Ultimately this feels weak. The prefatory clause is an explanation of why the right to bear arms is to be unrestricted. It isn’t a statement to say “the people should only have guns to serve in defense of the country”, it’s to support a militia should it be necessary. Everything else is just secondary to the “shall not be infringed” portion.
The Heller decision did enumerate a right to self defense as part of the 2A, with the justification that is was common to own guns to defend one’s person and property. While it can be argued that we shouldn’t base law today on life in 1787(given issues we are seeing in LGBT rights erosion, namely), I don’t think that there’s any reason why right to self defense has diminished in importance since then.
The Constitution is generally a statement of the limitations of the government, not the citizenry. I think that paints the tone of how the bill of rights should be taken.
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This is fairly clear from the text, which says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
But in 2008, the Supreme Court found in District of Columbia v. Heller that the amendment instead supports an individual right to own a gun for any lawful purpose, a right that has nothing to do with military service.
He explained in his opinion: “Although [‘bear arms’] implies that the carrying of the weapon is for the purpose of ‘offensive or defensive action,’ it in no way connotes participation in a structured military organization.
A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase.
And in 1840, in an early right- to-bear-arms case, Tennessee Supreme Court Judge Nathan Green wrote: “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes, might carry his rifle every day, for forty years, and, yet, it would never be said of him, that he had borne arms, much less could it be said, that a private citizen bears arms, because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”
I mean, is that the way they talk?” Clement finally conceded that no, that was not the way they talked: “Well, I will grant you this, that ‘bear arms’ in its unmodified form is most naturally understood to have a military context.” Souter did not need to point out the obvious: “Bear arms” appears in its unmodified form in the Second Amendment.
Opinion | Anton Scalia was a worthless stinking fat piece of shit who ignored reality to legislate his twisted vision from the bench. Glad he’s fuckin dead.
Look I hate the guy plenty, too, but this isn’t exactly solid ground to start a discussion with. The article provides plenty of ground to talk about linguistics or at the very least not just hate on him. I think it’s important to point out that he was not just a deplorable person, but that the very reasoning he used to argue in favor of his points was not based in reality.
Interesting article. I don’t think the linguistic argument used in the OPED is going to sway anyone to support gun control.
I think a lot of the efforts to implement gun control ignore the nature of the US. The country is large and in some areas people can not rely on quick police response or if the police can respond quickly, they can’t be trusted to act in good faith.
We certainly need some gun control to prevent those who are mentally ill or previously convicted of violent crimes from owning guns. Even processes for these, if put in place, must be appealable to ensure universal fair treatment. Additionally mandatory wait times would be great as well.
I think bans of X gun because it’s scary are non sensical because those bans are not going to win over any gun rights advocates to create a national consensus.
The large majority of gun owners never commit a violent crime and should not be told to give them up because of the actions of a few.
For the first 13 years of my life I lived on a rural dirt road surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. I can think of exactly zero times in those years where we needed a gun.
Well that is just one individual out of millions. Just because you don’t see a need doesn’t mean others don’t. Plus us as individuals can’t determine what other large groups can and cannot have. We don’t have the same life experiences.
Someone may be the victim of a sexual assault and when living in a rural area having something to defend themselves gives them some peace of mind.
Imagine living in a small neighborhood where everyone knows everyone and you don’t get along with a corrupt police force. When you are in danger from someone during a home invasion or if you are hiking in the wilderness, you may not trust the cops to act in your best interest
Plus us as individuals can’t determine what other large groups can and cannot have. We don’t have the same life experiences.
Us as a collective do so all the time. It is a totally normal activity in a society. Nations other than the USA have successfully done this with guns. There is no reason the USA could not do the same except will power.
The rest of your paranoid what-if scenarios are not a valid reason for everyone to have access to unlimited firepower.
Well we are also not other countries. We have different culture, socio economic makeup, different population distribution, and different history. Something that works in another country isn’t guaranteed to work here.
I think a key reason why nothing will ever change is because moderates offer “hey we can do mental health checks, bans on ownership for people convicted of violent crimes, and mandatory wait times” to meet in the middle and compromise but both sides don’t want to do that.
Just a symptom of how polarized the nation is. Until we fix that, nothing will ever change.
The gun control debate is the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since the election of Lincoln. It has singlehandedly ensured that the Democratic Party will never achieve practical dominance, funneling literally millions of single-issue voters into the GOP’s arms. If American progressives were capable of seeing farther than the ends of their own noses, they would push to drop it from the Democratic platform. Two reasons for that:
We’ll rid our society of guns the same day we go back to the way things were before AI. In other words, when we find out how to put things back inside Pandora’s box: it’s never going to happen. Besides, the brief window in time where it was possible ended the very instant it became possible to manufacture guns at home on a prosumer-grade CNC machine and a 3D printer. You can’t un-fuck that goat.
People who have universal medical/vision/dental/mental health care, a social safety net, and a job that pays a fair wage generally don’t care anywhere near as much about shooting people as desperate/poor/sick people do. It’s idiotic to treat a sickness by ignoring the disease and treating the symptoms, it’s like clearing your basement of black mold by putting a coat of paint over it. There’s no way in hell I’ll support disarming the working class, and certainly not when they’re getting constantly fucked the way they are now.
Do you really see a large number of gun-control-centered liberals talking about getting guns out of the “inner city” or away from “urban youth,” though? Because what I’ve observed is most of the people who are concerned about gun control are trying to get guns out of the hands of largely young white men who shoot up schools, churches, grocery stores etc. I can’t recall the last time I heard someone who identified as left of center complain about “violence in Chicago” — that beat is exclusively on the right.
It doesn’t matter who they claim the impetus is for their proposals, because too many of the orgs and platforms they use (e.g. Giffords, Everytown) are run by people who very openly say they believe no one should own guns.
Biden is constantly talking about an assault weapons ban, but if you actually look at his platform, it has expanded that definition to essentially be all semiauto rifles, and is copied directly from Waters’ and Fienstein’s own bills they reintroduce every year.
Progressives don’t realize that their anti-gun rhetoric is being shaped and championed by a bunch of rich neolib politicians (like “I bought my way into a presidential campaign” Bloomberg, who runs Everytown) who want only the state to have guns.
Agreed. If we just set this issue aside and focused solely on everything that contributed to making someone want to shoot up a school we’d save far more lives more quickly. I do believe that we need gun control, but like you I don’t think we’ll get it so why waste our time trying for something that will never happen?
Part of it, I’m sure, is the natural human tendency to think emotionally and allow Perfection to become the enemy of Better when you get worked up. Some people go so far into this that they actively sabotage the exact thing they want, because they’d rather not have it at all if it can’t be done their way.
But really, I think what it comes down to is that the idea of poor people (or worse, poor non-white people) getting ahead and having a good quality of life sickens them. More people than say so out loud have an emotional attachment to the existence of the wage-enslaved underclass of Little People, people who do things for you but don’t matter, people you’re better than. They might want gun violence to stop, but on no account do they want people from projects and trailer parks to look them straight in the eye and say “we’re equals”. Even poor people fall into this, any current or former poor person you ask can tell you all about the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.
Consider this: if people didn’t have to worry about paying a red cent to check on their weird heartbeat or get that cough checked on; if they weren’t afraid for their homes or families if they lost their job; if they weren’t scared of not being able to pay for their bipolar meds or their insulin; then other people would have a shitload less domination and control over them. In short, the kind of person who ascends to a position of party policymaking would lose one of the only things their broken brains are capable of taking pleasure in. The only things they’d have left are abusing their children and murdering sex workers, and while those are popular pastimes for political leaders of all stripes, they’re increasingly risky to get away with. It’s going to be a long uphill battle to remove the artifical sources of despair in our country, and I believe they’ll do quite a bit to try and keep those sources flowing. I also suspect that some of the purportedly benevolent advocates of gun control are really just motivated by fear: deep down, they think “if you had any sense, you would kill us for what we’re doing to you”. As much as I hate to spew the rhetoric of communists, capitalists (as in the ones with real capital, not normal people who believe in private property and entrepreneurship) should be viewed with perpetual suspicion in every circumstance, trusted only as far as they can be thrown, and the ones who call for gun control are just wolves calling for sheepdog control.
Pack it up - This dude Barron laid out an opinion piece five years ago saying the Justice was wrong. Debate’s over, laws go back on the books, Scalia will be impeached and removed.
Seriously, the opinion page of WaPo is just Medium for connected people. I love reading the post for in-depth stories and to check on the local section for news of my home town, but I wouldn’t even wrap fish with the Opinion section.
That Online Corpus of Founding Era American English seems like a pretty cool database. This is five years old (pre ChatGPT) and seems to have relied on manual search (which itself seems like a vast improvement). I wonder whether large language models are being built to assimilate the entire dataset to answer questions about “original meaning” nowadays and how close to useable they are. It would be even more compelling to have longitudinal versions that can identify when changes in meaning occurred. “Based on all existing written words, it didn’t mean X at that time and that meaning first appeard 60 years later.” Newspapers and legal rulings/documents seem like relatively convincing data sources that have been well curated and relevant to the task. Particularly since SCOTUS post-Scalia has become even more insistent about original meaning. I don’t think it works well post-hoc but it will be interesting for these things to be interpreted when presented as arguments in new cases.
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Ultimately this feels weak. The prefatory clause is an explanation of why the right to bear arms is to be unrestricted. It isn’t a statement to say “the people should only have guns to serve in defense of the country”, it’s to support a militia should it be necessary. Everything else is just secondary to the “shall not be infringed” portion.
The Heller decision did enumerate a right to self defense as part of the 2A, with the justification that is was common to own guns to defend one’s person and property. While it can be argued that we shouldn’t base law today on life in 1787(given issues we are seeing in LGBT rights erosion, namely), I don’t think that there’s any reason why right to self defense has diminished in importance since then.
The Constitution is generally a statement of the limitations of the government, not the citizenry. I think that paints the tone of how the bill of rights should be taken.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
This is fairly clear from the text, which says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
But in 2008, the Supreme Court found in District of Columbia v. Heller that the amendment instead supports an individual right to own a gun for any lawful purpose, a right that has nothing to do with military service.
He explained in his opinion: “Although [‘bear arms’] implies that the carrying of the weapon is for the purpose of ‘offensive or defensive action,’ it in no way connotes participation in a structured military organization.
A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase.
And in 1840, in an early right- to-bear-arms case, Tennessee Supreme Court Judge Nathan Green wrote: “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes, might carry his rifle every day, for forty years, and, yet, it would never be said of him, that he had borne arms, much less could it be said, that a private citizen bears arms, because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”
I mean, is that the way they talk?” Clement finally conceded that no, that was not the way they talked: “Well, I will grant you this, that ‘bear arms’ in its unmodified form is most naturally understood to have a military context.” Souter did not need to point out the obvious: “Bear arms” appears in its unmodified form in the Second Amendment.
Saved 65% of original text.
Opinion | Anton Scalia was a worthless stinking fat piece of shit who ignored reality to legislate his twisted vision from the bench. Glad he’s fuckin dead.
Look I hate the guy plenty, too, but this isn’t exactly solid ground to start a discussion with. The article provides plenty of ground to talk about linguistics or at the very least not just hate on him. I think it’s important to point out that he was not just a deplorable person, but that the very reasoning he used to argue in favor of his points was not based in reality.
Agreed, sorry, it was just the format of the title made me want to format my personal opinion on him as well.
Also, just to point out:
I feel like I covered that.
Interesting article. I don’t think the linguistic argument used in the OPED is going to sway anyone to support gun control.
I think a lot of the efforts to implement gun control ignore the nature of the US. The country is large and in some areas people can not rely on quick police response or if the police can respond quickly, they can’t be trusted to act in good faith.
We certainly need some gun control to prevent those who are mentally ill or previously convicted of violent crimes from owning guns. Even processes for these, if put in place, must be appealable to ensure universal fair treatment. Additionally mandatory wait times would be great as well.
I think bans of X gun because it’s scary are non sensical because those bans are not going to win over any gun rights advocates to create a national consensus.
The large majority of gun owners never commit a violent crime and should not be told to give them up because of the actions of a few.
Banning guns with a high sustained rate of fire is not stupid. It’s just politically convenient that some of them look scary.
Many, but not most, Americans need guns. Almost none need guns that can accurately shoot dozens of rounds in a short span.
The number of Americans that NEED guns is a vanishingly small percentage. Such a need should be easy to prove and easy to regulate.
I agree that it’s easy to prove but America has a huge rural population and if you live in the country it’s a good idea to own a gun.
Why?
For the first 13 years of my life I lived on a rural dirt road surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. I can think of exactly zero times in those years where we needed a gun.
Well that is just one individual out of millions. Just because you don’t see a need doesn’t mean others don’t. Plus us as individuals can’t determine what other large groups can and cannot have. We don’t have the same life experiences.
Someone may be the victim of a sexual assault and when living in a rural area having something to defend themselves gives them some peace of mind.
Imagine living in a small neighborhood where everyone knows everyone and you don’t get along with a corrupt police force. When you are in danger from someone during a home invasion or if you are hiking in the wilderness, you may not trust the cops to act in your best interest
Us as a collective do so all the time. It is a totally normal activity in a society. Nations other than the USA have successfully done this with guns. There is no reason the USA could not do the same except will power.
The rest of your paranoid what-if scenarios are not a valid reason for everyone to have access to unlimited firepower.
Well we are also not other countries. We have different culture, socio economic makeup, different population distribution, and different history. Something that works in another country isn’t guaranteed to work here.
I think a key reason why nothing will ever change is because moderates offer “hey we can do mental health checks, bans on ownership for people convicted of violent crimes, and mandatory wait times” to meet in the middle and compromise but both sides don’t want to do that.
Just a symptom of how polarized the nation is. Until we fix that, nothing will ever change.
But what about 30 to 50 feral hogs
/s
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The gun control debate is the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since the election of Lincoln. It has singlehandedly ensured that the Democratic Party will never achieve practical dominance, funneling literally millions of single-issue voters into the GOP’s arms. If American progressives were capable of seeing farther than the ends of their own noses, they would push to drop it from the Democratic platform. Two reasons for that:
We’ll rid our society of guns the same day we go back to the way things were before AI. In other words, when we find out how to put things back inside Pandora’s box: it’s never going to happen. Besides, the brief window in time where it was possible ended the very instant it became possible to manufacture guns at home on a prosumer-grade CNC machine and a 3D printer. You can’t un-fuck that goat.
People who have universal medical/vision/dental/mental health care, a social safety net, and a job that pays a fair wage generally don’t care anywhere near as much about shooting people as desperate/poor/sick people do. It’s idiotic to treat a sickness by ignoring the disease and treating the symptoms, it’s like clearing your basement of black mold by putting a coat of paint over it. There’s no way in hell I’ll support disarming the working class, and certainly not when they’re getting constantly fucked the way they are now.
deleted by creator
Do you really see a large number of gun-control-centered liberals talking about getting guns out of the “inner city” or away from “urban youth,” though? Because what I’ve observed is most of the people who are concerned about gun control are trying to get guns out of the hands of largely young white men who shoot up schools, churches, grocery stores etc. I can’t recall the last time I heard someone who identified as left of center complain about “violence in Chicago” — that beat is exclusively on the right.
It doesn’t matter who they claim the impetus is for their proposals, because too many of the orgs and platforms they use (e.g. Giffords, Everytown) are run by people who very openly say they believe no one should own guns.
Biden is constantly talking about an assault weapons ban, but if you actually look at his platform, it has expanded that definition to essentially be all semiauto rifles, and is copied directly from Waters’ and Fienstein’s own bills they reintroduce every year.
Progressives don’t realize that their anti-gun rhetoric is being shaped and championed by a bunch of rich neolib politicians (like “I bought my way into a presidential campaign” Bloomberg, who runs Everytown) who want only the state to have guns.
deleted by creator
Agreed. If we just set this issue aside and focused solely on everything that contributed to making someone want to shoot up a school we’d save far more lives more quickly. I do believe that we need gun control, but like you I don’t think we’ll get it so why waste our time trying for something that will never happen?
Part of it, I’m sure, is the natural human tendency to think emotionally and allow Perfection to become the enemy of Better when you get worked up. Some people go so far into this that they actively sabotage the exact thing they want, because they’d rather not have it at all if it can’t be done their way.
But really, I think what it comes down to is that the idea of poor people (or worse, poor non-white people) getting ahead and having a good quality of life sickens them. More people than say so out loud have an emotional attachment to the existence of the wage-enslaved underclass of Little People, people who do things for you but don’t matter, people you’re better than. They might want gun violence to stop, but on no account do they want people from projects and trailer parks to look them straight in the eye and say “we’re equals”. Even poor people fall into this, any current or former poor person you ask can tell you all about the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality.
Consider this: if people didn’t have to worry about paying a red cent to check on their weird heartbeat or get that cough checked on; if they weren’t afraid for their homes or families if they lost their job; if they weren’t scared of not being able to pay for their bipolar meds or their insulin; then other people would have a shitload less domination and control over them. In short, the kind of person who ascends to a position of party policymaking would lose one of the only things their broken brains are capable of taking pleasure in. The only things they’d have left are abusing their children and murdering sex workers, and while those are popular pastimes for political leaders of all stripes, they’re increasingly risky to get away with. It’s going to be a long uphill battle to remove the artifical sources of despair in our country, and I believe they’ll do quite a bit to try and keep those sources flowing. I also suspect that some of the purportedly benevolent advocates of gun control are really just motivated by fear: deep down, they think “if you had any sense, you would kill us for what we’re doing to you”. As much as I hate to spew the rhetoric of communists, capitalists (as in the ones with real capital, not normal people who believe in private property and entrepreneurship) should be viewed with perpetual suspicion in every circumstance, trusted only as far as they can be thrown, and the ones who call for gun control are just wolves calling for sheepdog control.
Pack it up - This dude Barron laid out an opinion piece five years ago saying the Justice was wrong. Debate’s over, laws go back on the books, Scalia will be impeached and removed.
Seriously, the opinion page of WaPo is just Medium for connected people. I love reading the post for in-depth stories and to check on the local section for news of my home town, but I wouldn’t even wrap fish with the Opinion section.
My dude Scalia died years ago lmao
well he didn’t say remove from the bench now did he. We just gotta dig up his corpse and put it on trial.
That Online Corpus of Founding Era American English seems like a pretty cool database. This is five years old (pre ChatGPT) and seems to have relied on manual search (which itself seems like a vast improvement). I wonder whether large language models are being built to assimilate the entire dataset to answer questions about “original meaning” nowadays and how close to useable they are. It would be even more compelling to have longitudinal versions that can identify when changes in meaning occurred. “Based on all existing written words, it didn’t mean X at that time and that meaning first appeard 60 years later.” Newspapers and legal rulings/documents seem like relatively convincing data sources that have been well curated and relevant to the task. Particularly since SCOTUS post-Scalia has become even more insistent about original meaning. I don’t think it works well post-hoc but it will be interesting for these things to be interpreted when presented as arguments in new cases.