Donald Trump has let rip with another blast of verbal shit. His comments over the Florida school shooting illustrate that not only does he have shit for brains, but he simply can't stop that shit from pouring from his mouth like someone suffering from a bad case of verbal norovirus.
Trump's ridiculous answer to school shootings is to arm teachers! A lot can be learned about the sewer that is Trump's brain from his comments. Having explained the actions of the shooter, as being those of someone suffering mental health problems (as always seems to be the case when the terrorist is a white supremacist) Trump's response is not to consider the needs of such a person for the US state to provide its citizen's with adequate mental healthcare and support, but was that armed teachers could have "shot the hell out of him"!
If all the teachers had guns, Trump reasons, and the NRA make the same argument, no gunman entering a school would know who was going to be able to take them down. Neither Trump nor the NRA seem to have considered what then happens if the gunman is themself a teacher, who might be suffering mental health problems, or just having a bad day, and so on. Then, of course, such a teacher would find all the students sitting at their desks in the classroom easy targets like shooting fish in a barrel. The only answer would clearly be that all of the school students, including those in the kindergarten would need to be equally heavily armed to protect themselves against rogue teachers, and students!
Its easy to laugh, because otherwise you would have to cry, at the lunacy of Trump and the conservatives in the US when it comes to guns, but liberals in the US and in Europe themselves on the basis of that lunacy have settled for easy and inadequate solutions to the question. The fact, is that the US Second Amendment does give citizens the right to bear arms as part of a well regulated militia, and does so for very good reasons, given the revolutionary history of America as it fought to overthrow the monarchical rule of George III, and to defend their freedom and the Republic guns in hand.
I heard some liberals in recent days, talk about the fact that now is not 1776, and its not necessary for the citizenry to defend themselves against home invasions by the forces of the state. Really? Tell that to many of the black citizens of the US, and all those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. Moreover, given the number of neo-nazis, white supremacists, who are already armed to the teeth, if I was a worker in the US, I would also want to be able to fight back, and not rely on the forces of the US state, who time and again, have sided with the reactionaries.
And, that too is the answer to all those liberals who have tried to turn the argument into one about citizens only needing hand guns, rather than semi-automatic weapons. The Second Amendment was not passed simply to allow US citizens to go on hunting trips, or to defend themselves against individuals; it was intended to allow them to defend themselves against a state tyranny. It was designed, as with Engels argument in relation to Prussian Military Policy, that an armed populace can enforce its decisions, arrived at by universal suffrage. As Engels puts it, universal military conscription is the necessary corollary of universal suffrage, for just that reason.
But, the whole point about Engels' argument, and a similar argument was put forward a century later by Trotsky is that the holding of such weapons is undertaken on precisely this organised, collective and democratic basis. The wording of the Second Amendment includes precisely that point, that the right to bear arms is a right within the context of sustaining "a well regulated militia". We should indeed adopt the idea of developing a well regulated militia, organised and run on democratic principles, with each community meeting, and acting to self-police and self-govern itself. On that basis there is no reason for any citizen to be able to acquire arms outside the constraints set by the militia. There is no basis for any citizen bearing arms outside their activities as part of such a militia, and on that basis anyone dealing in arms, or possessing arms outside those constraints could then be subject to the severest sanctions.
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