Researching the Second Amendment

Was the second amendment intended to secure individual gun ownership rights? I decided to look into the issue myself instead of reading the viewpoints of others since they could be shading the evidence. I read the most relevant Federalist paper. 

I read some original state constitutions, several of which are explicit in guaranteeing private ownership rights. Here's a selection:

Pennsylvania: § 21.  Right to bear arms. The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.

Ohio: The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be kept up; and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power.

Georgia: Paragraph VIII. Arms, right to keep and bear. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but the General Assembly shall have power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne.

Virginia: Section 13. Militia; standing armies; military subordinate to civil power. That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

I read about the House discussion on the draft amendment. It contains a great deal of original info, but its viewpoint seems like it might be skewed in its emphasis on the Quaker issue. Here's a long article on early gun laws because that can show what they considered acceptable way back then. Yes, there were restrictions on crazy people. 

My current guess as of late summer of 2023? (Yes, there was a long delay in publishing this.) The second amendment is mostly about militias, how every state could and should have one, that the federal government shouldn't be able to ban state militias, and how they are to be militias of the populace at large. As for limitations on gun rights, that was like many issues--up to the individual state to decide. 

Image: American Rifleman

Extras. Massachusetts gun rights discussion.

Update 6/24/24. This article discusses in detail the SCOTUS decision allowing restrictions based on laws from 1800 and prior, if the laws are similar in these times. 

February links

NYT endorses Warren and Klobuchar. (Didn't do any good for Warren.)

Virginia gun rights rally. Virginia Beach after mass shooting. Gun rights view. WaPo coverage. White supremacists arrested before arriving. Capsule report: it was peaceful. Solid people taking the issue seriously.

Questions for witnesses in abuse of power.

Strategy for Dems. Clear list, but do I agree?

Child abuse? A terrifying case of investigative abuse against a family.

Analysis on national-wide injunctions as judicial activism.

Bernie loves campaigning and hates governing. Oy, another one.

Did socialism ruin Venezuela? The article hedges, but it seems like it did. Moderate depth.

Trump is trying to demoralize his opponents so they give up.

US federal budgets continue to be smoke and mirrors and red ink. WE'RE DOOMED.

Written by socialists, this article tells why Bernie is just the beginning. Probably a fair representation of socialists, including their intense dislike of capitalism. Are we doomed again?

Image: latimes.com

November - December links

I wrote more posts in November than in any other month in the past year. The collection of links aside from the Ukraine scandal are paltry. Not much new in America.

Surprising Arizona politics. A tough, nasty, bigoted sheriff prompted many Latinos to run for elected office. This is another sign of the self-correction in the American political system. (But is it enough?)

Illegal gun sales. By law enforcement officials. Did they trust that the guns wouldn't be used on fellow police?

2nd amendment rationale. A viewpoint on the 2nd amendment, including its racial aspects. It's inspired me to look into the background of the 2nd amendment and try to sort out the contradictory arguments.

The GOP southern strategy. An article from back in 1970. It's the typical NYT style with a lot of side trips, but very interesting, focusing on the strategist who foresaw the realignment of voters.

How Kamala Harris failed. She lacked a clear strategy beyond being intelligent, black, and female.

Centrism is deluded. This article makes a strong case that there's no chance of working with Republicans. However, that's not the only reason to support someone like Biden or Buttigieg. Another reason is that those further left may not be able to win, not worth taking the chance, or just too socialist.

Flynn facing sentence. Mike Flynn tried to delay his sentence by promising he'd cooperate more with the Russian investigation. Then he fired his lawyers, brought in a new team to push the deep-state conspiracy narrative, and attacked the people he's supposed to cooperate with. The judge is not amused. A shorter version of the newstory and a longer version.

Media bias measured. Well, I'm not sure how the determination is made, but this site lists how biased a media outlet is, and how factual the reporting is. Plus it gives examples when there are issues with factual reporting.

Trump talking points. Someone allied with Trump launched a special site just for those holidays spent with your stupid liberal family members. It tells zipperheads how to argue, just in case they haven't watched enough Hannity lately. Are these good arguments? OF COURSE NOT. When do Trump supporters care about the quality of their arguments? Blather and blind, willful assertion are fine by them.

Image: snowflakevictory.com

More August links

Antifa is not the biggest violent threat. ... no matter what GOP pols say. The alt-right, neo-Nazis, white nationalists are a much bigger threat, but it's not politically useful for Republicans to acknowledge. They want antifa as the boogeyman. Related: A guy wearing a MAGA hat was beat up. Oh, those violent lefties. Except that he went to several bars soliciting fights. In video, we can see the lefties telling him that no one is going outside to fight him. Ummm... never mind.

Dictator-like move in Great Britain. Boris Johnson pulls a nearly unprecedented move to prevent Parliament from unseating him. I think Parliament will have a few days in session, and hopefully will remove him. Update: The British Supreme Court struck down the closing of Parliament, so Boris Johnson will have to face them.

Learning about the 2nd amendment. Here. Quite comprehensive.

Problems with e-verify surface. After a major raid on poultry processors. Good info to know.

Election prediction succeeded in 2018. How about 2020? I'm not unbiased, but I see skewing of the prediction, with progressive being favored. The political scientist points out that progressive did better than expected in Texas and Georgia compared to blue dogs in Missouri and Indiana. But they all lost. What about in Arizona? Well, it was a centrist Dem who won there. Odd to ignore that. Related. The Trump campaign is very worried about suburban women - worried that they'll lose the 2020 election.

Red flag law in California. Not a big sample size, but none of them became mass shooters. Frankly, we can't know what was prevented, if anything. But prevention is a worthy goal, especially considering that we are preventing deaths. In the last two weeks, there have been a spate of reports of people arrested for having caches of guns and worrisome plans, but before anyone was shot. That seems preferable to me, right?

A moderate view on US intervention. Police the worst places to shut down the worst of the safe havens.

Image: joe.ie

Our American gun culture

I've thought about guns all my adult intellectual life, which actually started at age 12-13. I've observed the American cultural traits and myths about guns. First, I have to say that guns are pervasive in American culture. Not as pervasive as food or cars or television, which are practically universal. But about as common as: voting, home ownership, and exercising regularly.

Our latest example of toxic American gun culture was a school shooting with 17 people killed. This is no surprise in the US. We have so many mass shootings, though the death toll isn't usually that high.

Gun rights advocates come up with so many excuses. It's never the goddamn huge availability of guns. It's never the worship of guns to blame. It's always mental illness, or a tenuous connection to the Democratic party, or bad parenting, or liberalism to blame.

I'm not having any of it. The gun rights advocates own these shootings. They are the ones who fight EVERY SINGLE REFORM.  They fight any improvement to background checking (NICS), until there's another mass shooting. They don't try to improve reporting. They don't want the system checked, its flaws revealed. They need the background check as a scapegoat. Many of them don't even support the background check, but feel it was imposed on them. That leads me to wonder if they want totally open sales with no limits on who can buy guns.

Maybe some do. Maybe they think it's a constitutional right, like free speech and freedom of religion. However, my freedom of religion doesn't give me the capability of killing even one person, much less riddling scores of people with bullets. Possibly that's a defect in our Bill of Rights--that gun ownership can't be restricted. Or perhaps I should say that 5 Supreme Court justices decided that's what the 2nd amendment meant.

But the interpretation of the 2nd amendment is only part of the problem. There is a whole cultural issue. In some quarters, you aren't a man if you don't own a gun. You aren't a man if you can't legally own a gun. You aren't an adult if you don't own a gun. Ownership is a right, not a privilege. It's a right, with no attendant responsibility to have training, or good handling. They belief anyone who speaks about good handling is infringing on sacred rights. That anyone who questions the gun culture is unpatriotic and infringing on sacred rights.

My god, more people may worship guns than attend church. That's how pervasive the gun culture is in the US.

Please note, though, that I don't think every gun advocate is part of the toxic gun culture. Many support reasonable reforms. Even more would support reforms if enough Democrats made clearly that they respect the right of sensible, responsible citizens to own guns. However, they aren't loud enough in their support of reasonable reform. Too often, their primary concern is not losing their gun rights, not safety.

Then there are the full-fledged nutcases. They resist all restrictions. They don't even trust restrictions due to mental issues. They would rather mentally ill people have full access than risk being labelled as unable to purchase due to mental impairment.

Frankly, my opinion is that our standards for mental impairment are seriously too tight. Many more people need to be disqualified due to mental impairment. We need to have a procedure for health professionals to report dangerous people, have their gun rights curtailed, and have procedures to follow up. We need the same for family members to report someone who is dangerous, and have their rights curtailed. Most of all, we need to encourage families and all parts of society to support this--to agree that safety is more important. To say "yes, we are committed to preventing dangerous people from having and using guns." I want that to be a whole-society commitment. That is the only rational basis for a healthy gun culture instead of the current toxic culture.

Again...

Image: abc15.com

Extras. An example of a gun advocate who blames anything and anyone but except the proximate cause. A conservative supports the kind of measure I talk about. It even has a name - Gun Violence Restraining Order, or GVRO. However, he writes as though these orders are common, but they aren't.

The FBI is accused of mishandling warnings about the shooter. I wonder how deluged the FBI with warnings, and whether the number far outweighed their ability to check. The right wing and alt-right have so many liars who keep them well-supplied with fake stories.

Update 4/7/18. Here's one of the fake stories. The most visible, talkative survivors are actually actors, according to lying stories floating around on the right. And many who repeat those stories don't give a damn that they're spouting lies.

The way they talk: Smart people on guns

I've wanted to make a series on real discussions that capture what people really think. It hasn't been easy to fit it in with everything else.

But you (my few readers) are lucky: Here is a great example of gun rights/gun control from two different perceptives.

Short: A gun isn't enough

I was following a news link about Eric Holder, "reefer madness," and Fast and Furious. Not surprisingly, it led to a conservative website, the Daily Caller. It was the usual tripe about Fast and Furious with a twist that Holder started major marijuana busts in California, which were connected in some unexplained way.  And it was also "highly cited" in the alternative universe where Fast and Furious is a major issue. So much for that.

However, what I saw then was interesting:

A 12 Gauge Won't Save You

Discover What Federal Agents & The Army Don't Want You To Know www.CloseCombatTraining.com

Does the NRA know that having a gun isn't enough? It's not going to be an armed citizenry that saves us from the amazing number of whackos out there. Those armed citizens also need close combat training. I guess our goose is cooked.

What I'm wearing out now.

Image: homeshopmachinist.net