Why we deeply need a new narrative on Gun Rights and the 2nd Amendment

Gun reform is a difficult issue - we may need to look to the past to carve out a brighter future

[People, I’ve been suspended on Dailykos for two weeks because the Staff didn’t like the title of one of my diaries. Again. If you could do me a favor could you share your favorite post of mine on your social media to help me really get things going here on Substack. I suspect I won’t be writing on Kos for very much longer.

Thanks.]

In 2008 the Supreme Court established gun ownership as a personal right in their Heller vs DC decision.

The ban on registering handguns and the requirement to keep guns in the home disassembled or nonfunctional with a trigger lock mechanism violate the Second Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The Court held that the first clause of the Second Amendment that references a “militia” is a prefatory clause that does not limit the operative clause of the Amendment. Additionally, the term “militia” should not be confined to those serving in the military, because at the time the term referred to all able-bodied men who were capable of being called to such service. To read the Amendment as limiting the right to bear arms only to those in a governed military force would be to create exactly the type of state-sponsored force against which the Amendment was meant to protect people. Because the text of the Amendment should be read in the manner that gives greatest effect to the plain meaning it would have had at the time it was written, the operative clause should be read to “guarantee an individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” This reading is also in line with legal writing of the time and subsequent scholarship. Therefore, banning handguns, an entire class of arms that is commonly used for protection purposes, and prohibiting firearms from being kept functional in the home, the area traditionally in need of protection, violates the Second Amendment.

This was a completely new and novel interpretation of the 2nd Amendment where its prefacing clause “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” is rendered irrelevant and moot. This was not the intention or the interpretation of the founders. This is not how the SCOTUS had determined what the 2nd Amendment meant previously. That is a radical re-interpretation.

The Militia is the entire point of the 2nd Amendment. It’s why the Amendment exists. It’s not about hunting, it’s not about self-protection, it’s not about anything other than protecting the nation from foreign attack and domestic rebellion.

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