The Second Amendment--originally, a sop to slaveowners

An originalist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment would see it not as conferring an individual right but as a structural limitation on the power of the federal government to restrict the Southern states from forming militias to put down slave rebellions.

"...the Second Amendment was written to assure the South that the militia--the very same militia described in the main body of the Constitution--could be armed even if Congress elected not to arm them or otherwise attempted to "disarm" them.

"From our perspective today, this may seem like a small matter since Congress retained exclusive authority to determine the composition of the militia, and, thus, who could enjoy the right to bear arms.

"However, in the context of the concern and circumstances of the time, it was significant. The Amendment deals with keeping and bearing arms in the militia, subject to federal and state regulation. Therefore, to the extent original intent matters, the hidden history of the Second Amendment strongly supports the collective rights position."

--From the University of California at Davis Law Review article "The hidden history of the Second Amendment" by Carl T. Bogus, Professor of Law at Roger Williams University and author of "Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism." reviewed with admiration by right wing newspaper The Washington Times.

http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm

If you live by the sword...

The NRA has a demographic problem no amount of it brilliantly Fascist propaganda can cure: its hard core is aging. Those huge gun sales are going to present gun owners building arsenals, while fewer and fewer households have guns in them, and fewer and fewer Americans practice hunting. The new sales are mostly for home defense against the gun nuts' fantasy of heavily armed black drug gangs assaulting their compounds, despite the statistical unlikelihood of that happening to any of them.

Turns out the real weapon defeating the NRA is....first person shooter videogames. That's what young men generally prefer to the hassle of a real weapon. They can duel with simulated humans in elaborately detailed commando scenarios--and they never have to clean their virtual firearms...or store them in a gun safe...or pay the big bucks for them.

Remember, though, I'm not arguing for them--just observing what's actually happening.

The remaining gun zealots are highly motivated, of course, though this article avoids the real secret of gun glamour: most gun owners have experienced a progressive lessening of economic security; the majority of Americans have become more and more different from them in both appearance and iifestyle; modern society's issues and functions are too complex for them to understand...and all these changes are emasculating.

But the gun gives them instant masculinity, and assault weapons give them even more, since assault weapons shift the self-pleasuring fantasy from Mighty Hunter to Invincible Commando on an Important Mission--exactly how the Adam Lanzas of the world see themselves BTW.

These people will never change.

But they will die out, slowly but surely. Hard to mount a fierce campaign against a congressman who dares to disagree with the NRA in the slightest when the protestors have to use walkers...

Lastly, the NRA's take no prisoners tactics are making more and more Americans heartily despite them. If/when we do get the upper hand...they will get no mercy (legislatively speaking, natch).

Great general-purpose JFK quote and its application to gun regulation

John F. Kennedy anticipated the self-flattering mythmaking of the NRA about the Second Amendment when he said:

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm

But even though the notion of the 2nd Amendment the NRA peddles is a pernicious myth, it's also now the law of the land, and will be until President Hillary Clinton can replace a couple of right wing justices with moderates.

However, the Supreme Court's right wing majority didn't roll over for the NRA completely. They did agree that like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

Nothing in the Second Amendment should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

And the sorts of weapons protected are those in common use at the time. The government can prohibit the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

(taken from the Heller decision)

What to tell your Uncle Harry the gun nut about the 2nd Amendment at the next family reunion

James Madison wrote the 2nd Amendment to make it ambiguous on purpose, to make it noble-sounding when in fact it was a compromise demanded under the table by the slave states led by Virginia. The Brits had attempted to confiscate American individual arms, but that wasn't a big deal when the 2nd Amendment was written, because America had been a separate nation for over a dozen years and thus the Brits had no say in who had guns here.

Who did have a say was the South, and the white oligarchs depended on white militias to keep black insurrections in check. But Madison couldn't come out and so this because the non-slave states would go ballistic.

So he had to come up with an ambiguous, pretty-sounding compromise that gave the slave states what they wanted--to keep their boot heels on black necks, while at the same the non-slave states could accept the 2nd Amendment as something all rugged frontiersman-y that fed into American mythmaking.

In other words, things haven't changed much from then to now. Look down this thread and you'll see that white Southern men are still obsessed about black men--particularly the one in the White House.

"plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

(the more it changes, the more it stays the same--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1808-1890)

For a clear, well-written article about all this see The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, from the UC Davis Law Review, published in 1998.aAvifrom the from thestory ofabout thisaboutoclear, wello...See More

 

The NRA disrespects the 2nd Amendment. That's right. Disrespects it.

It's a pity the gun maker's lobby--misleadingly calling itself the NRA--and the one third of its live members (as opposed to the million dead ones they keep on the rolls to make it look larger than it is)--have no respect for the 2nd Amendment, which was interpreted by the Supreme Court's current right wing majority as conferring a right to bear arms for individuals and a right to regulate those arms by governments. That second part is clearly stated in the first half of the 2nd Amendment.

Thus according to Heller the federal government can require the national registration of all firearms, require universal background checks, make straw man purchases a felony, ban unusual and dangerous firearms such as assault weapons, RPGs, flame throwers and machine guns, and more.

Rejecting half of the 2nd Amendment is worse than rejecting all of it, because it couples rights with responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities leads to chaos, just as responsibilities without rights leads to tyranny.

Thus the NRA and its shills are acting like spoiled five year old boys who want all the rights of grown-ups but none of the responsibilities of grown-ups.

They should show some respect for our Constitution. Their disrespect for it is downright unpatriotic. They call themselves conservatives when in fact they're anarchists.

The problem you face talking to Uncle Harry the gun nut

If you want to understand what happens when you try to reason with a gun rights zealot, you need to

remember that Gary Larson cartoon "What dogs hear."


It shows a man lecturing his dog about getting into the garbage. Of course all the dog recognizes is his name.
Similarly, in an argument with a gun nut (as opposed to a responsible gun owner), all your arguments sound like to him is "enemy tribesman speaking, therefore is all lies."

Then when he responds, mostly with stuff from the NRA's Fake Fact Factory, to you it sounds mostly like nonsense that anyone could refute with a few minutes' research of nonpartisan fact checking organizations such as factcheck.org and politifact.com.

But the gun guy would reject anything from those sites because it doesn't support his tribe--what we imagine to be the Republican Party, but now reconstituted as a primitive tribe--100% of the time.

The fact that the fact checkers challenge liberals daily for their own exaggerations and misrepresentations means nothing to Republican tribesmen, because everyone and everything is either friend or enemy, and anyone and anything that isn't 100% friend is 100% enemy.

And they don't actually know how to think. They were raised to take in ideas worshipfully, in church. They really have no idea what analytic thinking is. It just looks like defective worshipful thinking to them.

Add to this the fact that they usually know a lot more about guns and how they operate than liberals do. They use their superior knowledge of guns as further proof that no one who doesn't agree with them has anything useful to contribute, and that they're speaking ignorantly.

So you won't even get a foot in the door, metaphorically speaking, unless you educate yourself about guns. It doesn't take long--it ain't rocket science,  folks. And it's worth it just for the confused look they get on their faces when you show you see through their malarkey (they frequently lie about guns to liberals, figuring that they can get away with it).

Don't give up on gun control

Gun rights zealots believe they will always win--and that the rest of us will always lose. They have nothing but contempt and active dislike for anyone and everyone who advocates any form of gun ownership control, no matter how minor. If pressed, they claim their right to own any kind of gun they choose is based on the Constitution's 2nd Amendment having the purpose of enabling citizens to go into armed revolt against the government, using firearms comparable to those used by our military.Their message to gun control advocates is despair: "You are incompetent to talk about guns, your proposals are unconstitutional, and we OWN Congress (and every state legislature). Give up. We will always defeat you. And you deserve to be defeated, you contemptible worms."

They are that far out.

Equally far out is their defense of crazy people and criminals being able to get guns. Of course gun rights zealots say the exact opposite when they speak in generalities. But gun rights zealots are, as a group, self-centered and emotionally immature. So they see anything we could do to keep guns out of the hands of nuts and crooks only from the perspective of potential limitations to the zealots' rights to own guns--and to keep government agencies from knowing that the zealots have guns, and knowing which guns those are.

So they oppose changing the current federal privacy and mental health laws, which currently make it nearly impossible to institutionalize crazy people who don't think they're crazy--which is most of them. And they oppose universal gun registration, which would let us track straw buyers who are the source of most of the guns crooks possess.

Don't confuse gun rights zealots with gun owners in general, most of whom support at least some forms of gun control--especially universal background checks.

The only thing gun rights zealots support to deal with these all-too frequent massacres and gun homicides is more guns in more hands, which they say is the only way to more safety.

Of course every nation is an experiment in governance that other nations can study.America has more guns per capita with fewer controls than any other nation with comparable demographics. Comparisons prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our path--more guns, less regs--leads to four to eight times as many homicides (not just gun homicides) as comparable countries, and the more gun controls, the fewer homicides. It's that simple and that plain. The rate of violence is comparable to that of comparable counties--the difference with America is that here that violence is vastly more likely to result in death.

The gun makers know this, but they have proven repeatedly is that all they care about is profit. Their shills, who lead the NRA, tread a well-worn path after every massacre:

1. Loudly denounce gun control advocates who dare to use the massacre to try to get gun control legislation enacted--denounce them as exploiting the suffering of the victims and their families for political gain. Demand a period of weeks to "respect the victims" before launching any discussion about the massacre, which gives the NRA time to marshall its forces and lobby legislators.

2. Try to slow-walk such discussions--the more time that elapses between the massacre and the discussion, the more time the NRA has to prevent--or gut--any legislation that does ensue.

3. Loudly insist that the ONLY solution to gun violence is more guns in more hands. Claim that the expired assault weapons ban didn't work (a baldfaced lie--it did to a a degree, hampered by the gun lobby gutting the bill). Claim that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (a baldfaced lie--other countries that restrict guns have their criminals using knives mostly). Claim that massacres happen everywhere (they do--but they do several times as often here, and more are killed in each massacre here on average).

4. Trot out anecdote after anecdote showing how having a gun protected someone. This works because most people are innumerate and thus don't understand statistics (along with most abstractions).

5. Send forth the gun control zealots to overwhelm every newspaper and blog forum that mentions gun control, after stirriing them up with wild accusations.

6. Constantly try to change the subject from gun regulation to gun confiscation, despite the fact that no politician in America talking about gun confiscation.

7. Constantly try to change the subject of gun control to the subject of violent mental illness. It's a valid subject but not instead of gun control--it should be as well as gun control

8. Deny that there's any such thing as an assault weapon--important since the bulk of gun maker profits come from selling assault weapons, despite the fact that they're marketed to gun buyers as assault weapons, using military commando mission atmospherics.

9. Depend on the fact that the million-odd gun rights zealots wake up each morning thinking about guns, and typically associate gun possession with virility, so this group will ceaseless promote their position, while most people only think about guns for a few days or weeks after each massacre.

10. Continue to lobby to suppress any attempt to study gun violence by government agencies (a sucessful effort for decades).

11, Continually talk about video games and violent movies as the cause of massacres, ignoring the literally millions of young men who play such games and see such movies all the time and never commit acts of physical violence, also ignoring the difference between "shooting" cartoon people with a computer mouse vs. shooting human-shaped targets with real bullets fired from a real gun on a real target range.

12. Continually frame the debate as one between patriotic Americans and people advocating foreign ideas that violate the Constitution (talk about Constitution constatnly), bordering on treason. Use inflamed and inflammatory rhetoric, including denouncing the President for having Secret Service protection for his children when he doesn't want that for yours.

13. Try to wear down the other side on every front. Constantly belittle  gun control advocates for being ignorant about firearms and gun violence research (ironic since the NRA has prevented the government from studying gun violence).

Gun rights zealots typically know a lot more about firearms than gun control advocates. I'm not as ignorant about firearms as most gun control advocates, but even so I've found myself having to do hours of research to get up to speed enough to really debate with these guys.

And once I was up to speed I found that gun rights zealots--and the NRA--habitually and knowingly lie to the rest of us in order to advance their desire to own firearms of any type they like without impediments. I only discovered this after I'd done my homework. It was not obvious at first. This was especially interestting because gun rights zealots represent themselves as the most moral, patriotic, upstanding citizens. But in my experience they routinely practice taqiyya (an Arab term "honorable lying to Infidels") with those outside the gun community. If the NRA asserts something, you can safely assume it's a baldfaced lie unless proven otherwise.

For example, NRA membership claims include tens of thousands of members who are no longer alive, along with members whose membership was a freebie including with a gun purchase or gun show admission. It includes a million or so gun rights zealots along with three million or so gun owners whose views differ strikingly from those advocated by the zealots and the NRA leadership.

So when you debate with gun rights zealots, take note of the claims they make, and when you find out they're lying, and exactly how, consider the likelihood that they knew they were lying when they said that to you--and let them know, calmly but inexorably.

That is, use the techniques my spouse used to use when she worked as a collecor for a computer peripherals manufacturer. She never got mad but she never let people off the hook--and she took note of every promise they made, and used that in subsequent conversations, so as to draw the noose progressively tighter and tighter. And of course she never called them liars. She just pointed out what they said, what was factual, and asked them to account for the disparity.

That's the twofer. Never get mad--never relent.

It looks as though the gun makers and their eager shills will mostly win the current fight going on in Congress. But remember how many fights homosexual rights advocates lost before they started winning. Most political victories stand on the shoulders of innumerable losses.

And this is important.

Gun control advocates don't always stick to the high ground

At Connecticut state legislature hearings over the Newtown massacre, MSNBC presented--and the gun control world accepted--the proposal that gun nuts had been heckling a grieving father.

Wrong. MSNBC lied through editing the video--the grieving father had asked a rhetorical question during his testimony, demanding to know whether anyone could justify assault weapons being in private hands, then saying no one had an answer to his question--upon which several gun rights advocates in the crowd shouted out 2nd Amendment-type answers.

MSNBC edited out the relevant parts showing that the father had kind of set up the gun rights advocates by presenting what was obviously a rhetorical question, then acting as if he's asked a real question. And the MSNBC editors knew better.

Now at the same hearings a Sandy Hook father made an impassioned defense of gun rights that the RWM (Right Wing Media) ballyhooed. Then it turned out that more artful editing--this time from the other side--had concealed the fact that he wasn't a grieving father of a Sandy Hook Elementary murdered child at all--he was the father of a child who attended another school altogether.

This father hadn't pulled a fast one--he never claimed to be the father of a Sandy Hook victim--but the RWM did in promoting his gun rights rant as if he was.

We're never going to succeed in opposing the gun makers and their enthusiastic pawns if we stoop to their level. It gives them ammunition (so to speak) and lets them justify their own underhandedness.

When guns are registered, we'll know where outlaws' guns came from

The NRA now opposes even doing background checks on gun buyers--any gun buyers.

It gives a bunch of reasons for this, which you can see described here.

They boil down to hassle, slippery slope, and crooks won't bother.

The hassle argument is contemptible.

The slippery slope argument is, as are all slippery slope arguments, an attempt to argue against a different proposal than the one being proposed. It's like arguing against issuing parking tickets for parking in red zones because they could lead to the death penalty.

The "crooks won't bother" argument is a baldfaced lie. People with criminal records were stopped trying to buy guns from gun stores 1.7 million times in recent years--by background checks.

What the background checks don't stop is straw buyers, and even though that's illegal, you have to prove that the straw buyer knew the real buyer wasn't entitled--and that would require requiring a background check for every gun sale (including supposed "gifts").

Nearly every gun used in a crime was purchased legally originally. So we need to focus on the people who move a gun from the legal world to the illegal one--and nail them. Universal background checks are key to stopping the movement of guns from legal to illegal ownership.

And the NRA's opposition is yet another piece of evidence to the idea that the NRA represents the gun makers, not legitimate gun owners--and that the NRA works for gun maker profits without regard to whoever gets the guns.

Support the right to bear arms!

Anyone promoting strict observance of the Constitution must agree that the Second Amendment guarantees every member of a state militia the right to own a flintlock or a musket.

That is exactly what the Framers were thinking. They didn't know about any kind of weapon someone could \"bear\" that didn't take half a minute to reload after each shot.

Now if you think the Constitution is a \"living document\" that each generation gets to reinterpret according to the needs of the day, we can talk about modern arms.

But wait a minute. Aren't gun rights activists insistent on a strict, originalist interpretation of the Constitution?

I'm confused. Help me out. Because if you think \"arms\" can mean any kind of weapon you can hold in your arms, sign me up for a couple of RPGs--plus a shoulder-mounted Stinger, of course, in case I get mad at the next 747 taking off near my home.

That would be insane to permit, of course. But if \"arms\" don't mean \"sky's the limit\" then it has to mean \"flintlocks\" unless you believe we get to interpret the Constitution as a living doc, in which case the right to bear arms can be constrained by Congress to flintlocks and stay within the Constitution.

What'll it be, folks? The flintlocks the Framers meant (along with those conveniently forgotten crucial words about state militias), or you agree that we can interpret \"arms\" however we wish as a society, and you'll side with all those day-um lib-er-uls who argue for the Constitution being a living document--in this and in all other respects.

Your move.