And Charles Cooke at NRO is quite right not only about that but that the federal government can’t disarm the country to any serious or helpful extent in the teeth of the 2nd Amendment.
And so?
Cooke writes,
American liberties, including the Second Amendment and the 40-plus state-level guarantees of the right to bear arms, pre-exist the federal government, and are defined and protected in the same document from which the state derives its authority and its structure.
The 2nd Amendment pre-exists the federal government?
The state derives its authority from a document?
Not from the consent of the people?
What is this document to which all humanity owes such servile obeisance?
Perhaps his regular readers know what he has in mind.
I don't.
In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are its employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation.
In a free republic the people rule themselves and are not prevented from doing so by any institutional embodiment of someone else’s will.
And in a free republic – free in that regard, anyway – the will of the people would not be obstructed by anything like the 2nd Amendment.
There is no clause in our charters of liberty that allows for the people to be deprived of their freedom if and when a few individuals abuse theirs.
Yes, yes.
And no one thinks there should be.
Moreover, contrary to the rhetoric of many, America is not in the middle of a crime epidemic.
As laws have been liberalized over the last forty years, crime has dropped significantly.
The partial incorporation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court, along with the decline in public support for gun control and the passage of state-level concealed carry laws has done nothing to check this trend.
This could be right.
But as Cooke made perfectly clear at the top of his article, he understands perfectly well that the frequency of ordinary crime is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
And he also understands perfectly well that mass slaughters, already on something of an upswing, have increased dramatically since the Supremes began to combine 2nd Amendment honesty with the fundamental fakery of incorporation.
It is sad that all political factions in America, more and more, and including the faction of one that I am, have so much at stake in the secure and continued reign of utter fraud in our constitutional law.
NRO's editors write, espousing an interesting twist on Locke,
The irreducible challenge the Second Amendment poses to gun restrictionists is that it does not bestow upon the people a right they previously lacked.
It proscribes the government from infringing upon a right the people already have.
It is not that the people are allowed to arm.
It is that the government is disallowed to disarm them.
This is perhaps their opening shot in what they fear may be an emerging movement for outright repeal of the 2nd Amendment, for which no public safety argument is better than the rising tide of mass murders by people both very well armed and mentally disturbed.
Locke and his usual followers, even among the American colonials, seem to have had no idea the right to keep and bear arms is an absolute natural right on the same short – and, of course, entirely imaginary – list as life, liberty, and either property (for Locke) or the pursuit of happiness (for Jefferson).
In the constitution, the actual text of the 2nd Amendment clearly does not take that view, the right being said to exist and require safeguarding because, as a practical matter and as the framers and ratifiers believed and said, a well-regulated militia is necessary (and sufficient) to the security of a free state.
Of course, the framers and ratifiers were wrong on that point, even in their own lifetimes, as the Whiskey Rebellion and the War of 1812 both made abundantly clear though the Revolutionary War somehow did not.
The former made it abundantly clear that the armed yeomanry could not possibly stand up successfully against trained regulars in defense of liberty; they could not even do it in defense of whiskey.
And the latter demonstrated the uselessness of militia against foreign regulars in wartime.
The Brits, you will recall, pretty much cleaned our clocks in a war that took place and caused significant devastation almost entirely on our territory and not at all on theirs.
Other reasons given for the necessity of such a right in the 18th Century included frontier defense against Indians, self-defense in a society without effective police, and the daily need to feed one’s family.
None of these considerations apply in our time, of course; nor would they, if reasonable, be important enough to justify a constitutional right.
And nor would they, in the absence of such a right, justify allowing the ocean of guns in private hands in America to continue to enable such horrific disasters as that at Newtown.
So we are left with a constitutionally protected right thought necessary by its original supporters only for reasons that do not apply and the effect of which – thanks in large part to a gratuitous extension of the gratuitous incorporation doctrine – is wholly harmful.
And a right that NRO’s editors, no doubt not alone, have decided to upgrade to the short list of absolute, natural rights – all of them God-granted, in their official view – the better to defend the amendment that protects it from repeal and the right itself from common sense.
Wonderful.
The irreducible challenge the Second Amendment poses to gun restrictionists is that it does not bestow upon the people a right they previously lacked.
It proscribes the government from infringing upon a right the people already have.
It is not that the people are allowed to arm.
It is that the government is disallowed to disarm them.
This is perhaps their opening shot in what they fear may be an emerging movement for outright repeal of the 2nd Amendment, for which no public safety argument is better than the rising tide of mass murders by people both very well armed and mentally disturbed.
Locke and his usual followers, even among the American colonials, seem to have had no idea the right to keep and bear arms is an absolute natural right on the same short – and, of course, entirely imaginary – list as life, liberty, and either property (for Locke) or the pursuit of happiness (for Jefferson).
In the constitution, the actual text of the 2nd Amendment clearly does not take that view, the right being said to exist and require safeguarding because, as a practical matter and as the framers and ratifiers believed and said, a well-regulated militia is necessary (and sufficient) to the security of a free state.
Of course, the framers and ratifiers were wrong on that point, even in their own lifetimes, as the Whiskey Rebellion and the War of 1812 both made abundantly clear though the Revolutionary War somehow did not.
The former made it abundantly clear that the armed yeomanry could not possibly stand up successfully against trained regulars in defense of liberty; they could not even do it in defense of whiskey.
And the latter demonstrated the uselessness of militia against foreign regulars in wartime.
The Brits, you will recall, pretty much cleaned our clocks in a war that took place and caused significant devastation almost entirely on our territory and not at all on theirs.
Other reasons given for the necessity of such a right in the 18th Century included frontier defense against Indians, self-defense in a society without effective police, and the daily need to feed one’s family.
None of these considerations apply in our time, of course; nor would they, if reasonable, be important enough to justify a constitutional right.
And nor would they, in the absence of such a right, justify allowing the ocean of guns in private hands in America to continue to enable such horrific disasters as that at Newtown.
So we are left with a constitutionally protected right thought necessary by its original supporters only for reasons that do not apply and the effect of which – thanks in large part to a gratuitous extension of the gratuitous incorporation doctrine – is wholly harmful.
And a right that NRO’s editors, no doubt not alone, have decided to upgrade to the short list of absolute, natural rights – all of them God-granted, in their official view – the better to defend the amendment that protects it from repeal and the right itself from common sense.
Wonderful.
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