Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

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We're almost in the era of minority rule in the United Stated. The only bright spot here is we're in the death throes of conservative exceptionalism. But still the undue influence that group has due to gerrymandering, systemic voter suppression and disproportionate state representation is depressing.

The Supreme Court is meant to be one of the safeguards here. To his credit, while the conservatives were 5-4 John Roberts actually tried to fight the appearance of partisanship by the Court because faith in the institution matters. But now? The Conservatives have long put off taking up Second Amendment cases not because they weren't important but because they might not go their way. Now with a solid 6-3 majority, they seem prepared to foist that world view down our collective throats.

If you want an analog of this, look at how the Redeemer court effectively dismantled post-Emancipation protections in the decades following [1].

There's so many problems with the Second Amendment zealots it's hard to know where to begin.

First, the "right". Well, it's not absolute. If it was, it wouldn't be denied to felons and there wouldn't be background checks or waiting periods. Nor would there be a restriction on what "arms" the citizens could "keep and bear". Why not fully automatic weapons? Surface to air missiles? Nuclear weapons? Nerve gas? Biological weapons?

As soon as you concede the right isn't absolute you're just debating what limits there should be.

There's also the Second Amendment specifically noting a "well-regulated Militia". That nuance has been conveniently forgotten about.

The US had 45 mass shootings in a month recently [2]. 45.

The disastrous War on Drugs created the drug cartels. What do those cartels fight with in their territories? Guns easily obtained in the US. That's how the drug trade works: drugs into the US, money and guns out.

What's amazing is the US has collectively thrown its hands up saying "there's nothing we can do" to a problem literally no one else has.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/16/us/mass-shootings-45-one-mont...

"Second Amendment zealot" here. I'm optimistic about the future of civil rights in the area of the 2A in upcoming years.

There's a lot wrong with your post, but I'll just say that the right, like others, is written in a way that is absolute. If we want to restrict it, then we should amend the Constitution accordingly, as intended. Ideally, this should occur whenever a right is taken from us. This would make it clear what we're losing and force those proposing it justify doing so.

> There's a lot wrong with your post, but I'll just say that the right, like others, is written in a way that is absolute.

Then perhaps governments should be able to regulate it, as in the very first clause of 2A: well regulated.

And if one is going to be an Originalist à la Scalia (and there is nothing in the US Constitution that says that this is the (only) valid way to interpret it), then one needs treat the Milita like it was when the 2A was written: akin to the modern day National Guard. So if you wish to bear arms as part of the Militia, I would ask: what is your rank? who is your command officer? what unit are you a part of?

You're wrong as the 2A has consistently been assumed to mean the right of states to have militias such as the National Guard as well as individuals would also be able to bear arms. Please show me a single Founding Father that said individuals should not be able to own a gun. the only way to rescind it is with an amendment, and good luck with that since we can't even agree on an amendment to guarantee women equal rights.

> Please show me a single Founding Father that said

A corpus analysis of the words "bear" and "arms" separately and together showed:

> 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. Subtracting about 350 duplicate matches, that leaves about 1,500 separate occurrences of “bear arms” in the 17th and 18th centuries, and only a handful don’t refer to war, soldiering or organized, armed action. These databases confirm that the natural meaning of “bear arms” in the framers’ day was military.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/antonin-scalia-was-w...

* https://archive.is/TZAJs

Doing a similar search in just the works of the Founding Fathers' works would bear similar results. For a fuller treatment on the subject I will refer you to Michael Waldman's The Second Amendment: A Biography where he goes into this:

* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Second-Amendment/...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Waldman

See also my other comment about a literature review:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26951279

If you want to be Originalist† (à la Scalia), then ~200 years of legal history showed collective right being the accepted view; the individual right being present (not even prevalent) for only ~50 years.

† Of course nothing in the US Constitution itself says that it has to be interpreted in an Originalist way.

> First, the "right". Well, it's not absolute. If it was, it wouldn't be denied to felons and there wouldn't be background checks or waiting periods.

You're using circular reasoning here. Just because the right is currently infringed doesn't mean the right doesn't exist. That's like saying that if some people's right to vote is infringed, there really isn't a right to vote.

> There's also the Second Amendment specifically noting a "well-regulated Militia".

"well regulated" meant "in good working order" at the time the BoR was written. The operative clause is "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", which is a pretty strong statement.

> The disastrous War on Drugs created the drug cartels.

What do you think a new "war on guns" will do?

> Guns easily obtained in the US. That's how the drug trade works: drugs into the US, money and guns out.

Sometimes the US Government gives guns to the cartels which are ostensibly illegal for US civilians to own! [1]

> a problem literally no one else has.

The US isn't even close to the most violent country per capita. Other countries with less recognition of the right to keep and bear arms just resort to other forms of violence [2]. The "assault weapons" people are very concerned about are used in less than 300 homicides per year. More people are killed with hands and fists than all rifles (a subset of which are deemed "assault weapons") [3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

[3]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

> "well regulated" meant "in good working order" at the time the BoR was written.

The late Chief Justice Burger (appointed by Nixon) disagreed:

> That says a well regulated militia being necessary for the defense of the state, people's rights to bear arms. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word "fraud," on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. Now just look at those words. There are only three lines to that amendment. A well regulated militia -- if the militia, which was going to be the state army, was going to be well regulated, why shouldn't 16 and 17 and 18 or any other age persons be regulated in the use of arms the way an automobile is regulated? It's got to be registered, that you can't just deal with it at will. Someone asked me recently if I was for or against a bill that was pending in Congress calling for five days' waiting period. And I said, yes, I'm very much against it, it should be thirty days' waiting period so they find out why this person needs a handgun or a machine gun.

* MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, Dec. 16, 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eya_k4P-iEo

See also various comments by the late Associate Justice Stevens (Ford).

The individual right to bear arms is a recent invention, with no record of the idea appearing in the legal record until a 1960 article in the William and Mary Law Review:

* https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol2/iss2/6/

And in that article the author himself states:

> The majority of the jurisdictions have concluded that both the United States Constitution and the various state constitutions, having a similar provision relating to the right to bear arms, refer to the militia as a whole composed and regulated by the state as it desires. The individual does not have the right to own or bear individual arms, such being a privilege not a right.

A 2000 review of the literature:

* PDF: http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

> Just because the right is currently infringed doesn't mean the right doesn't exist

So obviously inmates should also be allowed guns too right? Where's the NRA's "AR-15s for Inmates" campaign? Hyperbolic? Sure. But it exposes the fallacy that the right (or any right for that matter) is absolute. Just like the First Amendment doesn't mean shouting "I have a bomb" in a crowded theater is protected speech the government can't criminalize.

> The operative clause is ...

Oh, so the first part is just irrelevant flavor text? Let me put this in context [1]:

> Under the Articles of Confederation, from 1777 on, states were required to maintain their own “well regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered” with “a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage.” The states would appoint all officers under the rank of colonel. The confederation Congress was permitted to “requisition” these militias for the “common defence,” but only “in proportion to the number of white inhabitants in such State.” If other states didn’t furnish their share, Congress could ask complying states for more than their proportional share—but the state legislature was guaranteed the power to refuse, even in an emergency. And even when the militia was under federal command, the state legislatures would choose replacement officers as well.

You continue:

> Other countries with less recognition of the right to keep and bear arms just resort to other forms of violence

From your link, less murders per 100k than the United States (4.96) include Niger (4.44), Somalia (4.31) and Libya (2.52).

Some other developed nations: Australia (0.88), England and Wales (1.21), Germany (0.95), Norway (0.47) and Japan (0.26).

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/second-...

How many gun deaths per year would need to occur for you to reconsider?

Funny, how this exact 6-3 conservative court has denied cert already in the past year to a number of gun cases, even where there is a circuit split. That and all your other arguments are bunk, see the other replies.

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