Gun laws are going to be in the news for quite some time. That’s good for my job security, but terrible for the nation. Gun control doesn’t work, it just makes regular people more vulnerable to not just the predators in our society, but a predatory government as well.
Say what you want, but we know that gun rights keep government overreach in some degree of check.
Of course, the free press is supposed to do some of that, too. Our Founding Fathers recognized that the press need to be free to say what they needed to say in order to keep the government from straying too far from the founding principles.
Unfortunately, the media is now the one pushing for us to stray.
Take this story, for example. Titled “Heller Skelter,” and it laments the Heller and McDonald decision and thinks we should undo it all.
Scalia and the other members of the conservative Heller majority purported to base their radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment on their “originalist” understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions. But their novel conclusion essentially ignored the first 13 words of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of preserving the militias.
This amounted to a distortion of American history. State militias played a critical role in the American revolution, and before that, in maintaining order in the 13 colonies. As the Second Amendment historian Noah Shusterman has written:
The men writing the Bill of Rights wanted every citizen to be in the militia, and they wanted everyone in the militia to be armed. If someone was prohibited from participating in the militia, the leaders of the Founders’ generation would not have wanted them to have access to weapons…Read the debates about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the militia’s importance leaps off the page. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called a well-regulated militia “the most natural defense of a free country.” His anti-Federalist critics agreed with the need for a citizens’ militia, writing that “a well regulated militia, composed of the Yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people.”
Few errors of constitutional interpretation have had such deadly real-world consequences as Heller. Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the principal dissent in Heller, later condemned the ruling as “the worst self-inflicted wound in the Court’s history.”
Of course, they quote the guy who wrote the decision in Chevron which basically said that when the government department creates a regulation isn’t the expressly dictated by legislation, we should just go along with it anyway. I’m sorry, but his opinions on the Second Amendment were irrelevant. Besides, he wasn’t on the Court anymore, so he didn’t get a say.
Now, let’s take a look at the well regulated militia talk.
See, what the author is angling for is the idea that the militia is now the National Guard, so all is well. However, a federally-funded entity that answers to the president wasn’t what our Founding Fathers had in mind. They were distrustful of government, even the one they were creating. They wanted the people to have the means to defend the nation from the government.
They didn’t see the government and the country as one, inextricably linked to one another. They knew the government could turn on the people–the people being the actual country–and they wanted us able to defend ourselves.
But this is old hat. We’ve had this discussion before. It’s not new.
Here’s where we get into the misrepresentation of literally everything.
In fact, gun-control regulations like the New York permit system have been common-place in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. The founders supported a variety of strict measures, including the registration of guns issued to militia members and prohibitions against carrying firearms in public. By the early 1900s, nearly every state had enacted laws requiring firearm licenses and banning concealed carry.
So let’s go through this one by one, shall we?
First, permit systems were in place…for people like freed slaves and other “undesirables.” They weren’t blanket applied during the time of the nation’s founding. They were the result of long-held bigotry and were put in place particularly because these individuals were viewed as second-class citizens. Is the author suggesting the rest of us be viewed as such?
Second, I went to the link on these “variety of strict measures” quoted and I’m not sure where anyone is getting anything. First, guns issued to militia members would be registered because they were owned by the state in the first place. Of course they’d want to know who had what. It was a matter of tracking government property.
But the link he uses goes to an article that claims there was widespread weapon regulation in colonial America, then provides a link to Google Books that just highlights the word “accouterments.” I didn’t see anything that showed colonial-era regulation of people’s personal weapons, only a requirement that people have them for militia service. There might have been some method of tracking, but it wasn’t exactly gun registration as it’s currently discussed.
As for what happened by the early 1900s, I’m going put this as politely as I can. I don’t give a flying f@#%.
For one, that happened well after the era of the Founding Fathers. It doesn’t express their views, and while I know the author thinks Bruen is wrong, it’s now a simple fact of judicial life, so what happened more than a century ago is irrelevant. That’s probably good when you consider the things from back then that we would consider horrific by today’s standards. Why is it that we can view people from this era as unquestionable on guns, but not so many other issues? Or does the author want segregation again?
See, in each case, the author is presenting a snapshot with a link that sort of, kind of, backs up his argument but doesn’t really, but he also knows that most people don’t click the links. He’s trusting that you won’t either.
All while trying to push us to abandon the Constitution.
