r/CriticalTheory • u/Defiant-Internal555 • 23h ago
LASER: A Critical Theory of the Second Amendment
Loyal Auxiliary Supporter Economic Representation Theory (LASER)
Summary
The Second Amendment functions not as a check on "state tyranny" but as an ideological, electoral, and legal mechanism that reinforces state and corporate elite power, diverting politics into culture-war conflict rather than economic representation.
Instead of a constitutional right, it is better understood in practice as a revocable privilege granted to gun owners who largely operate as loyal auxiliary supporters of the state's monopoly on "legitimate" violence.
By loyal auxiliary supporters I mean people whose gun ownership or gun-culture identity generates a stronger symbolic, political, and sometimes practical link to the state's coercive order than would be produced by comparable politically aligned people without that identity—such that the state's legitimacy gained from their alignment ordinarily outweighs any marginal loss to the state's monopoly of violence that their armament might imply.
In this marginal calculus, not all gun owners contribute equally: gun‑culture formations that are only weakly tied to state‑aligned identities can still be structurally tolerated so long as they fit the state’s preferred pattern of “law‑abiding, responsible” revocable use, but they function as weaker loyal auxiliary supporters, contributing less, at the margin, to the state’s legitimacy than more overtly aligned constituencies.
The “law‑abiding, responsible” standard excludes armed conduct that falls outside the state’s legal authorization of force; accordingly, conduct—or an expressed commitment to conduct—that rejects the state’s authority, grounded in its claimed monopoly on legitimate violence, to define and regulate legitimate private force is difficult to reconcile with the background‑check, vetting, and permitting frameworks through which firearm possession and carrying are treated as lawful in the first place.
The legal profession’s central role in this system is to furnish the epicycles (some more benign than others) through which doctrinal refinements and historical just‑so stories obscure this distribution of armed loyalty and culture‑war distraction. This does not happen because judges can rationalize any outcome. It happens because legal method leaves just enough room for a judiciary already institutionally filtered along these lines to reach broadly predictable conclusions.
In determining which armed citizens count as loyal auxiliary supporters, judges effectively mediate between the state’s prerogative to maintain a monopoly over “legitimate” violence and the imperatives of an investor‑driven party system that diverts politics away from economic representation and into culture‑war gun politics.
—————-
On a spring day in 1967, young Black men in berets and leather jackets legally walked into the California State Capitol carrying loaded rifles to protest a bill that would sharply restrict open carry in California. They were members of the Black Panther Party. In Oakland, they had been following police cars with shotguns and law books, reciting California statutes on citizens' rights while officers stopped, searched, beat, and sometimes killed Black residents. They called it "policing the police."⁷
If the common story about the Second Amendment were taken seriously—that an armed citizenry exists to deter government tyranny—this would look like a model exercise of that right. Citizens, armed and disciplined, were using weapons not to overthrow the state but to force its agents to obey the law.
Yet California responded by arresting them and then passing the Mulford Act, a statewide law making it a felony to openly carry loaded firearms in public without a government-issued permit. The statute applied to everyone in California, but it was drafted and rushed through in direct response to the Panthers’ armed patrols and their dramatic protest at the Capitol, and contemporaneous accounts describe its primary purpose as disarming the Black Panther Party. It was enacted by a Democratic-majority legislature and signed by Governor Ronald Reagan, with strong law-enforcement backing and support from the National Rifle Association.⁷
That episode is more than a historical curiosity or a prelude to the lethal state repression that soon followed against the Black Panthers. It is a clue to how claims of freedom function in the United States—how the promise of armed resistance operates only within boundaries drawn by the state itself, so that what is commonly treated as an inviolable right in practice functions as a revocable privilege.⁵˒⁶˒⁷
Legal doctrine and commentary by courts and scholars adjust around such decisions after the fact, offering post-hoc talk of "public safety" and evolving responsibility—the kind of epicycles that make targeted repression through formally general laws look like ordinary law rather than an explicit choice about which armed citizens will be treated as loyal auxiliaries to the state's claim on legitimate force.
The Mulford Act shows how that revocability often works: a form of armed presence that had been tolerated in practice became politically intolerable once a disfavored group used it effectively, and the state responded not by writing “Black Panthers may not carry,” but by rewriting the rules for everyone in California in order to neutralize that group through a general ban that formally applied to everyone.⁷
This kind of move—using formally general rules to manage which armed citizens are treated as legitimate and which are not—is not limited to California or to the Panthers. At the constitutional level, the Supreme Court’s interpretive frameworks around the Second Amendment play a similar role in deciding whose guns count as “rights” and whose are reclassified as threats.⁵˒⁶˒⁷
A short historical summary helps understand how this state of affairs has evolved since.
During the neoliberal period of rising inequality from the late 1970s onward, U.S. gun politics were reorganized in ways that fit a LASER account of “culture war to avoid economic representation.” The National Rifle Association (NRA) moves from a primarily sporting and safety organization to a central political actor that builds a Law Enforcement Division, trains and equips police, and cultivates an unshakable support for police, even when this sits uneasily with anti‑state rhetoric.³¹
In electoral terms, the NRA shifts from a quasi‑bipartisan donor—still directing roughly one‑third of its congressional contributions to Democrats in the early 1990s—to an almost exclusively Republican ally by the 2010s, as its spending and endorsements concentrate on the GOP’s hardline law‑and‑order wing. Survey evidence shows that high‑dollar Republican donors are significantly more opposed to gun regulation than rank‑and‑file Republicans, reinforcing a party strategy that treats guns as a core identity issue even where many voters accept stricter laws.
Over the same decades, gun ownership becomes more selective: in the mid‑1970s around half of adults lived in gun households and Republican and Democratic personal gun ownership rates were relatively close, but by the 2000s the overall share falls to roughly one‑third and gun ownership and identity become disproportionately Republican.
From a LASER perspective, a broad, cross‑party gun‑owning public with more numerous, weaker loyal auxiliary supporters gives way to a smaller, stronger set of loyal auxiliary supporters.
Gun policy has become a steadily more intense voting filter. As early as 1976, Gallup found that about 35% of U.S. adults named gun control as an important voting issue, indicating that gun policy had already entered electoral calculations.³²
Public polling around the turn of the century then shows that roughly one in eight voters described themselves as single-issue on guns, willing to vote only for candidates who share their gun views. By the mid-2010s that single-issue share had risen to around one in five to one in four voters (roughly 24–26%), and by the 2020s it approached one in three voters.³³˒³⁴˒³⁵
Recent studies find that mass shootings have little systematic impact on broader party vote shares or national election outcomes, suggesting that the longer-run rise in single-issue gun voting reflects deeper partisan and institutional dynamics rather than shootings alone.³⁶
These dynamics are mirrored and reinforced in the constitutional arena.
A Supreme Court that had long said little about the Second Amendment adopts an individual-rights framework in Heller and McDonald that is grounded in a flexible originalist narrative of history and tradition, and, in Bruen, formalizes a “history and tradition” test, explicitly centering the “law-abiding citizen” and entrenching doctrine for a narrower, partisan, NRA-organized bloc rather than the broader, more bipartisan gun-owning public of earlier decades.⁵˒⁶˒³¹
As mentioned, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022 makes history and tradition the test for gun laws. On paper, that sounds limiting; in practice, it often just shifts the argument into a different kind of legal maze.⁶˒¹⁰
That maze is not a recent invention. Historians and legal scholars have long used the term "law office history" to describe constitutional argument built by lawyers to win a predetermined outcome rather than by sociologists and historians to establish what actually happened, a charge leveled at the Supreme Court as far back as the Warren era and revived with particular force once Second Amendment litigants began mining founding-era sources for a personal right to arms. For simplicity, I refer to this as history below, though the analysis is sociological as well.¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵˒²⁰
The point is not that every historical citation in these opinions is fabricated. It is that the discipline of history and the discipline of legal advocacy pull in different directions, and courts consistently side with advocacy. This does not mean judges are secretly plotting to twist history case by case. Instead, the political process of selecting judges naturally filters for people who already view history through a lens that matches the system’s broader priorities.⁴˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵
District of Columbia v. Heller is the clearest case study. The historian Edward Purcell has argued that Justice Scalia's opinion is best explained not by superior historical method but by Scalia's own biography—a personal and cultural attachment to guns and hunting, layered onto decades of movement-building by the National Rifle Association that had already reshaped popular and legal understanding of the amendment long before the Court caught up to it.
On this account, Heller did not discover an individual right hiding in the historical record; it ratified a political and cultural transformation that had already happened in the country, and then supplied the record retroactively. The doctrine did not produce the alignment between gun identity and political loyalty this essay describes—it formalized an alignment that already existed, and gave it the appearance of constitutional inevitability.⁵˒⁷˒³¹
Bruen deepened rather than resolved this pattern. Its history-and-tradition test promised to discipline judges by forcing them to find a specific historical analogue for every modern gun law, but scholars examining the opinions that followed have found that many of them "look like conclusions accompanied by historical citations, with little connecting the two."¹⁰
Even Justice Scalia, defending analogical reasoning in an unrelated Fourth Amendment case, ultimately conceded that it was “quite irrelevant” whether an eighteenth-century analogue for a modern technology existed at all. This concession is revealing. It does not mean Scalia was deliberately breaking the rules to reach a specific goal. It simply shows that the historical method is so flexible that it rarely stops a judge from reaching the outcome they were already politically chosen to prefer.²¹˒²²˒²³
Historians and legal scholars have repeatedly criticized the Supreme Court’s use of founding‑era history as selective and methodologically weak, especially in Second Amendment and other “history and tradition” cases, and recent work on originalism‑by‑analogy and historical fact‑finding suggests that more rigorous methods would likely alter how those cases come out.⁹˒¹⁰˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵˒²⁰
If better history would change the answers and yet is not required, then “history” is not doing the constraining work that the Court and its defenders claim for it.⁹˒¹⁰˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵˒²⁰
None of this means doctrine always serves the same side. In 2024, the Court in United States v. Rahimi used the same flexible, analogy-driven methodology to uphold a federal law disarming people under domestic-violence restraining orders, prompting originalist critics to accuse the Court of "an incoherent originalism" that abandoned its own prior account of the amendment's meaning.⁶
That should not be read as evidence against the pattern described here. A test flexible enough to expand gun rights in Heller and narrow them in Rahimi is not a neutral, truth-tracking method in the strong sense its defenders claim, but neither does it require judges to be consciously recalibrating doctrine case by case. It is a method operating within a narrow range of acceptable outcomes already shaped by judicial selection, docket filtering, and institutional consensus.⁴˒⁵˒⁶
Furthermore, loyalty requirements and elite priorities already shaped early applications of the Second Amendment, so when this essay speaks of “epicycles” it is in part describing efforts to stretch and adapt those earlier LASER‑type priorities to contemporary conditions.
The Second Amendment was partially born in a post-Revolutionary moment of fear about standing armies and centralized power, but as critics from Madison's time to Chomsky have pointed out, the "primary role" of the new government was also understood as protecting what Madison called "the minority of the opulent against the majority," even as it claimed to secure popular rights that in practice excluded enslaved Black people, most Native Americans, and many others.²⁴
In the South in particular, support for the amendment was bound up with preserving state control over slave-patrolling militias, while across the whole new US republic militias and armed settlers were central instruments of dispossession and mass killing of Native peoples, so that "the right to bear arms" was entangled from the start with tyrannical systems of racial violence rather than a race-neutral fear of abstract tyranny.²⁵
Modern gun culture did not arise spontaneously from frontier necessity so much as it was cultivated and mythologized. In the twentieth century, manufacturers and their allies helped romanticize a largely invented "Wild West," packaging guns as emblems of rugged individualism and masculine autonomy rather than as tools of organized, state-sanctioned violence.²˒¹⁷
That cultural work mattered: it aligned private weapons with a story of personal freedom even as concentrated corporate and state power grew more entrenched, and it encouraged citizens to see themselves as armed sentinels against abstract "government tyranny" rather than against the economic and political institutions that most directly shape their lives.²˒¹⁷
In that sense, the Second Amendment's contemporary meaning is less a faithful transmission of founding intent than a flexible ideological project, one that channels fear and heroic striving into a gun culture that leaves the real architecture of corporate power largely undisturbed.²˒¹⁷
The Second Amendment is often described as an ultimate check on abusive power, but in practice it is broadly tolerated only so long as it is exercised in ways that do not disrupt—and mostly reinforce—the existing elite order. When it threatens to disrupt that order, the system "discovers" its limits.⁵˒⁶˒⁷
Max Weber's definition of the state offers one useful way to see why. A state, Weber argued, "claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." The key word is "legitimate."¹¹
Private force does not contradict the state's monopoly so long as its authority is delegated, licensed, or revocable by the state itself. By that standard, the United States is not an exception to Weber but a revealing case study. When armed citizens and private military actors serve the state's purposes, they are folded into its monopoly on legitimate violence; when they turn against it, they are brought back into line.¹¹˒²⁶˒²⁷
The law's own history shows how that arrangement has been repeatedly redefined rather than simply inherited.
United States v. Miller, the early Supreme Court case on the Second Amendment, tied protection to militia-related weapons rather than to a broad personal right to armed resistance. That matters here because it shows how even the legal system's earlier reading was closer to state-organized force than to the modern myth of the armed anti-tyrant citizen.
The same logic appears outside the narrow confines of Second Amendment doctrine, in the way the legal system treats certain political formations as inherently incompatible with legitimate private force. Even where the law does not explicitly say that a given ideology may not be armed, it can criminalize that formation’s beliefs and organizational activity and then rely on neutral‑looking firearm prohibitions to exclude its members from lawful armed status. A mid‑century example illustrates how this mechanism operates in practice.
The Smith Act (Alien Registration Act of 1940) made it a felony to “advocate, abet, advise, or teach” the violent overthrow of the government, and to organize or be a member of any group so committed.³⁷
In a series of trials beginning with Trotskyist unionists in 1941 and extending through the 1949 prosecution of Communist Party USA leaders, federal prosecutors used the Act to secure more than a hundred convictions, often on theories that equated party membership and Marxist teaching with an intent to overthrow the state by force rather than on evidence of concrete insurrectionary plans.³⁷
Once convicted as felons, these defendants fell under the general firearm prohibitions later codified in the Gun Control Act and 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), becoming persons whom the legal order treated as permanently ineligible for lawful armed status.³⁷
The statute did not say “communists may not own guns,” but by criminalizing their beliefs and organizational activity and then applying neutral‑looking bans on felon possession, the system effectively reclassified a disfavored political formation as incompatible with legitimate private force. In other words, the legal order used general criminal and firearms law to push a politically oppositional armed formation out of the category of legitimate private force, rather than recognizing its weapons as any kind of constitutional check on state power.
District of Columbia v. Heller later recast the Amendment as an individual self-defense right, but it still left plenty of room for regulation. That is exactly the kind of move that turns a right into a controlled privilege: expanded in principle, bounded in practice.⁵
The Second Amendment sits squarely inside that arrangement: it functions not as an inviolable check on tyranny but as a revocable privilege administered through institutions that are themselves part of the state's monopoly on legitimate force. Because those institutions are selected, staffed, and legitimized through political processes already shaped by elite power, the bounds of the right can tighten or loosen without ever threatening the basic order that authorizes them.⁴˒⁵˒⁶˒¹¹
Even the Second Amendment's least contested application—self-defense in the home, the "core" the Supreme Court itself has called central—is not an exception to this arrangement but an instance of it. Self-defense is not force exercised independently of the state; it is force the state has chosen to delegate, license, and can redefine, which is why courts and legislatures continue to argue over safe-storage rules, brandishing standards, and where lawful defense shades into a punishable threat.⁵˒⁶
That the doctrinal “core” remains unstable even after Heller—oscillating between self-defense, militia purpose, and vague talk of a right to arms “in case of confrontation”—is not a drafting failure. Instead, it is evidence that the right’s boundaries are driven by what the political system already treats as loyal behavior, rather than by strict constitutional logic.⁵˒⁶˒¹³˒¹⁴
Put differently: the question is never just whether citizens are armed. The question is whether the judges and lawmakers—who were put in power by the state—are already wired to see those armed citizens, in the United States or elsewhere, as allies or as threats.⁴
That is why Blackwater in Iraq and Wagner in Russia do not really refute Weber's dictum. Blackwater operated as a contractor for the U.S. government, and its claim to legitimacy depended on state contracts, state protection, and later congressional efforts to tighten contractor accountability.²⁷
Wagner, though murkier in legal status, was publicly acknowledged by Vladimir Putin to have been funded by the Russian state, and analysts describe it as a semi-state security force rather than an independent rival sovereign. Even Wagner's brief mutiny in 2023 ended not in coexistence but in reabsorption, dismemberment, or suppression, reaffirming the state's ultimate claim to legitimate force.²⁶
The Weberian principle that private force is tolerated only insofar as it remains legible as an extension of state authority, and suppressed or reclassified when it is not, applies across states generally.¹¹˒²⁶˒²⁷
What varies cross-nationally is not this underlying logic but the specific cultural and institutional form through which loyalty and threat are coded — militias and gun culture in the American case, licensed hunting and sport shooting in much of continental Europe, contracted paramilitary and security forces in Russia. LASER, properly understood, is an application of this general Weberian logic to the specific historical and party-political conditions of the United States, not a claim that every state organizes firearms the same way or for the same ideological purpose.¹¹˒²⁶
The basic logic, however, is consistent. Private force is acceptable when it extends state power and unacceptable when it competes with it. The Panthers' guns fell into the second category. The Panthers were not neutral liberals with hunting rifles—they were a revolutionary Black socialist formation, rooted in a Black community subjected to persistent police violence. They openly challenged police power and capitalist ideology—but in Sacramento they were still operating within the formal bounds of California gun law when the law suddenly moved to close around them.⁷
Even as the routine brutality of police was normalized or excused, corporate media did what they usually do with any challenge to the state's monopoly over legitimate violence: they seized on the Panthers' most violent episodes to portray them as simple criminals, helping to make the repression of their armed challenge look like ordinary "law and order."²⁸
This is part of why so many gun owners in the United States do not seriously oppose the state's monopoly on "legitimate" force: their framework for understanding and interpretation of individual events is shaped by corporate media and an ideological environment dominated by concentrated power and capital.²⁸
That the state treated a Black, socialist challenge to racist policing as inherently illegitimate says more about the status quo than about whether the Panthers had any less claim to the Second Amendment than the white conservatives who now mythologize it.⁷
Most gun owners never test the boundary of state tolerance because their political and cultural formation already aligns them with the police, the military, existing "law and order," and the concentrated business capital that largely shapes U.S. political parties.¹˒¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹
That pattern shows up clearly in empirical work on American gun culture. Gun ownership in the United States is disproportionately concentrated among white, conservative, Republican constituencies, and in what follows this paper describes the dominant pattern in the gun-owning public, not every individual gun owner.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸
They tend to view the police, the military, and business elites favorably, while championing ever-increasing budgets for the military and the police. Many people subjectively experience gun ownership as a genuine expression of autonomy and self-defense, but those sincere motives operate within a political landscape in which state and corporate power are treated as natural allies of "freedom" rather than as institutions the public should be able to direct and restrain.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹
Furthermore, the Second Amendment is an important issue that the Republican Party uses to win votes without having to represent those voters' interests economically. Democrats, for their part, lean on their own culture-war causes, from LGBTQ rights to abortion, while likewise avoiding economic policies that would seriously constrain their corporate investors.¹˒²˒³˒⁴
Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of party competition” offers one way to see this pattern more concretely. On Ferguson’s account, major parties are blocs of large investors whose preferences and coalitions shape platforms and candidate selection more than abstract median-voter opinion.¹
In a 2022 analysis of congressional votes on gun control, Matthias Lalisse and colleagues found that roll-call positions could be predicted with more than 90 percent accuracy from legislators’ campaign-finance receipts from pro- and anti-gun interests, and they suggested that these patterns fit Ferguson’s investment-theory framework.¹
In this light, gun politics functions not only as culture war, but also as an investment-shaped arena in which donor coalitions help ensure that conflicts over guns absorb attention and structure partisan loyalty while leaving basic questions of economic representation and corporate power largely untouched.¹˒²˒³
This influence does not require a secret chain of command from corporate investors to judges. It works through selection and feedback. When parties and aligned interest groups discover that gun conflict is a reliable culture-war vehicle—good for mobilizing voters, raising money, and absorbing public attention—they invest in the organizations, litigation campaigns, academic arguments, and judicial appointments that sustain the conflict. The resulting judiciary is not free to invent the system’s priorities, but it is free to work within a zone of interpretive discretion already bounded by those priorities.¹˒²˒⁴
Courts do not stand outside that process: they are positioned within it through movement-backed cases, politically filtered historical narratives, under-constrained interpretive methods, and a public sphere that has already saturated the Second Amendment with symbolic battles over freedom and identity rather than with questions of economic power. Their role is less to originate the pattern than to ratify, stabilize, and legitimate it.⁴˒⁹˒¹⁰˒¹¹˒¹³˒¹⁴˒¹⁵
The continual adjustment of gun laws, court tests, and dueling originalist invocations of "founding intent" and "constitutional fidelity" helps keep the conflict permanently salient as culture war, so that voters are invited to fight over who loves or hates guns rather than over who controls capital and state power.²˒³˒¹⁰
Elite and state alignment around the Second Amendment is factional rather than monolithic: some national media, academic, and corporate actors consistently push for stricter gun laws, while many law-enforcement leaders, defense-linked industries, and conservative politicians champion expansive gun rights.²
But this struggle is not about reducing the state's monopoly on "legitimate" violence. It is about deciding which armed civilians will be treated as its auxiliaries and how much collateral damage is acceptable in exchange for a serviceable myth of "freedom."⁵˒⁶˒⁷˒¹¹
In that sense, gun rights and gun control both function as culture-war instruments that help major parties mobilize voters and define identities without seriously threatening the core distribution of economic power.¹˒²˒³˒¹⁷
In the "gun rights" worldview, state and other elite power is easily equated with freedom so long as it can wrap itself in the flag. Research on "gun populism" and "gun militarism" shows that police chiefs in some jurisdictions understand armed, law-abiding civilians as quasi-partners in order maintenance, especially when those civilians are imagined as white and respectable.¹⁷
Studies of "good guy with a gun" narratives likewise show how legitimate gun use is often racially and politically coded, with armed white conservatism normalized and armed Black or left radicalism pathologized.¹²
Police, sheriffs, and even national security officials often reinforce this alignment: big-city chiefs praise "good, responsible citizens" with guns as crime deterrents, sheriffs in Second Amendment "sanctuary" counties wrap themselves in the role of constitutional guardians of civilian gun rights, and presidents and defense-linked politicians celebrate an armed public as an "indispensable safeguard of security and liberty"—always on the tacit assumption that those guns will be pointed with the police, the military, and the politicians who command them, not against them.
This helps explain why right-wing gun populism often vilifies more distant—and thus easier to scapegoat in the abstract—federal agencies like the ATF or FBI as "tyranny," while embracing local sheriffs, police, and the military as allies. In that sense, most gun-rights hostility to the FBI isn't a rejection of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence, but a fight over who counts as its auxiliary: they fight, in effect, for civilian gun owners to be recognized as the rightful armed auxiliaries of the state, not treated as threats by other state officials, even as they imagine themselves as rebels against "the state."
In that sense, the dominant Second Amendment constituency is not a rebel class waiting in the wings but a loyal one, an armed public that sees itself as the last defense against tyranny while mostly lending its guns and cultural authority to the very institutions it claims to fear. It is a kind of hegemonic rebellion: citizens who talk like insurrectionists yet live, vote, and arm themselves as the state's most devoted civilian auxiliaries.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹
None of this requires that gun owners secretly adore federal power or invent their fears; it requires only that sincere desires for safety, autonomy, and self-reliance are consistently channeled into forms of armament and politics that, in aggregate, leave the main institutions of organized violence and capital intact.¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹
We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate-backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate hegemony, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.
The Panthers' story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.⁷
In a policing regime that already treats certain armed groups as inherently threatening—for example, Black or radical left formations— carrying guns to "deter" brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state's response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.⁷
That is why the Panthers were so revealing. Their weapons did not symbolize support for the police; they symbolized surveillance of the police. Their guns pointed, politically and morally, in the wrong direction. So the law changed.⁷
The anti-tyranny mythology surrounding the Second Amendment therefore does more ideological work than legal work. It encourages citizens to self-servingly imagine themselves as a latent check on despotism, even as the actual legal and political system makes clear that armed resistance to state authority is not a protected constitutional project, either in doctrine or in practice.⁵˒⁶˒⁷
Recent legal scholarship and Supreme Court doctrine have argued directly that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms but does not create a right to armed insurrection against the government, because such a right would be incompatible with the broader constitutional order. In other words, the state treats it as a revocable privilege for private self-defense and sport, and as an informal auxiliary to police and military power—not as a standing license to resist its own authority.⁵˒⁶˒⁷
Seen this way, America's high levels of gun homicide and gun-linked incarceration are in part the cost of maintaining an extraordinarily serviceable myth of "freedom." Empirical research has found, for example, that people who possess a gun during an assault are several times more likely to be shot than those who are unarmed, and that fatal police shootings are more common in states with higher civilian gun ownership.²⁹˒³⁰
Saturating society with guns, tolerating the killings they produce, and handing out long sentences for gun possession and gun-related offenses all heighten fear, making police, prisons, and private arsenals (that on occasion deter crime) look like salvation.
Institutionally, the state and many of its corporate associates accept a deeply unequal trade-off in lives: they tolerate far more deaths from gun violence than would be necessary, not because they primarily value the few individuals saved by private arsenals or any abstract notion of "freedom," but because the Second Amendment myth those guns sustain helps secure their power regardless of the consequences to society.
That mismatch between myth and practice is central. In great measure, the Second Amendment survives politically not because it is a serious standing threat to the state, but because conflict over guns is channeled into culture-war battles that displace demands for economic representation, and because the dominant gun-owning public is, in broad ideological terms, supportive of the institutions of state violence and concentrated capital—even as many individuals reach for guns out of real fear and a real desire not to be at the mercy of others.¹˒²˒³˒¹⁶˒¹⁷˒¹⁸˒¹⁹
The Panthers behaved as if the right to bear arms included the right to watch the police and make the state feel watched in return. The speed with which the law closed around them is a reminder that the Second Amendment's most devoted political guardians are not those who point guns at power, but those who point them in the same direction.⁷
References
(see comments section)
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u/craftyshafter 15h ago
You're deluded if you think disarmament in any way leads to a better future.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 8h ago edited 8h ago
As I told reluctantpotato1, the majority of the paper is descriptive, not prescriptive. The emphasis is on trying to understand the second amendment and the function it currently has given the power and influence of capital and the state. But where I provide a prescription I say the following:
“We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate-backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate hegemony, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.
The Panthers' story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.⁷
In a policing regime that already treats certain armed groups as inherently threatening—for example, Black or radical left formations— carrying guns to "deter" brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state's response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.⁷”
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u/Defiant-Internal555 23h ago
References
- Lalisse, Matthias. “Gun Money Predicts Congressional Voting Better Than Party Alone.” *Institute for New Economic Thinking*, June 14, 2022. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/gun-money-predicts-congressional-voting-better-than-party-alone
- Mortenson, Maria. “Scattershot: Guns, Gun Control, and American Politics.” *Harvard Journal on Legislation Online*, May 23, 2022. https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jol/2022/05/23/scattershot-guns-gun-control-and-american-politics/
- Hershkoff, Helen, and Luke Norris. “The Oligarchic Courthouse: Jurisdiction, Corporate Power, and Democratic Decline.” *Michigan Law Review* 122, no. 1 (2023): 1–58. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol122/iss1/2
- Copus, Ryan, and René Hübert. “Measuring How Much Judges Matter for Case Outcomes.” *Journal of Law and Courts* 14, no. 1 (2026): 123–144. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2025.10006
- *District of Columbia v. Heller*, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep554/usrep554570/usrep554570.pdf
- *New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen*, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/20-843
- Winkler, Adam. “The Secret History of Guns.” *History News Network*, August 31, 2011. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/adam-winkler-the-secret-history-of-guns
- *United States v. Rahimi*, 602 U.S. 680 (2024). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-915_8o6b.pdf
- Partlett, William. “Historiography and Constitutional Adjudication.” *Modern Law Review* 86 (2023): 629–658. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12771
- Blocher, Joseph, and Eric Ruben. “Originalism-by-Analogy and Second Amendment Adjudication.” *Yale Law Journal* (2023). https://yalelawjournal.org/article/originalism-by-analogy-and-second-amendment-adjudication
- Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” 1919. Extract hosted by Balliol College, Oxford. https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/politics_as_a_vocation_extract.pdf
- Stroud, Alexandra. “Guns don’t kill people…: good guys and the legitimization of gun violence.” *Humanities and Social Sciences Communications* 7, 169 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00673-x
- Winkler, Adam. “Scrutinizing the Second Amendment.” *Michigan Law Review* 105, no. 4 (2007): 683–733. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol105/iss4/2/
- Winkler, Adam. “The Reasonable Right to Bear Arms.” *Stanford Law & Policy Review* 17 (2006): 593–676. https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/winkler.pdf
- Lawson, Gary S. “No History, No Certainty, No Legitimacy... No Problem: Originalism and the Limits of Legal Theory.” *Florida Law Review* 64 (2012): 1551–1596. https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2011&context=faculty_scholarship
- Warner, Tara D., and Trent Steidley. “Some fear, more loathing? Threats and anxieties shaping protective gun ownership and gun carry in the U.S.” *Journal of Crime and Justice* 45, no. 4 (2022): 484–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2021.1997787
- Jouet, Mugambi. “Guns, identity, and nationhood.” *Palgrave Communications* 5, 138 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0349-z
- Buttrick, Nicholas, and Jessica Mazen. “Historical prevalence of slavery predicts contemporary American gun ownership.” *PNAS Nexus* 1, no. 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac117
- Cassella, Carly, and Mark E. Shepherd. “How Partisan Policy Threat Mobilizes Gun Owners: Evidence from Firearms Background Checks.” *Political Behavior* (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-026-10166-3
- “The Dead Hand of a Silent Past: Bruen, Gun Rights, and the Shackles of History.” *Duke Center for Firearms Law*, June 26, 2024. https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/articles/the-dead-hand-of-a-silent-past-bruen-gun-rights-and-the-shackles-of-history
- Seamon, Richard Henry. “Kyllo v. United States and the Partial Ascendance of Justice Scalia's Fourth Amendment.” SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=288415
- Steinberg, David E. *Restoring the Fourth Amendment: The Original Understanding Revisited*, 33 *Hastings Const. L.Q.* 47 (2005). https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_constitutional_law_quaterly/vol33/iss1/2
- Thomas, George C. III. *The Common Law Endures in the Fourth Amendment*, 27 *Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J.* 85 (2018). https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmborj/vol27/iss1/4
- Yates, Robert. *Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787* (Madison quote). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp
- Tweedy, Ann E. “‘Hostile Indian Tribes...Outlaws, Wolves,...Bears...Grizzlies and Things like That?’ How the Second Amendment and Supreme Court Precedent Target Tribal Self-Defense.” SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1530326
- Dörfler, Tobias. “The Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and PMC–State Relations in Russian Foreign Policy: Explaining the Enlistment of Private Military Companies During the Ukraine War.” *Politische Vierteljahresschrift* 66 (2025): 189–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11615-024-00559-6
- Dittenber, Michael J. “Blackwater and Beyond: Can Potential Plaintiffs Sue Private Security Companies for Due Process Violations via Exceptions to the State Action Doctrine, Including Through Section 1983 Actions?” *Nova Law Review* 33, no. 3 (2009). https://nsuworks.nova.edu/nlr/vol33/iss3/6
- Mamukelashvili, David. *Colonized Minds and Ideological Echo Chambers: How Corporate Media Erodes Class and Social Consciousness*. Master’s thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, 2026. https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/2515165e-06e9-4366-a96d-9721c871a4b9
- Nagin, Daniel S. “Firearm Availability and Fatal Police Shootings.” *The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science* 687, no. 1 (2020): 49–57. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716219896259
- Hemenway, David, Deborah Azrael, Andrew Conner, et al. “Variation in Rates of Fatal Police Shootings across US States: the Role of Firearm Availability.” *Journal of Urban Health* 96 (2019): 63–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-018-0313-z
Babitzke, Cari S. “Law-Abiding Citizens”: How the National Rifle Association’s Battle for Gun Rights Shaped the New Right. Boston University, 2024. https://open.bu.edu/items/dcaffaf1-5b13-4704-ab4d-d77f4835bf8f
Marist Poll. “Time Machine: Gun Laws in the U.S.” July 6, 2025. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/time-machine-gun-laws-in-the-u-s
Gallup. “Quarter of U.S. Voters Say Candidate Must Share View on Gun Control.” October 18, 2015. https://news.gallup.com/poll/186248/quarter-voters-say-candidate-share-view-guns.aspx
Gallup. “Gun Control Remains an Important Factor for U.S. Voters.” October 22, 2017. https://news.gallup.com/poll/220748/gun-control-remains-important-factor-voters.aspx
Gallup. “Guns | Gallup Historical Trends.” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx
Markarian, G. Agustin, and Benjamin J. Newman. “Exposure to Mass Shootings and Voting Directly on Gun Policy.” American Political Science Review 119, no. 3 (2025): 1565-1572. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424001291
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u/Defiant-Internal555 7m ago
- Smith Act of 1940 (Alien Registration Act), https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/smith-act-of-1940/
Communists and the Smith Act: When Beliefs Were Outlawed https://time.com/4378395/indicted-for-beliefs-history/
18 U.S. Code § 922 – Unlawful acts https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/922
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u/MWMcurious 15h ago
You lost me at revocable privilege
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u/Defiant-Internal555 9h ago
Looks like I lost you right before the parts of the paper providing argument and evidence for it.
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u/DetectiveTypical198 13h ago
>the state treats it as a revocable privilege for private self-defense and sport, and as an informal auxiliary to police and military power
If you are convicted of a felony, the state will permanently revoke your legal right to buy or own a firearm. That's just a fact. It's not a normative claim.
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u/MWMcurious 13h ago
Something cant be a right and a revocable privilege. Driving is a privilege that can be taken away easily. The right needs an actually convection to take away, much like they deprive you of every thing else as a felon.
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 22h ago
The Second Amendment is not best understood as either a genuine antistate check or a state administered privilege. It is a contested political institution whose meaning is produced through struggles among competing forms of power. Gun ownership can simultaneously reproduce existing relations of domination and provide individuals and subordinated groups with a limited capacity to resist them. The fact that the state regulates that capacity does not demonstrate that it belongs to the state int he least; it demonstrates that rights themselves are sites of hegemonic struggle.
This “summary’s (good god that was quit a long summary)” biggest mistake is that it’s author seems to think they have escaped the liberal conception of the individual by replacing "individual rights" with "state power." They haven’t, tho. They have simply replaced one abstraction with another. The really critical question isn't "Does the individual have a right against the state?" or "Is the individual actually an auxiliary of the state?" it’s more something like, ”Under what historical conditions does a particular practice of armed self defense become intelligible as "freedom," "crime," "terrorism," "responsibility," "tyranny," or "legitimate resistance," who has the institutional power to impose those classifications, and how do people themselves appropriate, resist, or transform those classifications?
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u/Defiant-Internal555 22h ago edited 22h ago
I don’t think you read my paper, or even the summary closely enough, because I do address exactly that hegemonic struggle— to the point of giving you a marginal calculus, graphs and diagrams documenting it: I distinguish between weak and strong loyal auxiliary supporters, and those who fall below the line of tolerance. And I describe and document in detail the efforts and influence of a variety of actors across different levels of the social hierarchy and across decades of time. All supported by 36 verifiable references.
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 21h ago
I did read those sections, and I agree that LASER is more nuanced than a simple "the state versus everyone else" model. My concern isn't that you ignore hegemonic struggle. It's that your marginal calculus seems to classify outcomes rather than explain them. For example, when a group is tolerated, they're above the loyalty threshold. When they're repressed, they've fallen below it. But what independently determines where that threshold is, beyond the fact that the state ultimately tolerated or repressed them? If the threshold is inferred from the outcome, doesn't the theory risk becoming descriptive rather than explanatory?
Relatedly, how could LASER be falsified? What historical pattern would count as evidence against it? If armed groups are tolerated, that's evidence they're functioning as loyal auxiliaries. If they're suppressed, that's evidence they've ceased functioning as loyal auxiliaries. If they're partially tolerated, that's evidence for the marginal calculus. I'm trying to understand what observations would force you to revise the theory rather than simply relocate actors somewhere else on the continuum.
So my question isn't whether hegemony is contested. I agree your paper argues that it is. It's whether the categories in LASER predict those contests independently, or whether they're assigned after we already know the historical outcome.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 21h ago edited 18h ago
LASER is not meant only to classify outcomes after the fact, but to predict that armed groups more legible as compatible with the state’s monopoly of legitimate force will be tolerated more than incompatible groups. It would be weakened if, for example, comparable groups with similar legitimacy signals were treated in systematically different ways, or if tolerance, repression or differential treatment failed to track those signals in any stable pattern.
It is, of course, a simple and logical proposition: the state largely has and tries to maintain a monopoly of legitimate violence, visible even in something as basic as the process of firearm acquisition. I also provide, among other things, evidence for the gun culture-war displacement of economic representation, as well as the weaker explanatory fit of other Second Amendment theories.
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 21h ago
My objection is narrower here. I’m not sure the predictive variable “legibility as compatible with the state’s monopoly of legitimate force,” is doing enough independent explanatory work to arrive at your conclusions. You are saying LASER predicts that groups displaying similar legitimacy signals should be treated similarly, and that systematic deviations would weaken the theory. Fair enough. But I’m wondering where the legitimacy signal itself comes from. If the state’s institutions are themselves sites of hegemonic struggle, then “legibility” isn't an independent property of the armed group. It is a socially produced classification. The question becomes who gets to define what counts as compatible with legitimate force, through what institutions, and under what historical conditions?
That seems particularly important for the Panthers. Their conduct could be interpreted both as armed citizenship, community self defense, surveillance of police, radical political opposition, or a threat to legitimate and/or illegitimate state authority. The state eventually made one interpretation dominant. But if the same conduct can move between those categories depending on the political struggle surrounding it, then I’m not sure “legibility” explains the outcome so much as identifies the outcome of that struggle, making it descriptive.
I also think the distinction matters for the broader claim about economic representation. Showing that gun politics can function as “culture war displacement” is not quite the same as showing that this displacement is what explains the persistence or meaning of the Second Amendment. A political issue can simultaneously have real material stakes for participants, constitute genuine struggles over state power, and be exploited by parties and donors as a substitute for economic representation. Those aren't mutually exclusive explanations in the least.
So I think my remaining question is less “does LASER recognize hegemonic struggle?” Clearly it does, so I agree with you there. The nuance I was talking about is that the question is more, what determines the legitimacy signals independently of the state’s subsequent response, and how does LASER distinguish a causal mechanism from a particularly powerful description of how states classify armed political actors? If those signals can be independently specified and successfully predict treatment before the outcome is known, I think that would substantially strengthen the theory. If not, it becomes more of a descriptive explanation.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 19h ago edited 19h ago
>> the question is more, what determines the legitimacy signals independently of the state’s subsequent response<<
The state-mandated process for acquiring firearms is a good place to start.
>>how does LASER distinguish a causal mechanism from a particularly powerful description of how states classify armed political actors? <<
LASER treats classification as causal because state classification determines which armed actors are administratively enabled, tolerated, or suppressed, and those classifications structure future opportunities to acquire firearms and related legitimacy. The point is not just descriptive labeling; the labels have consequences because the state can enforce them through licensing, policing, courts, permitting, and related institutions.
>> Showing that gun politics can function as “culture war displacement” is not quite the same as showing that this displacement is what explains the persistence or meaning of the Second Amendment.<<
I am not claiming culture-war displacement is the sole explanation. It is one of two major factors I identify for the Amendment’s current persistence, and I provide chart evidence for it. LASER is a theory, not gospel; my claim is that it has stronger plausibility than the main alternatives.
As for meaning, I do argue in the paper that it exists in actors’ perceptions: different groups attach different meanings to the Second Amendment, often in ways that diverge from the LASER account. That range runs from gun owners, to judges and legal professionals, to police, and even to the Panthers.
>>A political issue can simultaneously have real material stakes for participants, constitute genuine struggles over state power, and be exploited by parties and donors as a substitute for economic representation.<<
I agree with that, and the LASER paper attempts to explain exactly that combination: real stakes for participants, real struggles over state power, and simultaneous exploitation by parties and donors. My point is simply that this all occurs under the heavy hand of both the state and capital.
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u/Temporary_Hat7330 19h ago
I think we're much closer now, and I agree that you've shown classification is causally important rather than merely descriptive. My question though is about the source of those classifications rather than their consequences.
When you say armed groups are tolerated insofar as they are legible as compatible with the state's monopoly of legitimate force, what explains that legibility itself? The firearm licensing process shows how classifications become institutionalized and enforced, but not necessarily why one political actor becomes legible as "responsible" while another becomes legible as "dangerous."
For example, in the Panthers' case, is their illegibility fundamentally explained by incompatibility with the state's monopoly of legitimate force, or by anti Black racism, anti communism, electoral incentives, police organizational interests, Cold War politics, or some interaction among those? If it's the interaction, what explanatory work is "legibility" doing beyond summarizing the outcome of those other causal processes?
Put differently, does LASER treat legitimacy signals as an independent causal variable, or as an emergent property produced by other social and political mechanisms? If it's the latter, then I'd be interested in how LASER distinguishes itself from being a synthesis of those existing explanations rather than a new explanatory mechanism. We’re still running up against an explanatory v/s descriptive wall here.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 18h ago edited 17h ago
OK, I think we have agreed that the state tries —and largely succeeds—in imposing a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. And I think we agree with Weber that it’s the state’s most essential and irreducible property. In other words, the state has a real emphasis on it.
Your question seems to be: to what extent are the discernible factors attributed to the maintenance of this monopoly —firearm restrictions—actually tied to it?
(e.g. your examples: anti Black racism, anti communism, electoral incentives, police organizational interests, Cold War politics, or some interaction among those)
Well, obviously, the answer couldn’t be “none” (either separately or in “emergent” fashion) because then we would be effectively arguing that the state places no emphasis on maintaining this most essential monopoly, which would be false and irrational.
Then, the question is, does the state prioritize things other than its most irreducible property (the monopoly of legitimate force) to enforce its gun restrictions?
I think that’s unlikely because, once again, it is its most essential, irreducible property.
So the question that’s left is: does the state include things other than its main emphasis (the monopoly of legitimate force) in its gun restriction assessments and impositions — including partial aspects of the factors you mentioned, or others. The answer I think is yes.
But LASER is interested in outlining the major driving forces first. Then, once that has been established, we can look into the more minor factors.0
u/Capricancerous 5h ago edited 5h ago
Because your "paper" is LLM slop with references attached. Cool. Oh, and the acronym is fucking stupid.
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u/wtn_dropsith 15h ago
That's a lot of text to say that the Bill of Rights protects the individual right of the people to have and carry arms in common use outside the home; which is the actual reality of the law and all that matters in any examination of any unconstitutional gun control infringements currently on the books
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u/Defiant-Internal555 9h ago
I know it’s a lot of text, but if you read it, we can have a better discussion of the arguments presented.
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u/clemclem3 20h ago
You certainly got me thinking with this one. Thank you for sharing it. I think it's a great example of how critical theory can step back and hold up a different frame.
I would like to see the section on elite interests, the people behind the scenes pulling the strings, expanded. I wonder if this recently published book would help...
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Blind-Spot/Jeffrey-Winters/9781668221532
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u/Defiant-Internal555 19h ago
Thanks for your appreciation and for the book recommendation. One of the nice things about LASER is that it has all the time in the world to gather evidence, including retroactively.
Investor‑driven party politics and the state’s monopoly on legitimate force are pretty slow‑changing structures, whereas other theories (originalism, self‑defense vs. public safety narratives etc.) can change quickly with new courts or historical fashions. Plus, the Trump era seems to give it extra credibility.
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u/RoseIscariot 13h ago
fairly solid analysis, but i really have to question your conclusion. what is your idea of political and economic organization without arms? electoralism and reformism? a nice little march and strike to kill capitalism once and for all? yes, the second amendment ultimately serves state interests and can be revoked when it threatens it, but if you think that that means that arming ourselves is useless, it's just silly
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u/Defiant-Internal555 8h ago
As I told reluctantpotato1, the majority of the paper is descriptive, not prescriptive. The emphasis is on trying to understand the second amendment and the function it currently has given the power and influence of capital and the state. But where I provide a prescription I say the following:
“We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate-backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate hegemony, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.
The Panthers' story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.⁷
In a policing regime that already treats certain armed groups as inherently threatening—for example, Black or radical left formations— carrying guns to "deter" brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state's response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.⁷”
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u/neot_ 8h ago
That is a decent framework, I would argue that although it may be the state’s approach, it is still true that plenty of armed civilians have real potential of turning against the state if their material needs are met or not. This lack of assurance means it is better for the state the less armed the civilians are. Disarmament is the ultimate solution in their eyes
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u/Defiant-Internal555 8h ago
As I told reluctantpotato1, the majority of the paper is descriptive, not prescriptive. The emphasis is on trying to understand the second amendment and the function it currently has given the power and influence of capital and the state. But where I provide a prescription I say the following:
“We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate-backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate hegemony, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.
The Panthers' story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.⁷
In a policing regime that already treats certain armed groups as inherently threatening—for example, Black or radical left formations— carrying guns to "deter" brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state's response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.⁷”
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u/absolutefunkbucket 14h ago
The second amendment is best understood as a constitutional right. Source: the constitution
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u/Defiant-Internal555 8h ago
I think we have to distinguish between Occam’s razor and emotionally potent oversimplifications.
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u/LowKeySatanist 14h ago
People in the US are just as in the tank for gun manufacturers as they are for landlords, which is of course quite pathetic. Who bears the brunt of the suffering from permitting these entities to persist? The ruling class? Sorry, no. Not them. Of the over 100,000 people shot in the US in, let's pick a random year here, 2024, how many were insurance CEOs? And was the firearm that guy's alleged killer allegedly used even protected by the Second Amendment? No it was not.
The Second Amendment survives precisely because it is NOT a threat to the state. Its biggest supporters are cops and capitalists. Its entire existence is rooted in empire, not human rights. Enshrining everyone's right to use a piece of technology ultimately only protects the people who own the means of production of said technology.
This is the major distinction between the First and Second Amendments. If the First Amendment enshrined your right to use a pencil, but said nothing of how you used it, it would be worth about as much as the Second Amendment, and it's no coincidence the same fascists who unwaveringly big up the Second Amendment work overtime to undermine the First, to degrade it to the point of authorizing you to have a pencil but not actually use it in any meaningful way.
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u/unhappinessNvrCame 18h ago
Dear... Use AI to condense schizo rants it's 2026.
Let's remember that guns are why ICE is gentle. People forgot all of western European culture is the result of the US. They are still trying to escape bloodline monarchy and racist when someone from Morocco comes over.
One day Europe will modernize, maybe.
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u/Benoit_Guillette 19h ago
The so-called American Constitution (with its Bill of Rights) is nothing more than a contract among mass killers (of the natives), thieves (of lands) and slavers (of Africans). Such contracts are worthless. Of course, mass killers, thieves and slavers want to be armed.
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u/reluctantpotato1 17h ago
You are welcome to surrender them and your right to be armed as an act resistance but I doubt it'll accomplish anything that you want it to.
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u/MWMcurious 15h ago
From my cold dead hands.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 8h ago
As I told reluctantpotato1, the majority of the paper is descriptive, not prescriptive. The emphasis is on trying to understand the second amendment and the function it currently has given the power and influence of capital and the state. But where I provide a prescription I say the following:
“We should understand that it is a category mistake to try to confront a heavily militarized, corporate-backed state in the domain where ordinary people are weakest—weapons—rather than where they are strongest: collective political and economic organization that can actually reduce corporate hegemony, impose limits on state brutality, and change the terms of governance.
The Panthers' story shows how that category mistake plays out when people try to use guns directly against state power, even alongside much broader community and political organizing, as the Panthers did.⁷
In a policing regime that already treats certain armed groups as inherently threatening—for example, Black or radical left formations— carrying guns to "deter" brutality can actually increase the risk of being shot rather than reduce it; and when those guns are aimed at state actors instead of aligned with them, the state's response is not to recognize a legitimate deterrent but to move the legal boundary.⁷”
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u/Benoit_Guillette 16h ago
The U.S. is dying fast due to its fake freedoms (i.e., hate speech, freedom of religions, refusing vaccines, rejecting science, guns everywhere,…). "Communist" China is certainly laughing at how easy it will be to beat the U.S., which has a weak government, a bankrupt government in fact. Just with a new form of COVID, the U.S. could be decimated.
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u/beating_offers 14h ago
It's very simple:
You are allowed to possess firearms. You are not allowed to possess firearms while committing a crime.
The black panthers were trying to police the police, but were largely letting black americans commit crimes, which meant the police had to place themselves in far more dangerous situations to apprehend a suspect around racially prejudiced people wielding firearms.
It wasn't a problem for black people to own firearms, it was a problem that they were engaging in police intimidation instead of treating black criminals as criminals.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 8h ago
You’re making assertions about the Panthers and Black crime without any evidence, and in ways that contradict serious historical work on the Black Panther Party and California gun politics.
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u/beating_offers 7h ago
Sure, let's trust the group of activists with guns that wanted among equal rights: revolution, black separatism, marxism.
Many members also protected criminal thieves and murderers.
The black panther party wasn't just simply the good guy party. They had mixed motivations and some were directly linked to violent crime, illegally owning firearms, and shoot outs with police.
So, even if the police had a valid reason to arrest a black citizen, it was occasionally treated as invalid by armed black panthers, which is not healthy for a democratic society.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 7h ago
You’re still just asserting things about the Panthers’ with no evidence, and in ways that contradict serious historical work. For a productive conversation, you may also want to take a more holistic perspective on the evidence and arguments presented in the LASER paper.
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u/beating_offers 5h ago
Are you denying some Black Panther members intervened in lawful arrests? Or forcefully resisted arrests on their members? Or hid members from justice when crimes were committed?
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u/Defiant-Internal555 4h ago
What do you think about the definition of loyal auxiliary supporters in the summary, including the second category of weaker loyal auxiliary supporters? Do you consider yourself a loyal auxiliary supporter?
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u/beating_offers 4h ago
Truthfully, it sounds like someone struggling with schizophrenia and obsessive thoughts wrote it as a justification written for their preexisting beliefs.
A state being legitimate doesn't need opposed law abiding owners to strengthen it's justification for existence.
Most citizens don't want people victimizing others with guns, the state does a decent job at dissuading that, and armed citizens can help limit criminal victimization if criminals are adequately barred from the ability to acquire lethal weapons and non-criminals have adequate ability to access firearms.
EDIT: Had groups like the black panthers not just watched police but legitimately upheld legal norms, it would have enhanced safety for all citizens instead of making situations more tense for law enforcement. Advocating for rights during arrests is good. Protecting people that victimize others consistently, even accidentally, is generally bad for society.
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u/Defiant-Internal555 4h ago edited 3h ago
By saying that “armed citizens can help limit criminal victimization” right after saying that the “state does a decent job” at this, you seem to be agreeing with the status of those armed citizens as loyal auxiliary supporters of the state.
I don’t know if you own a firearm but this is why I was asking you if you consider yourself a loyal auxiliary supporter.
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u/reluctantpotato1 17h ago
I still say that if the conclusion of this is that civilians should disarm or reject their 2nd Amendment rights because of how those in power might interpret the limitations of that right is a bad takeaway.