Daily Archives: October 4, 2015

Participants consoling each other during a candlelight vigil for the nine people who were killed in a shooting at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, Oregon, on Thursday. The gunman also was killed. Credit photograph by Rich Pedroncelli/AP

The tragedy happensyesterday at a school in Oregon, and then as it will againexactly as predicted, and uniquely here. It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the Presidenthis growing exasperation and disbelief moving, if not effective, as he serves as national mournerhas now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measlesnot perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that its been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party wont allow that to change, and the partywont allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns.

In the course of todays conversation, two issues may come up, treated in what is now called a trolling tonepretending to show concern but actually standing in the way of real argument. One is the issue of mental health and this particular killers apparent religious bigotry. Everyone crazy enough to pick up a gun and kill many people is crazy enough to have an ideology to attach to the act. The pointthe only pointis that, everywhere else, that person rants in isolation or on his keyboard; only in America do we cheerfully supply him with military-style weapons to express his rage. As the otherwise reliably Republican (but still Canadian-raised) David Frum wisely writes: Every mass shooter has his own hateful motive. They all use the same tool.

More standard, and seemingly more significant, is the claimoften made by those who say they recognize the tragedy of mass shootings and pretend, at least, that they would like to see gun sanity reign in Americathat the Second Amendment acts as a barrier to anything like the gun laws, passed after mass shootings, that have saved so many lives in Canada and Australia. Like it or not, according to this argument, the Constitution limits our ability to control the number and kinds of guns in private hands. Even the great Jim Jeffries, in his memorable standup on American madness, says, Why cant you change the Second Amendment? Its an amendment!as though further amending it were necessary to escape it.

In point of historical and constitutional fact, nothing could be further from the truth: the only amendment necessary for gun legislation, on the local or national level, is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense. This sense can be summed up in a sentence: if the Founders hadnt wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase well regulated in the amendment. (A quick thought experiment: What if those words were not in the preamble to the amendment and a gun-sanity group wanted to insert them? Would the National Rifle Association be for or against this change? Its obvious, isnt it?)

The confusion is contemporary. (And, let us hope, temporary.) It rises from the younger-than-springtime decision D.C. v. Heller, from 2008, when Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a 54 majority, insisted that, whether he wanted it to or not, the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own a weapon. (A certain disingenuous show of disinterestedness is typical of his opinions.)

This was an astounding constitutional reading, or misreading, as original as Citizens United, and as idiosyncratic as the reasoning in Bush v. Gore, which found a conclusive principle designed to be instantly discardedor, for that matter, as the readiness among the courts right wing to overturn a health-care law passed by a supermajority of the legislature over a typo. Anyone who wants to both grasp that decisions radicalism and get a calm, instructive view of what the Second Amendment does say, and was intended to say, and was always before been understood to say, should read Justice John Paul Stevenss brilliant, persuasive dissent in that case. Every person who despairs of the sanity of the country should read it, at least once, not just for its calm and irrefutable case-making but as a reminder of what sanity sounds like.

Stevens, a Republican judge appointed by a Republican President, brilliantly analyzes the history of the amendment, making it plain that for Scalia, et al., to arrive at their view, they have to reference not the deliberations that produced the amendment but, rather, bring in British common law and lean on interpretations that arose long after the amendment was passed. Both keep arms and bear arms, he demonstrates, were, in the writers day, military terms used in military contexts. (Gary Wills has usefully illuminated this truth in the New York Review of Books.) The intent of the Second Amendment, Stevens explains, was obviously to secure to the people a right to use and possess arms in conjunction with service in a well-regulated militia. The one seemingly sound argument in the Scalia decisionthat the people in the Second Amendment ought to be the same people referenced in the other amendments, that is, everybodyis exactly the interpretation that the preamble was meant to guard against.

Stevenss dissent should be read in full, but his conclusion in particular is clear and ringing:

The right the Court announces [in Heller] was not enshrined in the Second Amendment by the Framers; it is the product of todays law-changing decision. . . . Until today, it has been understood that legislatures may regulate the civilian use and misuse of firearms so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of a well-regulated militia. The Courts announcement of a new constitutional right to own and use firearms for private purposes upsets that settled understanding . . .

Justice Stevens and his colleagues were not saying, a mere seven years ago, that the gun-control legislation in dispute in Heller alone was constitutional within the confines of the Second Amendment. They were asserting that essentially every kind of legislation concerning guns in the hands of individuals was compatible with the Second Amendmentindeed, that regulating guns in individual hands was one of the purposes for which the amendment was offered.

So there is no need to amend the Constitution, or to alter the historical understanding of what the Second Amendment meant. No new reasoning or tortured rereading is needed to reconcile the Constitution with common sense. All that is necessary for sanity to rule again, on the question of guns, is to restore the amendment to its commonly understood meaning as it was articulated by this wise Republican judge a scant few years ago. And all you need for that is one saner and, in the true sense, conservative Supreme Court vote. One Presidential election could make that happen.

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The Second Amendment Is a Gun-Control Amendment

posted at 6:41 pm on October 2, 2015 by Matt Vespa

At a small private fundraiser in New York, Hillary Clinton slammed the Supreme Court and the National Rifle Association on Second Amendment issues, even going so far as to say that the Court is wrong regarding this provision in our bill of rights. Stephen Gutowski and Alanna Goodman at the Washington Free Beacon obtainedthe audio of this event:

I was proud when my husband took [the National Rifle Association] on, and we were able to ban assault weapons, but he had to put a sunset on so 10 years later. Of course [President George W.] Bush wouldnt agree to reinstate them, said Clinton.

Weve got to go after this, Clinton continued. And here again, the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get.

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Im going to speak out, Im going to do everything I can to rally people against this pernicious, corrupting influence of the NRA and were going to do whatever we can, she said.

Clinton argued that the NRA has so intimidated elected members of Congress and other legislative bodies that these people are passing the most absurd laws.

The idea that you can have an open carry permit with an AK-47 over your shoulder walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket is just despicable, she said.

Yet, when one says the Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment, is the former first lady referring to the Heller case? The 2008 D.C. v Heller was a landmark case that said Americans have a constitutional right to own a handgun unrelated to service in a standing militia, but it only applied to federal enclaves. In 2010, McDonald v. Chicago expanded that right to the states.

I have no doubt that Clinton agrees with these views. Im not so sure if she has the guts to pull it off. Yes, her husband did take on the NRA and it partially contributed to the 1994 Democratic wipeout. Speaker of the House Tom Foley (D-OR) became the first sitting speaker since Galusha Grow to lose his re-election bid. Grow was booted in 1862.

Six years later, Democrats still didnt get the picture. The story goes that Vice President Al Gore could have easily become President Gore if he hadnt tried to out-gun control his Democratic rival, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ), in the primaries; a completely unnecessary move since Bradley never polled within striking distance of Gore. The consequence of this was Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia going for Bush. If these three states had been etched into the Gore column, Florida wouldnt have been an issue. Bush could have still won Florida, but Gore would have locked down more than enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Since then, the gun control movement has gone into the bunker.

All Clinton is doing is courting the most progressive elements of the Democratic base, which yearns for a candidate that will challenge the NRA and enact new gun control laws. In reality, Clinton rhetoric on SCOTUS being wrong on the Second Amendment, and her pledge to make that case every chance I get, is the definition of pie-in-the-sky. You need a functioning state-based Democratic political apparatus to place pressure on localities and state legislatures to change the guns laws, file lawsuits, and hope that the Supreme Court will hear arguments again on the Second Amendment. As its been reported before, state-based Democratic parties are all but finished in some states.

This underreported aspect of the Obama era includes the slow, bleeding death of these political operations, which have entered such a state of decrepitude in some areas that Clinton has vowed to rebuild those structures if shes elected president. With no strong Democratic leaders at the local level, no anti-gun voices in the state legislatures, which have become more Republican since 2008, Hillarys crusade to reverse landmark gun rights cases on the Supreme Court seems to be nothing more than slogans for fundraising. Moreover, on the legal front, those who are for Second Amendment freedom appear to be on a winning streak, winning cases in California and Illinois that either expand gun rights, or prevent governing bodies from curtailing them.

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Clinton at private fundraiser: SCOTUS is wrong about the ...

During a press conference this afternoon, the president mocked gun rights supporters for supposedly spreading conspiracy theories about his desire to take away guns from law abiding citizens.

Obama described gun rights supporters as absolutists who denounced gun control as somehow an assault on freedom or communistic or a plot by me to, you know, take over and stay in power forever or something.

I mean, there are all kinds of crack pot conspiracy theories that float around there, he continued. Some of which by the way are ratified by elected officials in the other party on occasion.

He dismissed the notion that the issue of mass shootings was somehow just a mental problem.

There are hundreds of millions of angry young men around the world, most of them dont shoot, he insisted. The only thing we can do is make sure that they dont have an entire arsenal when something snaps in them.

Obama suggested that gun control supporters shouldnt vote for Democrats even if they were good on other issues they cared about.

Even if theyre great on other stuff for a couple of election cycles, you got to vote against them and let them know precisely why youre voting against them, he said.

He encouraged gun control supporters to be single issue voters, like gun rights supporters who agreed with the National Rifle Association.

The NRA has had a good start, you know. Theyve been at this for a long time, he said.

Theyve perfected what they do, you have got to give them credit they know how to stir up fear, they know how to stir up their base, they know how to raise money, they know how to scare politicians, they know how to organize campaigns and the American people are going to have to match them in their sense of urgency if were actually going to stop this.

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Obama Mocks Second Amendment Supporters For Crack Pot ...