of whether or not it should be made an illegal act to burn the American flag. Talk about a symbol in six different ways, both the having/flying and the burning, and all else.