The Daily Escape:
Lenticular clouds over Mt. Adams, WA – October 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography
The news is awful and the time to cover it is short. So here’s a few thoughts on the fly:
First, about Lewiston. This is another American tragedy caused by the AR-15. The effort to paint the problem as another mentally-ill person who unfortunately happened to snap has already begun.
And on average, more than one gun per capita is owned by Americans. The Framers couldn’t have conceived of such violence from one gun. Wrongo is fully aware that it is highly unlikely that guns will ever be brought under better control, unless we happen to become the autocracy that many on the Right want us to be.
The Supreme Court’s ideas about originalism and what was meant by a “well-regulated militia” back in the 1770s, made Wrongo take a look at the demographics of the era. In 1790, the US population was around 3.9 million people, excluding Indians and slaves (as they did back then).
And if you try to determine what a rifle owned by one of America’s well-regulated militia cost in the 1770s, you uncover an almost insoluble problem. There was no national currency, each state had its own. Most were expressed in pounds, but each varied in value in relation to the English pound that they were based on.
Despite all of the problems of comparisons, in 1775, a week’s wages for a Massachusetts agricultural laborer were about 3.75 MA pounds. Across the colonies, a long rifle of medium quality cost between 4-7 pounds, so an average worker could acquire a rifle for less than two week’s wages.
That probably meant that like today, there were at least as many guns as men in colonial America.
The well-regulated militia as a deterrent to tyranny made sense until the time of muzzle loaders came to an end. From roughly 1500 – 1850, militias could fight on relatively equal ground with professional soldiers. But once artillery got good enough to chew up massed formations with only a few cannons, the rifle and other small arms became of secondary value in the fight against tyranny because citizen militias could no longer stand up to formal militaries.
Today, small arms play a different role in combat than when the Constitution was written. If the Second Amendment people were serious about wanting to be able to fight off their government they should be arguing to legalize artillery and explosives. They should conduct anti-armored drone drills, weekend artillery practice, and crowd-fund air defense systems.
Think of it as: Today, guns are worthless for fighting tyranny, but they’re perfect for imposing it.
Now, onward to the House of Representatives, and the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, (R-LA). We now have an insurrectionist religious fundamentalist conspiracy theorist who’s second in line for the presidency should something happen to Biden. The House GOP caucus just unanimously elected a traitor.
This needs to be on billboards nationwide.
The election of Johnson represents the surrender by the remaining non-MAGA Republicans to the minority MAGA fringe of their Party. It is a debacle for what the GOP used to stand for in America. And given that funding for the government runs out in a few weeks, a fight between what is now a fully-controlled MAGA House and the House Democrats is inevitable.
To say you’re a Republican in America in 2023 but don’t support Trump makes about as much sense as saying you’re a Communist Party member in the USSR in 1950 but don’t support Stalin.
We should expect a very long shutdown.
House Democrats have to make their fights with House Republicans as loud as possible. They need to make public remarks every day, regardless of their impact on private negotiations. Dems need to make sure everyone knows what the demands by Johnson and the MAGA extremists he leads mean to citizens.
We have to expect that Beltway pundits and the editorial boards of the WaPo and the NYT will attempt to push Biden and Democrats to work with the new Speaker. But, that is a lost cause. House Democrats should work in a bipartisan manner with the (slightly) more reasonable Senate and then turn the fight back to the GOP House in a big public event.
Here’s a tweet by Politico’s Jonathan Martin:
Martin sees this as giving a political advantage to Democrats, but the problem he ignores is the chaos. Is it possible that any order can come out of the MAGA chaos? Johnson is still vulnerable to the rule that a single disgruntled Republican House member can initiate the process to oust him, just as Matt Gaetz (R-FL) did with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
If four of the other 220 House Republicans agree, he will lose his job. So a reasonable view is to expect more Republican chaos.
Buckle up, it’s going to be a roller coaster ride from here to next November.
My 2 cents about colonial militias et al. The first is that “arms” included swords (cutlasses for example). There is an account of a battle in the 1750s between the militias of 2 states (I think NY and MA) and they fought each other with cutlasses. And a man alone with a musket or cutlass was better off with a cutlass – muskets were useful only when in groups.
Re ownership – while there were many guns owned by adults farmers and such. The typical rev war soldier was a teenager with no assets. He joined for the bonus as well as a uniform.
Later on – so during the War of 1812, the typical militia man was also young and often an apprentice so not cash income. We know this from examining the details of the lives of men like Thomas Rogers and Charles Danforth were from New England – both served in someone else’s place (similar to what happened in the Civil War). The both ended up in Paterson and became prosperous factory owners.
Later on in the early 1830s a penniless Abe Lincoln served a few weeks in the state militia during the Indian wars.
The militias often owned the weapons, musket balls and powder. While the farmers in Lexington and Concord likely owned their muskets, the typical soldier relied on the weapons owned by the militia. Thus just a few year later when Shay’s rebellion happened, one of their objects was to get the weapons at the Springfield Amory.
Scotus ignores history for their rulings (as they did re abortion – which was the province of mid-wives , so women).