nygreenguy wrote:Fresh Air on NPR had a very interesting story about gun control and the 2nd amendment.
Spitzer says the original interpretation of the Second Amendment was not controversial in the way it has become politicized in the 20th century — and the debate about whether the Second Amendment protected only militia service or whether it also protected the personal right to own guns is a relatively recent one.
"As a matter of history, we didn't really see anything like the individual point of view emerge until the 20th century," he says. "That doesn't mean individuals didn't own guns or didn't think gun ownership was an important thing — of course they did — but the chief purpose that is cited for the individual ownership of guns is personal protection — from predators, from criminals or from marauding Indians or whatever threats might arise — but you didn't need the Second Amendment to ensure that civilians would have the right to defend themselves or to own a gun to defend themselves."
The modern debate about individual rights pertaining to guns, he says, began in the aftermath of Congress' enactment of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which attempted to control crime in the aftermath of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
"In the 1970s, you see the Second Amendment rhetoric escalate dramatically as an argument against stronger gun laws and to identify gun ownership with American values and historical values," he says. "You find this increasingly heavy emphasis on Second Amendment rights and Constitutional rhetoric as part of the argument against enacting stronger gun laws."
"The burden was placed on each militia-eligible man to obtain firearms, to keep them in good working order and to bring them to militia service at such time when they were called up. In fact, Congress enacted a law in 1792 which required militiamen to have a working musket. ... That law was widely ignored, but it underscored the fact that the government didn't have the resources or ability to arm militia citizens, and so the burden fell on the [citizens]."
What is also interesting about this interview where they talked about Scalia, who supported, an went against precedence, the idea the 2nd amendment was for personal protection. What is interesting about this is how Scalia always advocates for a literalist interpretation of the law, in which personal ownership is no where mentioned.
Should the 2nd amendment include the right to own guns? Can this be justified from a literalist perspective? Can this be justified at all? Do we even need this amendment anymore?
Well, I suppose my position is pretty well known here to most members, but I'll repeat it for the benefit of the newbies.
On most issues, I have realized that I am a liberal; I won't bother to list them, but suffice it to say that there are few exceptions. This is one of them. On the Second Amendment, I am a Neanderthal. I have some very good personal and practical reasons for that indeed, and no one here will be changing my mind; I've written about that elsewhere. But the nature of the Bill of Rights and its reasons for existence in the first place stand on their own without reference to my personal experiences and convictions.
The Founders never said, and never intended to say, that the Bill of Rights
granted any rights to anyone, as if the Federal Government had that power. In the Federalist Papers, it is explicitly said that the Bill of Rights
recognized rights that the People had whether or not any Government presumed to "grant" them or not. (Most of these arguments over the Founders' intent could be resolved pretty easily by reading those documents, which were basically the public record of the debate on these issues at the time.)
To the point: the Second Amendment was never about self-defense; it was about POWER, and the limitation of the power of the Government. That is true of ALL the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, without exception.
The First Amendment was put in place to recognize that the Government had no right to claim or enforce a monopoly on information. The Second Amendment was to recognize that it had no right to claim or enforce a monopoly on physical force, either. ALL of the first ten Amendments to the Constitution are about limitations on government power; NONE of them are about
restricting the rights of the people and limiting them to the Government or to Government-approved and administered organizations. The Founders' jaws would have dropped to the floor at the contention that the Second Amendment was only there to make sure that
only government officials and military troops, i.e. "militias" in the modern sense, had the right to possess weapons. If that reading of "The People" makes sense, then the First Amendment means that only the government should have printing presses. How many are for that reading? Hands?
If your position is that the only people who should be armed are the Army and the Police, rethink it. What you're talking about is Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier or Romania under Ceaucescu. That is granting
absolute power to the State, and giving bureaucrats the right to rule in any way they like.
That's how brutal, tyrannical dictatorships get that way, and how they stay that way. Whatever else the Founders had in mind, that wasn't it. Ownership of weapons is a right of
the peoplel, not of the State. It's all there in the Federalist Papers, and in the context of the obvious intent of the other nine Amendments.
Any liberal with two working brain cells should run from the idea that the Second Amendment restricts firearms ownership to officially approved military personnel as if from a forest fire. Whatever "Power to the People" means, it surely doesn't mean giving the only REAL power -- the actual, practical power of physical force -- to the Government. The Government doesn't need to control the supply and delivery of printer's ink if it can control the supply and delivery of lead.
Reasonable regulation and restrictions ought to be in place, of course; but an outright ban on civilian gun ownership? I love this country, but if that ever happens, I'll be leaving, thanks. And Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Adams will be doing about 78 RPM in their graves.
