From Capoferro, published 1610 So much for the natural rights

>>33951720
He's wrong about the Roman Republic. Carrying arms in ROME was illegal, largely for religious reasons (once politics got heated everybody ignored it anyways, so much for sword free zones).

If you carried weapons elsewhere you might get some strange room from normie citizens but as long as you weren't carrying a fucking sword into the baths or another persons home nobody gave two fucks what you brought around with you.

Just don't be that autist who insists on carrying a scutum and pilum at all times for "self defense" unless you're in the shitty parts of Gaul.

t. Time traveler

Literally fucking who? Also, this dude knows nothing of Rome. Not only does he have their laws wrong (Was Caesar stabbed with law scrolls? Has he never read Luke 22:36?), and not know what their military structure was, but citing them as "the true ideal of a good government" is fucking mindboggling.

Flush this down the crapperferro.

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>>33951838
Open carry is my Zeus-given right, mang.

>>33951720
>The weapons which are of length exceeding the distance of natural defense and offense are ill suited and abhorrent for use in civic converse
A citizen should not own a weapon that goes beyond his personal needs for defense. I.e. he may own a rifle, but not an MG or an artillery piece.
>the excessively short ones are insidious and of danger to life
Weapons of murder (as opposed to defense), i.e. daggers etc. must not be owned.
>to no one, however noble and great that there was, was it licit to carry a sword or other weapon, except in war
Carrying weapons in a working, civil society means you're probably up to no good. Note that owning them was still quite allowed or even required. Also, rome would see an attacker punished in all sorts of ways beyond the slap on the wrist common in the modern world.

You know, I could get behind all these points.

>>33951851
>A 17th century Italian citing the Roman Republic as the true ideal of good government is mind boggling
You have an easily boggled mind. It's an excerpt from Capoferro's treatise on the rapier.

>>33951884
>You know, I could get behind all these points.
And you could get in a gas chamber, too. Shall. Not. Be. Infringed.

>>33951897
>You have an easily boggled mind. It's an excerpt from Capoferro's treatise on the rapier.
Okay... and? Is that supposed to mean something to me? Was Capoferro a holy prophet? Did his treatise on the rapier come down Mt. Sinai on stone tablets? Is the fact that he wrote this in the 17th century supposed to make it inviolate or beyond criticism? Lots of Renaissance Italians (and Enlightenment-era Brits, like Gibbon) had a hysterically overinflated opinion of what Rome was like, which came of taking the writings of its rich and noble citizens (who, before the 18th century, were pretty close to the only people in society who ever wrote anything) at face value. Protip: You'll never get an accurate picture of what a society is really like by listening only to its rich and powerful, because for the rich and powerful, life is always great. Thus these early moderns got the idea that life in Rome was all about sitting on comfy couches in big palaces, drinking wine, having orgies, and talking to the likes of Cato and Seneca, because for the privileged slice of Roman society whose works they read, that *was* what life was like. But that's like basing your opinions of what life in early 21st century America was like solely on what Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian have to say about it.

So no - I'm not impressed.

>>33951720
Some noguns from 400 years ago had an opinion, and you think that's worth making a thread on /k/? Go play in traffic.

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>>33951976
Point being that the idea for a "natural right to own implements of violence" was created following the American Revolution and doesn't have any real base in writing prior to the enlightenment and even then only in America. Of course his views on Rome weren't accurate given when he lived. It's irrelevant to the point.

By the way, "natural rights" are a spook.

>>33951720
Come on, we've seen this song and dance countless times. Weapons aren't needed for civil actions, but they sure as shit are needed when civility has broken down. That's the whole point of the right to bear arms.

Those who argue that people should not have the right to bear arms always resort to special pleading, ignoring evidence, ignoratio elenchi, to try and make it look like people are civil all the time, when they aren't. OP is just showing us an example of this.

>17
>But turning to our matter, I say that the sword is the most useful and just arm, because it is proportioned to the distance at which offense is
naturally performed, and all arms, to the degree that they differ from this distance of natural defence and offense, are to that extent more bestial and adverse to nature, and therefore useless to civic converse; the one is the way of virtue and of true reason, and the other burdensome and coarse, from which nature never departs, keeping company with sin and ignorance, and sliding about by many routes; one is the straight line, which none but the artful knows how to do; the oblique lines are infinite, and anyone can do them. Whence in our tim
es we see offenses and defences multiply themselves and the art unto infinity, human endeavour imitating nature from principles; and while it follows the traces thereof it is useful and advantageous to the human life, but as soon as it departs from the footprints of nature, it begins to degenerate from the nobility of its origin, and hurls itself into the snares of harmful fancy, and plunges human kind into the abyss of ignorance, leading it from the age of gold into the filthiness of mud

>24
>Fencing is an art of defending oneself well with a sword.

>25
>An art, because it is an assembly of perpetually true and well-ordained precepts, advantageous to civil converse.

>26
>The truth is an arrangement of the precepts of fence; it must not be measured by the ignorance of some, who teach and write based upon
their lengthy use of arms and not based upon knowledge; rather more often they make substance out of shadow and reason out of chance, mixing gourds with lanterns, and switching rapidly from one subject to another; but it must be esteemed in and of itself, and restricted to the truth of its nature.
Basically there's a lot of fuddlore out there

>27
>Their utility is manifest, because they teach the mode of defence that is very naturally just and honest, and that cannot be doubted to be of the greatest utility that is delivered to human life, because its effects are clearly discerned daily. For as the sword is a weapon well suited for defending oneself in the just distance in which one and the other can naturally offend, we see that the combatants, almost always resting in the defence, rarely come to the offense, which is the last remedy for saving their life, which they would not possess, if their weapons were disproportionate, that is, either greater or lesser than the natural defence requires.

>28
>The aim which separates fencing from all other sciences, is to defend oneself well, with, however, the sword.

>>33952032
>Point being that the idea for a "natural right to own implements of violence" was created following the American Revolution and doesn't have any real base in writing prior to the enlightenment and even then only in America. Of course his views on Rome weren't accurate given when he lived. It's irrelevant to the point.
>By the way, "natural rights" are a spook.
You hardly have to talk me into the idea that Enlightenment "rights of man" ideas are all wet. That's all over my website (http://antidem.wordpress.com). But let's turn that around and ask: from whence derives the right of a man who calls himself a king, or a president, or a senator, or a caesar, to tell me that I cannot own weapons? Is he a god? A prophet? An ubermensch? Here, don't confuse the *ability* to do something with the *right* to do something. Caesar can perhaps force me to do as he says, but that does not give him a legitimate right to force me to do as he says.

Here's the sad truth: When Chairman Mao said that all law derives from the barrel of a gun, that was a descriptive, not a normative. He was only saying honestly what bullshitters like Thomas Jefferson couldn't bring themselves to say. Kings and presidents and senators and caesars have no natural right to tell me that I can't own a weapon; they just want to do it because they like it when they have all the power and I have none of it. Everything else is bullshit wrapped in pretty language.

But I don't like when kings and presidents and senators and caesars have all the power, and I have none of it. So molon labe, motherfucker.

>>33952386
I agree that the idea of natural rights are general advantageous to the stability of society and the happiness of those who live within. They can hardly exist outside of belief in a higher power from which the rights are derived. Calling them spooks doesn't mean that they're poorly thought out, or ineffective. Rather that they have no basis in reality on the ground and are abstract principles. And on that we agree, but it also brings the discussion of "what is a right" and it is no longer a discussion of absolutes.

Personally, I believe that negative rights have a much better claim to being "natural" than positive rights, and most declarations of "positive rights" can be more reasonably restated as "responsibilities of government".

>>33952515
>I agree that the idea of natural rights are general advantageous to the stability of society and the happiness of those who live within
I'm not sure you understood my point. "Natural rights" are a fairy tale that Enlightenment philosophers told us to rationalize creating the society they wanted. The reality is what Chairman Mao was honest enough to tell us. If you follow that to its logical ends, the inescapable conclusion is this: never, ever, EVER give up your guns. Disarmament makes you powerless; it makes you a slave who lives at the whim of masters who style themselves great men and who never run out reasons why everything they do is by legitimate right. But I don't want to be a slave, so I'm not giving up my guns.

>>33951884
Get fucked.

Who determines what a citizen needs? You?

One can find many occasions in history when even something as destrictive as an artillery piece would have been very welcome in the hands of someone who needed it, with very little effort. Lynching victims in the post-war South, the Warsaw ghetto, the Battle of Athens, I could go on.