The trouble is that the question hinges on ideology – how you interpret of use the Constitution. Obama taught Constitutional law – ffs – and he thinks the miss-focus of the civil rights movements was on the Judiciary clarifying civil rights rather than on legislating “redistributive change”.
Can I get a “holy shit” ?
And this is nothing new. There has always been the minimalists and alittlemoreists with regard to US government. Some people are off the reservation though, like people trying to argue that the second amendment only grants gun rights to “militias”. Seriously, the second is about the most straight forward amendment by a long shot.
And then there’s the Living Document interpretation, which was authors’ intent, to an extent. Certainly, the founders understood things would change. Search and seizure, for example, only pertained to personal belongings and mail. Soon phones came along and we took the basic ideas in the Constitution and applied them to information going over phone lines. Likewise a computer is treated like a vintage 1776 trunk full of documents.
Now some wack-jobs like to think of the Living Document philosophy as a way to change the fundamental ideas. For example, some would like to
apply what they call Living Document to the second amendment and make owning guns illegal, or owning modern automatic guns illegal. That’s wrong because it is counter to the original fundamental ideas. Gun ownership is the last safety against tyranny.
Some Living Document ninnies come at the second in two ways. One, they say modern weapons are more dangerous. And if the founders knew we’d have machineguns that can fire 900 rounds per minute they wouldn’t have wanted citizens owning them. Something is often said about hunting here too but that’s so inapplicable it’s annoying. Two, they claim our society isn’t primitive like it was and the idea that citizens would somehow have to defend their freedom from the Federal government or some other entity is ridiculous.
Ok. SO here’s my jerk answer to those two arguments. If the Redcoats had machineguns you can bet your ass the Constitution would have been specific that people have the right to own machinguns, and the Minute Men would have left their Deer rifles at home – unless that’s all they had – then they’d pick up the next dead guy’s machinegun. And yeah, a lot of German Jews of the 1930s figured their liberty was pretty safe too, and figured the new gun laws would keep them safe from gun violence. You can also bet your ass Hitler wouldn’t have killed 6 millions of them had they been armed like American hillbillies.
And here’s my thoughtful answer: The right to bear arms includes machineguns – or should – because that’s the modern personal field weapon. So is the sidearm. The fear that machine guns make it easier to kill mass numbers of people is a false one people get from watching TV. Seriously, the common wacko will kill many more people with a rifle that doesn’t dump all his ammo at his first few targets. This is for another article though. And regardless, making guns illegal only disarms law abiding citizens and leaves those exact entities armed that the second amendment was meant to arm us against.
I don’t imagine any free society saw tyranny coming. If they did I imagine they would have worked against it kicking and screaming. It’s truly naïve to imagine our freedom is so secure. And you never know what might happen. Natural disasters can suddenly put you into an environment without the rule of law. If you don’t have the right weapon, all you and your stored up bottles of water are is prey to the guys that DO have weapons.
Someone argue this with me damn-it!
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Raging Kitty
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