Is anyone else tired of navel-gazing pieces on firearms written by people who know nothing about them? If you’re not, you’re in luck! Slate added another to the trash heap:
Sunday night, when my son asked me why we shoot each other dead almost every day in America, I got to tell him that it’s because we are “free.” We are free to get a .223 caliber AR-15–style semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm handgun. And we are free to sell those weapons to someone who might shoot and kill 49 people in a nightclub because of whom they choose to love. We are free to arm ourselves against any potentially tyrannical federal government and also free to watch our children bleed to death in our schools, and churches, and clubs.
Lady, if you’re teaching your kid that he’s “free” to sell guns to prohibited possessors or murder people in a nightclub, you’re parenting wrong.
Lithwick also sloppily misinterprets Scalia. Read here, my emphasis:
Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose… For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues… Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment , nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.”… We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”
[…]
It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment ’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.
The firearms that anti-Second Amendment advocates talk of banning (and justify doing so by either ignorantly or purposefully butchering Heller) are all common use. See Scalia’s discussion of colonial-era affrighting:
“What limitations upon the right to bear arms are permissible? Some undoubtedly are, because there were some that were acknowledged at the time. For example, there was a tort called affrighting, which if you carried around a really horrible weapon just to scare people, like a head ax or something, that was I believe a misdemeanor. So yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed.”—Justice Antonin Scalia
Affrighting is inapplicable to the commonly-held firearms gun control advocates today want to ban, thus a ridiculously illogical claim. Brandishing suggests intimidation, a felony in most states, and that’s applicable to common-use firearms.
And yes, they actually are coming for our guns. I discussed in depth here how the admin wants to create a registry by making every gun owner a de facto FFL.
Gun control advocates, not “the NRA” are the ones zealously perverting the meaning of the Second Amendment.
