After watching the CNN “panel” discuss the President’s Town Hall meeting on gun control, I think it is only right that CNN drop one N and, henceforth, be known as Cable Network. But CNN is too easy a target (though an entirely deserving one). The root problem, here, is not an incompetent pseudo-news organization but a corrupt Supreme Court.
For a new country running an experiment in governance on the edge of the frontier in 18th century America, an armed citizenry was an insurance policy. Today, that country’s government is guaranteed by the most powerful military in history and all its reserve and auxiliary components. Except for a few independent state guards, “well regulated” militias are no longer. And they certainly are no longer “necessary to the security of a free State.”
But that is what the second amendment speaks to: collective security. It does so explicitly, exactly, pointedly, and in so many words. It says that it is concerned with a “well regulated Militia” because such an entity is “necessary to the security of a free State.” Note the word “State.” It does not anywhere say anything about individuals, much less about the right of inbred, racist yokels to tote loaded assault weapons through department stores.
So, how did the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling manage to overlook all that? Dissents are not the law of the land, but they do give insight into the quality of the majority decision. In this case, we have two dissents upon which to draw. The majority ruling was, as Justice Stevens so politely put it in his dissent, “strained.” He also called it unpersuasive, overwrought, and “novel.” Justice Breyer’s dissent (the minority of four joined in both dissents) said outright that “the Second Amendment protects militia-related, not self-defense-related, interests.” So, the two dissents tell us that the assertion of the Republican majority that the first thirteen words in the amendment do not exist is less than credible. In fact, it would be silly were its consequences not so terrible.
The problem is that there is no check on and nothing to balance a Supreme Court ruling, especially when congress is so dysfunctional and the amendment process so onerous. Thus, when a Court has a partisan majority that is more than willing to follow political dogma rather than the constitution, no matter how twisted and irrational such rulings would of necessity be, we are condemned to live with decisions that say racism is over, that corporations have the same (or more) rights than do people, that no one would dream of suppressing the voting rights of minorities, and that money is the same thing as speech, especially when in large denominations wielded by plutocrats. Once a Court has shown such an aversion to reality, it is a small step to claim that the actual words in the Constitution are not relevant.
Ironically, if one were to take the opposite approach and assume that the constitution means what the words in it say it means, we might have no gun rights at all, today. No well-regulated militias; no guns. Maybe that occurred to and so terrified the Republican majority that they over corrected (though that probably is too generous).
Alternatively, if Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were half the “originalists” they claim to be, maybe we could constrain the entire argument to the possession of muskets. I think most if not all gun-control advocates could live with the right to bear muskets.
The real solution is a new amendment that would have two purposes. One would be to safeguard the rights and define the responsibilities of sportsmen, target shooters, and people who need personal protection. The second would be to safeguard the rights — and the lives — of everyone else.
Unfortunately, there are no good ways to get there, or at least, no timely ways. The willful misinterpretation of the Second Amendment has created an on-going atrocity that can be ended only by a new Court or a new amendment. Either way, we need to organize and get started with the long haul always in mind. This is going to take a long time, a long, ugly, and very deadly time.
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