I had so much else I wanted to write but…
Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has written a bit of tripe called The Second Amendment Hoax. The piece is wrong in enough places that either she is being intentionally ignorant or she’s actually a moron.
We are free to get a .223 caliber AR-15–style semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm handgun.
Stop right there. Let me explain something to everyone: semi-automatic means that one trigger pull fires one bullet out the end of the barrel. Nothing more or less. It does not make the gun more powerful, it is not a machine gun. I want to be sure everyone is aware of that. Nearly every gun produced for decades is a semi-automatic. One trigger pull, one bullet. This is opposed to a shotgun or bolt-action gun that requires one to rack a chamber or pull a bolt to clear the empty shell and put the new bullet in its place.
This limits the shots per minute to the speed of the human finger. But I’ll give her credit for not saying “assault rifle.” (The AR 15 is not an Assault Rifle, that’s not what the AR stands for. Assault rifles typically have various modes of operation such as semi-, burst, and fully-automatic.)
We are also free to defend ourselves against rapists, murderers, and tin cans with the guns. Lots of things kill people, even children, and none of them get the focus guns do.
I’m going to skip all of her scare mongering about “our kids getting shot with the weapons of war” and nonsense. That’s emotion, not logic.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution says this: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
She then tries to argue this isn’t an individual right, but I will go ahead and say:
“A well informed populace, being necessary to the security of the free State, the right of the people to keep and bear writing utensils, shall not be infringed.”
Who can own writing utensils in this mash-up of 1A and 2A, the populace or the people? Does that mean we only have a collective right to pencils?
No, because that’s not how the human brain interprets English. Yeah, “the people” and “the populace” are the same. “The militia” is made up of “the people.” It’s legally defined by the government as men between something like 17 and 45, and I think it includes a rider for anyone outside that group wanting in. (Also, now we’d need to add women, but still.)
We are the militia. Every able-bodied adult male by default, plus we can’t be sexist or ableist so we’ll add women and other-abled folks.
She goes on to quote others about the amendment and what “we” and Justice Bulger thought of it, but the Founders were extremely clear in their own writings and opinions. It was meant as an individual right. If you asked any politician for the first 150 years of the United States what the second amendment meant they would all without hesitation tell you folks could own guns. Democrat, Republican, Whig — doesn’t matter.
That the Heller court itself qualified that right in multiple ways—and that in the years since Heller, the court has declined one important gun case after another—doesn’t change the fact that the hoax is now the law.
Replace Heller with Roe, and guns with abortion. And watch the liberal conniption fit. Whether you like it or not we’ve decided that the Supreme Court can interpret fairly wildly. In Heller and MacDonald, though, they interpret the Constitution quite narrowly — not nearly the horror Dahlia is imagining in their words.
The larger fabrication is the idea that the Second Amendment—unlike other provisions of the Constitution—cannot be subject to any reasonable restriction
Here comes the strawman.
Nobody is arguing that. We’re arguing over what reasonable is. To get a gun, you have to be a citizen. You can’t be a felon. You can’t be insane. You must undergo a background check unless buying from a private buyer — who can still get in hot water if you would have failed a background check — and you must do this for every single gun you buy. If I bought a new gun today I would first have to fill out a form and wait for a NICS check. If I bought two guns today, I might have to fill out two forms — I’ve never bought two guns at once before.
You can’t buy, own, or manufacture a fully-automatic gun outside of very narrow exceptions requiring further forms and waiting periods. You cannot have explosive devices outside of a few cases. I cannot own a fighter jet with live missiles.
There are restrictions already in place on the Second Amendment.
Hoax number three: Obama, Clinton, Democrats, liberals, the media, whomever are coming for your guns.
Senator DiFi once said that, if she had the votes, she would round up every gun in the country (except for her armed security). The media has in many places called for a repeal of the Second Amendment entirely (Rolling Stone is the most recent example.) After every tragedy the media and Democrats (but I repeat myself) come after the most popular sporting rifle in America.
Even though it wasn’t used in Orlando.
After every lunatic goes on a shooting spree — almost ALWAYS where people are forcibly disarmed — the media and Democrats propose an “assault weapons ban.” This always involves some nebulous definition of “assault weapon” up to and including “the shoulder thing that goes up.”
Obama has constantly pushed to reduce our rights. We just push back. Hillary has promised to sideline our rights — and she’ll lose in a landslide for it — and we just push back.
We had an Assault Weapons Ban. It banned guns for how they looked. Why the hell would we trust you again?
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Gun control wouldn’t help in The Boots Are Red