It's the First Amendment For a Reason

I come across a lot of Second Amendment types. Here's why I'm a First Amendment guy. 

To my right-leaning and/or libertarian friends on Facebook:

For all your flag waving, sometimes I really don't think you guys care much for America. You certainly don't appear to have much faith in our system of government. To hear you go on, our weak and rotten political structure leaves us forever teetering on the brink of serfdom. "We must be doing something right to last 200 years," sang Haven Hamilton. You seem to think it's a wonder we've made it this far.

A Self-Correcting System

You point to government overreach as the smoking gun. What you fail to appreciate is that public institutions in this country are subject to near-constant scrutiny and vetting. Each “scandal” exposed in the media as an example of menacing authoritarianism is actually a victory for our system of checks, balances and watchdogs—the very things that prevent such nightmare scenarios from taking place. When malfeasance is uncovered and prosecuted, it proves the system, while flawed, works.

Civil society: the true bulwark of freedom.

They key to effective democracy is to protect and shore up the institutions and practices of civil society, the "third pillar" of the social order independent of government and business. This is what countries like Afghanistan, China and Iran lack. This is what was stamped out in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and is under attack today in Russia, Mexico and elsewhere. Wherever you see freedom under threat, it has something to do with weak or ineffective social systems that fail to act as a foil to plutocracy, corruption and arbitrary expressions of power.

"But we have guns!"

All this emphasis on guns = freedom misdiagnoses both the problem and the solution.

Private ownership of guns, either independently or in aggregate, does not prevent the government from doing what it's going to do. It never has and never will. (During the fight against British rule, gun owners were militia members called to serve under officers as active-duty military—the original, limited intent of the Second Amendment.) The frontiersmen of the Whisky Rebellion had plenty of guns. So did bootleggers, counterfeiters, bandits and paramilitary groups (such as the KKK and the James Gang) and every single returning confederate soldier. More recently, the mafia, the Branch Davidians, MOVE, Jim Jones' cult (which committed mass suicide after realizing it was not going to get away with murder), the Symbionese Liberation Army... the list goes on.

Lots of countries have lots of guns. Afghanistan and Pakistan have loads of them, as well as liberal gun laws. They do not keep the peace nor guarantee any other freedoms.

Keep a gun if it makes you feel safer, but don’t delude yourself into thinking it's what separates “citizens from subjects,” as the phrase goes. Only the institutions of civil society, from the Courts to NGOs to school boards to voting registration drives, nonprofits, town hall meetings and public displays of protest, solidarity and disobedience—and most critically, a free press—can do that. Guns, to the extent they create fear in the streets, can actually work against these essential bulwarks of our freedom.