Repeal the 2nd Amendment! Or Don't!
David Weigel | March 19, 2007, 8:16am
The relaunched and rebuffed
New Republic has been making with the excellent content recently, which makes
this essay by Benjamin Wittes read all the weirder:
It's time for gun-control supporters to come to grips with the fact that the [Second] amendment actually means something in contemporary society. For which reason, I hereby advance a modest proposal: Let's repeal the damned thing.
OK, let's do it! Or...
It's true that repealing the Second Amendment is politically impossible right now; that doesn't bother me. It should be hard to take away a fundamental right.
Let's repeal it, even though we can't and it's a fundamental right. Who needs some time to catch up? Come back and check out Wiites' main argument:
I like guns well enough in rural areas. I don't like them in cities. I don't believe that the Constitution ought to prevent my hometown of Washington, D.C.--which has a serious problem with gun violence--from making a profoundly different judgment about how available handguns should be than the New York legislature would make for the hamlet near my old camp. Guns, in other words, present a legitimate policy question on which different jurisdictions should take very different approaches--including, in some areas, outright bans.
Great idea! Washington banned handguns in 1976. Check out
the chart and see if you can grok the impact the ban had on murders, violent crimes, etc etc.
Wittes is so good on
other Constitutional issues that this piece hardly makes sense. Not unless you consider it a token of how badly the anti-Second Amendment school has fallen into disrepair.
LarryA | March 19, 2007, 6:57pm | #
My former colleagues at the Washington Post described the decision as a "radical ruling" that "will inevitably mean more people killed and wounded as keeping guns out of the city becomes harder."
When Florida passed shall-issue concealed carry in the mid-1980s the anti-gun folks predicted disaster. For more than twenty years they’ve made similar predictions every time the subjects of privately owned guns or self-defense are raised. “Concealed carry will result in fenderbenders becoming firefights.” “Pilots will end up shooting passengers.” “Ending the assault rifle ban will stack bodies like cordwood.” “Police officers carrying nationally will cost cities millions in liability.” “Fifty caliber rifles will shoot down airliners.” “With castle doctrine laws blood will flow in the streets.”
After two decades and dozens of predictions they’ve been wrong
every single time. I keep wondering when the national media is going to notice the trend.
While at the Founding, the Second Amendment may have embodied a "collective" right, after the Civil War amendments, the constitutional landscape changed dramatically, and "gun-toting was individualistic, accentuating not group rights of the citizenry but self-regarding 'privileges' of discrete 'citizens' to individual self-protection."
Instead of 20th century liberal law professors guessing, why not quote the founders who wrote the Bill of Rights? They’re crystal clear on what kind of right they were protecting. And it ain’t “collective.”
There are lots of good reasons why our values today might not coincide with those of the Founders on the question of guns. The weapons available today, for one thing, are a far cry from muskets, which could never have yielded the kind of street violence America sees routinely now.
This is a truly ironic argument from a member of the press. Suppose we could bring Ben Franklin to the present.
I bet he would look at an M-16 and say, “That’s a really strange-looking firearm.” It has a barrel, a stock, sights, a trigger. It would be recognizable. I could show him how it worked, and in five minutes or so he’d be loading, firing, and hitting targets. He’d find it much easier to use than his flintlock.
But how would he compare his one-page-at-a-time hand-screwed printing press with a TV news camera? Today’s journalists claim (justifiably) “freedom of the press” for processes that don’t in any way even use a “press.”
And, by the way, this guy has no clue about the history of “street violence” in the U.S., starting with the Boston Massacre. Has he not heard of Indian wars, union busting, the civil rights movement, slave rebellions, bleeding Kansas, regulators, range wars, race riots, alcohol prohibition, the wild West, etc? Not to speak of the official wars, Revolutionary and Civil?
The Founders had a lot of experience with oppressive rulers and little idea whether the constitutional order they were setting up would remain free; maybe they would need to overthrow it sometime. After more than two centuries of constitutional government, however, it's safe to assume that neither an armed citizenry nor a well-regulated militia really is "necessary to the security of a free State."
PATRIOT Act.
f we disagree with the Founders--and as to guns, I very much disagree with whatever they might have meant--we should say so and invoke that provision of the Constitution they specifically designed so that we could give voice to our disagreements with them.
Let the debate begin.
