Guest Post by Gary Demar
The House of Representatives and Senate are considering more expansive gun control bills considering the latest school shooting in Texas. These school shootings are horrific and evil. The parents of these children are devastated as I would be. I can’t imagine the anguish they must feel.
Some Republicans joined past gun control bills and some of them are working with the Democrats to enact even more restrictions. Criminals laugh at these laws. Do members of Congress believe that such laws are going to stop criminals from purchasing and using firearms? How well has it worked with drugs? Elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution. How many obey that oath? They, too, laugh at the built-in restrictions of the Constitution.
Every day people kill other people with guns, knives, automobiles, and even water by drowning. These are not going to stop with new laws. Murder is already against the law. People are the problem, not guns. Recent surveys have determined that around 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. More than 99+ percent of all gun owners have never shot anyone. Mentally disturbed people are going to do disturbing things. Better to eliminate soft targets like schools. Why this hasn’t been done is insane. Parents need to take control of their schools. Demand physical security for your children!
To show that guns are not the problem, decades ago, many public schools had shooting clubs. According to John Lott:
Until 1969 virtually every public high school—even in New York City—had a shooting club. High school students in New York City carried their guns to school on the subways in the morning, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach during the day, and retrieved them after school for target practice. Club members were given their rifles and ammunition by the federal government. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships.
Even today there are “more than 2,000 high-school rifle programs across the United States. In 2015, 9,245 students in 317 schools across three states participated in the USA High School Clay Target League. In 2018, participation had increased 138% with 21,917 students from 804 teams in 20 states.”
There are many who believe the Second Amendment is the problem. For example, actor Mark Hamill best known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars series and the voice of the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series has said some things about the Second Amendment that defy history, the Constitution, and logic. In a tweet, he wrote the following:
Don’t get me wrong, as a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment—I believe in every American’s right to own a musket.
Piers Morgan said something similar:
The Second Amendment was devised with muskets in mind, not high-powered handguns and assault rifles. Fact.
See if you can find the word “musket” in the Second Amendment:
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.
Even without this constitutional right, we have the right to bear arms to protect ourselves from people who want to do us harm. Such a right does not originate with civil governments. The Second Amendment was included in the Constitution to ensure the already existing right to “keep and bear arms.” Hamill and Morgan should study some of their own histories before they write on a subject like the Second Amendment.
“The right to have arms in English history is believed to have been regarded as a long-established natural right in English law, auxiliary to the natural and legally defensible rights to life. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court remarked that at the time of the passing of the English Bill of Rights there was ‘clearly an individual right, having nothing whatsoever to do with service in the militia’ and that it was a right not to be disarmed by the crown and was not the granting of a new right to have arms.”
The Second Amendment doesn’t say what type of “arms” is included in the right to bear them. There’s a reason for this. Our founders knew that the definition of “arms” can change over time. What was considered “arms” in the 18th century differed from what would have been defined as “arms” in the 13th century? The Constitution was designed to be a document for the ages, not just for the late 18th century.
Following Hamill and Morgan’s logic, the freedoms of speech and press found in the First Amendment should be limited to a town crier, horses, and footmen to carry dispatches, quill pens for writing, and actual printing presses. This would mean setting type by hand, rolling ink ever the type, and pressing the paper on the raised letters, one sheet at a time. Since we don’t “press” paper over inked type today we can’t appeal to the First Amendment’s right to “freedom of the press.” Freedom of speech has dramatically changed with microphones, recording devices, television, films, streaming, etc. Should these new communication devices be prohibited because they weren’t available in the 18th century?
If the Second Amendment was only for muskets, then it was also only for parchment and literal printing presses. Our founders knew better. Ideals transcend technology and innovation. Ideals are for the ages.
No one in the 18th century, or even in the last decade of the 20th century, could have conceived of printing electronically and people having portable printers in their homes. Printing has made more technical advancements since the First Amendment was drafted than has the development of “arms.” Someone from the 18th century could easily recognize a modern-day handgun and rifle and learn to load and shoot them in a matter of minutes but would be stymied by a laptop computer and software used to “typeset” a book with no hard type that could be turned into an electronic file that in the end could print a million copies of a book in days or send the document around the world in a matter of seconds.
We are beginning to see a chipping away of the free speech and freedom of the press provisions found in the First Amendment under the guise of stopping “misinformation.” And who gets to determine what’s misinformation? The Left is OK with limiting speech and the “press” for people they disagree with on policy and moral issues. We’re seeing it everywhere—from university campuses to social media platforms. This might be the reason our Founders thought it necessary to include the Second Amendment because when a government and those who control the free flow of information suppress speech, wholesale tyranny can’t be far behind.
Originally posted at American Vision
