World News Korner

New book exploring the 2nd Amendment will NOT make the Ammosexuals very happy.

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Courtesy of Mother Jones:

As America grapples with a relentless tide of gun violence, pro-gun activists have come to rely on the Second Amendment as their trusty shield when faced with mass-shooting-induced criticism. In their interpretation, the amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms—a reading that was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 2008 ruling in District of Columbia. v. Heller. Yet most judges and scholars who debated the clause's awkwardly worded and oddly punctuated 27 words in the decades before Heller almost always arrived at the opposite conclusion, finding that the amendment protects gun ownership for purposes of military duty and collective security. It was drafted, after all, in the first years of post-colonial America, an era of scrappy citizen militias where the idea of a standing army—like that of the just-expelled British—evoked deep mistrust.

In his new book, The Second Amendment: A Biography, Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, digs into this discrepancy. What does the Second Amendment mean today, and what has it meant over time? He traces the history of the contentious clause and the legal reasoning behind it, from the Constitutional Convention to modern courtrooms.

So what exactly did Mr. Waldman discover about the history of the 2nd Amendment?

MJ: What preconceived notions about the Second Amendment did the history that you uncovered confirm or debunk?

MW: There are surprises in this book for people who support gun control, and people who are for gun rights. When the Supreme Court ruled in Heller, Justice Scalia said he was following his doctrine of originalism. But when you actually go back and look at the debate that went into drafting of the amendment, you can squint and look really hard, but there's simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting. Emphatically, the focus was on the militias. To the framers, that phrase "a well-regulated militia" was really critical. In the debates, in James Madison's notes of the Constitutional Convention, on the floor of the House of Representatives as they wrote the Second Amendment, all the focus was about the militias. Now at the same time, those militias are not the National Guard. Every adult man, and eventually every adult white man, was required to be in the militias and was required to own a gun, and to bring it from home. So it was an individual right to fulfill the duty to serve in the militias.

You know I have a friend, some of you may actually know of him, who is always going on about the fact that we really cannot make any truly effective long term gun laws until somebody in the government finds the balls to revisit the 2nd Amendment and rewrite it so that it makes sense in our modern world.

I usually get pissed at him and tell him that suggesting that is a cop out for not wanting to do anything, since there is NO way that in this political climate we could ever attempt to modernize the 2nd Amendment.

However just between you and I, he is not exactly wrong.

As long as the Amendment remains so poorly written, and open to interpretation, it will continue to interfere with our efforts to protect our citizens from senseless gun violence.

But hey, perhaps we will in the near future finally get a Supreme Court that understands the Amendment and reinterprets it to help Congress pass mandatory laws gun registration laws, ban military style weapons, and make mental health background checks a must before giving every Tom, Dick, and Dirty Harry a weapon for killing other human beings.

Justice Antony Scalia 78 years old.

Justice Anthony Kennedy 77 years old.

Justice Clarence Thomas 65 years old.

Justice Samuel Alito 64 years old

If the Democrats manage to hold on to the White House for two more terms it COULD happen!

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