Farewell to arms, hello to armaments

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — I recently visited the defense-contracting lab where my brother works. It was Family Day at the facility, so classified plans and secret gadgets had presumably been shoved into closets and cabinets. The staff had left a nuclear warhead out for guests to gawk at, however, and my 4-year-old daughter and I duly did so. It was designed for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, which back in the day could reach Moscow faster than a phone call, depending on your luck with the switchboards. My daughter stood uncharacteristically still and straight, as though pledging allegiance to the flag. Do they do that at nursery, I wondered? I stiffened my own spine and tried to look equally patriotic, but something about the whole tableau just didn’t feel right.

Then it hit me. The original Minutemen — the citizen militia of revolutionary days, famously roused to action by Paul Revere — were our nation’s very first first line of defense. I’d seen statues of them around Boston in their tight pants, rakish in stance and at one with their rifles. It is deeply democratic, that oneness with their weapons, I mused. It says, “We the people are the military.” And they were. I mean we were. Are we now? I asked myself, looking at the bomb before me.

A professional standing army will “never be formidable to the liberties of the people,” argued Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, if the people are not “inferior to [it] in discipline and the use of arms.” And yet here we are, with our peashooters, hunting licenses and background checks, allowed an annual glimpse of the big stuff only on Family Day. People with Hamilton’s views today are dismissed as hard-core insurrectionists. On no other constitutional matter have we strayed so far from the intentions of the founders. For them, military force belonged in the hands of the people. Let us summon the courage to return to that vision. Arms are arms: From the bayonets of our glorious past to the ballistic missiles of our glorious future, we have a right to keep them, bear them and use them.

The truth is, guns per se have no constitutional implications whatsoever. The point of the Bill of Rights was to preclude government monopolies on matters of the mind and spirit, on public life and the life of power. Guns were the basic unit of armed power in the 18th century; that’s all. Today’s gun culture is a ridiculous idolatry born of that historical accident. It is fossilized synecdoche. The First Amendment equivalent would be a subculture centered on printing press fetishism, with members feverishly collecting slugs, galleys, composing sticks and so on, all the while consenting blithely to centralized state control of wireless and digital media.

Put another way, there is nothing more ideologically incoherent than a man wearing a “Support our troops” T-shirt and an NRA baseball cap. For truly, if the Founding Fathers were here today, they’d be wearing NRA caps and ACLU shirts. They’d be reading free speeches on their iPads and favoriting them. I like to think they wouldn’t also be sitting around eating chips out of bags and scratching themselves, but that’s their call. I was raised not to stare.

We cheapen the Second Amendment when we equate it with the right to pack a Smith & Wesson in a café or house of worship. Were that the heart of the matter, let it be said that a truly free man should be able to drag a surface-to-sea missile into church, right past the pews full of fellow parishioners and into confessional, with head held high and nothing to apologize for, except, of course, whatever he went in there to apologize for (which won’t amount to much in the eyes of God if he’s as fine a patriot as he looks, lugging that thing). But the right to bear arms is an elastic philosophy of force, not a finite set of permissions.

Defense contractors like my brother have more to gain than anyone from what I’m proposing. Fast as fission, their client base of one — the government — mushrooms into a mass-market sector. Red America’s love of firepower fuses with blue America’s love of gadgetry to create a bipartisan explosion of constitutional consumerism, releasing enormous amounts of economic energy.

Everyone knows American manufacturing is plummeting in every sector of durable goods except armaments. The only thing we make these days, in other words, is something we’re not allowed to buy or use. “The worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object,” wrote Karl Marx. If Marx were around today, I think he would be deeply disturbed by the alienation he’d see on the factory floors of our military-industrial complex, assuming he could obtain a clearance to see it in the first place.

I already hear the objections. “What if a madman gets hold of something big and takes a whole city hostage?” someone asks. But that’s a mental-health issue, not a political or constitutional one. Weapons of mass destruction don’t kill people; people do. “The last thing we need is a more heavily armed society,” someone else interjects, growing emotional. But logically speaking, the best defense against a bad guy with fissile material from Big 5 Sporting Goods is a good guy with a depleted-uranium-tipped bunker-buster missile purchased online for home delivery by same-day Super Saver drone from one of Amazon’s automated fulfillment centers.

Doubtless there’s something comforting about centralized authority. But this anxiety about power falling into the wrong hands is fundamentally anti-democratic. Let’s do for military power what Wikipedia did for human knowledge: take it out of the hands of so-called experts and crowdsource it, in real time. That way it can constantly enlarge and improve, driven forward by market forces and entrepreneurial innovation rather than dragged backward by budgetary bloat and state sclerosis.

Old debates about whether the right to bear arms is individual or collective are as obsolete as old distinctions between what is public and what is private. In the social media age, digital solitude is communal. It is now “impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts,” writes longtime journalist and sometime ponderer of constitutional freedoms Michael Kinsley. It will soon be equally impossible to distinguish a reserve soldier and a patriot with a 3-D printer who wants to make a difference. “Militia” is but an old-timey, Constitution-esque word for a weaponized flash mob.

If you really think about it, reader, the very opposition between gun rights and gun control is obsolescent. Just as today’s Internet has made speech and expression freer than ever yet also more easily tracked and surveilled than ever, tomorrow’s Internet of Things can do the same for consumer artillery. Every munition printed, purchased, fired or detonated will leave an IP address and GPS signature. It will be possible for you not only to monitor guerrilla warfare in your neighborhood but also to check out the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of present and likely future combatants and thus make informed decisions about your involvement. Crowdsourced online action could disarm a warhead remotely or, for that matter, jam a bad guy’s RPG launcher in real time and in sundry other ways defend rights, lives, property and values.

“Those who would give up essential liberties for a little temporary security deserve neither,” Benjamin Franklin is said to have said. These days — thank God! — freedom means not having to make that choice or even think about such things.