For which reason, I hereby advance a modest proposal: Let's repeal the damned thing.
"Modest." If repealing the protection granting the most basic and fundamental right known to humanity and all living beings, namely the right to protect one's self, one's family and one's liberty, is "modest" then the explosion of the Tsar Bomba was also modest. [Note: Tsar Bomba means "King of Bombs" and indeed it was - a 50 megaton explosion by the Russkies in the early '60's
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/TsarBomba.html ]
If, on the other hand, the amendment really does as Silberman, Tribe, Amar, and Levinson essentially claim--and I suspect they are all more right than wrong--then it embodies values in which I don't believe.
Witteless is entitled to his views - views, I might add, which are protected by the very Amendment that he seeks to repeal. Nothing in the Constitution or any other U.S. or state law I've ever heard of mandate common sense or intelligence. Of course, even monkeys believe in self-defense, but that's neither here nor there.
I don't believe that the Constitution ought to prevent my hometown of Washington, D.C.--which has a serious problem with gun violence--from making a profoundly different judgment about how available handguns should be than the New York legislature would make for the hamlet near my old camp.
IOW, he doesn't believe in Equal Protection. What would Witteless say if someone else proposed a similar idea about a free press, or freedom of religion, or the ability of people to engage in sodomy? I think that he'd be spitting teeth and bleeding from his eyes in rage.
On a more esoteric level, the Second Amendment's protection for militias reflected the importance the Founders attached to an armed citizenry as a protection against tyrannical government. This made sense at the time. ... After more than two centuries of constitutional government, however, it's safe to assume that neither an armed citizenry nor a well-regulated militia really is "necessary to the security of a free State." The opposite seems closer to the truth; just ask the Bosnians or the Iraqis. And elections, it turns out, do the job pretty well. To put the matter simply, the Founders were wrong about the importance of guns to a free society.
Yeah, elections work so well...just ask those who voted against Herr Hitler in 1933. Look, Witteless, questioning the Founders as a group puts you on pretty shaky ground in my book. No, they weren't perfect, but they had a knowledge of human nature and the nature of power that few other groups in history have EVER had. Their fear that a central government would only grow in power over time IS correct, pretty much anywhere you look. Oh, and even WITH 300 million or so guns in the hands of civilians, the government managed to do Ruby Ridge, Waco, Elian Gonzalez, ignores 70% of the population regarding immigration, strip searches 85-year-old Swedish grandmothers from North Dakota, etc. What, moron, would they do if we were completely disarmed? Dummy, DETERRING TYRANNY is the primary goal of the 2nd Amendment, fighting it only secondary.
But, critically, judges shouldn't be in charge of stripping disfavored rights from the Constitution. If the courts can simply make gun rights disappear, what happens when the First Amendment becomes embarrassing or inconvenient? It corrodes the very idea of a written Constitution when the document means, in practice, the opposite of what its text says. The great beauty of the Constitution is that, unlike, say, the treaties that form the European Union, you can actually read it. You can see how its language embodies principles that still animate the day-to-day operation of American political life. When that is no longer the case, American democracy suffers; it gets unmoored from its source of legitimacy.
Ah, at least a couple of the old neurons are working.
The Bill of Rights is sacred, but it is not so sacred that we should prefer lying to ourselves about what it actually says, rather than changing it as our needs shift.
Uh, I beg to differ. Oh, it isn't sacred in the sense of being the word of the Creator, but it is sacred writ for our nation. You see, without the promise of the Bill of Rights being enacted by the 1st Congress, lots of state legislators (and, likely, whole legislatures) wouldn't have voted to ratify the Constitution in the first place. By my way of thinking, the Bill of Rights - ALL of it, not just selected parts that someone agrees with - is the consideration received by the People in return for ratifying the Constitution. Take away the consideration, and the contract is revoked. I don't think that Witteless wants to go there.
But that doesn't make it less wrong to ask Silberman and his colleagues to relieve the political culture of the obligation of trying.
Could someone with an insight into small minds please interpret that nonsense?
It is certainly easier to pretend that's not what we're doing--that the Founders never created the right
As Silberman made clear, the 2nd Amendment CREATED NOTHING. It simply protected and protects a set of rights (keeping arms and bearing arms) that pre-existed our Republic, rights which are arguably unrepealable (because rights ALWAYS exist - they may be infringed, but they don't cease to exist).
Look, anyone can propose any Amendment to the Constitution. It is, after all, a free country by design. However, I can promise that I will never willingly give up my firearms to any governmental authority if I've done nothing to deserve such treatment. Not as a Jew who's relatives were gassed and cremated
after being disarmed, not as an American who's cultural forefathers sacrificed blood and treasure on a scale that we can only imagine to win freedom for us, and not as a human being who values his life, his family and his liberty. Molon Labe!
