Sam1911
Moderator Emeritus
I've got an admission to make: If it wasn't for the fact that I liked guns and read about them heavily, and learned as much as I could about the laws governing them, and then learned how and why to fight those laws, I'd have really never stumbled into much of an interest in Constitutional law, near as I can tell.I can understand states rights but not when it comes down to what amounts to harming human rights.
And I can't help but believe that I've got rather a lot of company in that, looking around the forum at all these thousands of enthusiasts who gather here.
And it appears to me we've all arrived together at this point where we like to stand up and proclaim how we're Constitutional originalists, maybe textualists. And most of us have branched out to see that the rest of the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be preserved in the same way we'd like our interpretation of the 2nd Amendment to be.
So we're all great amateur Constitutional enthusiasts and defenders -- as seen through the lens of gun rights.
And a fair number of us have managed to become at least half so enamored of the 1st Amendment as the 2nd, and that's great. And a fair number of us have come to a realization that a very great deal of federal political and legislative goings-on in the 20th and 21st centuries don't seem to look exactly like what was written back in 1787. And a prime example -- among many -- of this is how the modern limitations on states' rights very significantly diverge from how the early, pre-Civil War, federal government operated.
But now we face a possible opportunity to do something really powerful for all Americans, which would stand a chance of significantly moving the goalposts in the gun rights debate. A federal law that says citizens must be allowed to bear arms no matter where they go across the country (with limits, but not based on state borders). That would be such a sea change that most of us can't quite imagine it. Driving armed over the NY or MD or CA state line for the first time would be like walking out on a bridge made of tempered glass. Exhilarating but scary at the same time!
But some of us now have reservations. Having latched on so tightly to Constitutional originalist ideology that this clearly positive step now makes us uncomfortable. We've been abused and insulted by federal laws which restrict and infringe our rights to bear arms, and told our state can't "occupy the field" in those areas, but must bow to federal laws that tried to tell us we couldn't own "Assault Weapons", or that threatened to force upon us Universal Background Checks, and on an on. But now that we might hold enough power to use that federal might to loosen the chains a bit, we say, "Oh, we shouldn't ... that would violate state's rights!" As though that weren't a horse so far beyond the proverbial barn door, that the horse died of old age and the barn burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp.
Seriously, we're weighing the chance to breathe new life into the terms written into the 2nd Amendment, "...to keep and bear arms..." against a pretty well abandoned and disused alternate view of federalism that we now find ourselves to be nearly the only proponents of (seeing as segregation isn't a thing any more). And saying, "naaahhh... this abandoned view of states' rights that nobody but us even thinks about these days is more important that putting the supercharger on the words "and bear" in the 2nd Amendment."
I'd really like to hear if I'm off base on that. Maybe there's some other avenue or genesis for this adoption of originalist views of state's rights as a supreme component of our political philosophy. How is it we've elevated it so high in our thinking that it actually is worthy of superseding an effort to use federal legislation in our favor?
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