There is a danger that Judge Amy Barrett might not get the votes to be confirmed as the next Justice of the Supreme Court because several Republican members of the Senate have contracted Covid-19. Failure to confirm her nomination would pretty much guarantee that the leftward shift of the Supreme Court since 2010 will continue. The current members of the court are unlikely to reverse the two Second Amendment decisions from 2008 and 2010, Heller and McDonald. They don’t have to because the inferior courts have, for all intents and purposes, already done so.
The only thing a future Supreme Court dominated by Obama and Biden appointees could do is to grant a Second Amendment cert petition and declare the Heller and McDonald decisions apostate and damned.
If Judge Barrett is not confirmed, or even if she is confirmed, we may very well still lose the fight for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Our greatest threat is from the so-called gun-rights groups and their millions of members and supporters who have a very different view of the Second Amendment than did the Framers of the Second Amendment and those who voted to enact the Second Amendment into law in 1791.
The leadership of the National Rifle Association, its various state organizations such as the California Rifle and Pistol Association, as well as the leadership of competing so-called gun-rights groups like the Second Amendment Foundation, and millions of their combined supporters, believe that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to commit murder.
There are millions of Americans who don’t own guns. They have no desire to own guns. They really don’t think about guns or gun-rights, and they don’t vote for or against a politician because of the politician’s position on gun control.
There are also millions of Americans who do own guns but really don’t think about guns much or gun-rights. and gun control doesn’t factor into how they vote. So long as they can hunt or go to the target range, they are content.
These two groups aren’t the danger and are best left alone. Your trying to persuade them of the value of the individual right to keep and bear arms means they would have to think about the Second Amendment and thinking about things is just too hard for them and so they become resentful at having to think about things and resentful of the people who try to get them to think about things. Of course, the moral ones will be repelled by a right to commit murder. And if the moral ones are told by the concealed carriers that murder is what the Second Amendment protects, they won’t do their own research because research would require they think about things. Instead, they will simply oppose the Second Amendment.
And then there are the people who are afraid of guns. They are afraid that they will be murdered by a gun. They are afraid that if they had a gun then they would not be able to control themselves, they would murder somebody, everybody, with their gun.
They don’t think anyone should have a gun, not even the police. Phobias are a mental illness that requires the skill of a trained professional to treat. I say “treat” because mental illness cannot be cured. The anti-gun rights groups have, needless to say, found this group of people to be very useful. Unfortunately, their exploitation by the anti-gun groups was made easy by the concealed carriers who go around telling everyone that the Second Amendment protects a right to commit murder, and the reason why they skulk around town with their concealed, loaded handguns is to search for an excuse to murder someone with their concealed, loaded handgun. And that someone the concealed carrier murders could be them.
And then there are the many gun owners who support the opponents of gun-rights. They believe that the government should decide who gets to own and carry guns. Naturally, they include themselves among those who the government should allow to have guns. Although they are, sadly, the largest groups of gun-owners, most of them don’t give money to any gun groups. Some do, particularly to the NRA, but most don’t.
Money is the ammunition in the war for the Second Amendment. As most gun owners don’t contribute any money to anyone, they are not the greatest danger.
The greatest danger to the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms comes from gun-owners who are the simplest to identify because they are the ones who loudly proclaim that there is no right to openly carry firearms for the purpose of self-defense, and they financially support those organizations dedicated to banning our Second Amendment right to bear arms. These gun-owners proudly display their membership in those gun-groups dedicated to destroying the Second Amendment Open Carry right. Groups like the NRA and SAF that oppose Open Carry in the courts, and in legislatures and in the case of the SAF, oppose Open Carry publicly, and loudly to its members.
They are also easy to identify because there is no shutting them up.
Try doing a web search sometime on “concealed carry” and “secret advantage” or “tactical advantage” or search any social media. They are, like Covid-19, spreading their disease everywhere.
According to their view of the Second Amendment, government can ban the Open Carry of rifles, shotguns, and handguns. According to them, there is only a right to carry a concealed handgun, and only then if you have a government-issued permission slip.
There are those in this last group who oppose the permit requirement to carry a loaded, concealed handgun in public. Make no mistake, if they were able to obtain a concealed carry permit then that would make them feel special and it might seem for a while to fill that empty void inside of them. But they know they will never get a concealed carry permit and so they bellow that they don’t need a concealed carry permit. They bellow that the Second Amendment is their concealed carry permit.
Of course, it matters not to them that the Second Amendment does not protect the carrying of weapons concealed. The Second Amendment never did.
But the Second Amendment enacted by the Founding Fathers or interpreted by the United States Supreme Court in 2008 and 2012 is not their Second Amendment. The concealed carriers’ Second Amendment is a right to commit murder.
This last group certainly has many mentally ill people in it. But the defining property of this group is not a mental illness, it is immorality. And consists of not just immoral people, but downright evil people.
Why do we have a Second Amendment and what is it?
The Framers of the Second Amendment and those who voted to enact it into law were afraid of the central government they had just created, and rightly so. The Constitution they had just enacted created a national government. The Framers were afraid that this new national government could raise an army to enslave the people of the various states.
The Founding Fathers were well-read in Roman history and well aware of why the Roman Republic collapsed into dictatorship. They constructed a Federal Constitution, amended by a Bill of Rights, to prevent an American Caesar from rising and destroying the newly minted American Republic.
And so, the Framers of the Second Amendment rejected what we have today, a standing army, in favor of state and local militias. These militias consisted of nearly every able-bodied adult, White male within a certain age range.
The second half of the Second Amendment is “The Right of The People to Keep and Bear Arms” shall not be infringed. “The People” included at a minimum not just those adult American males who could vote, but all of those who considered themselves Americans and could be called upon to bear arms in defense of their country.
The American Right to Keep and Bear Arms Expanded on the English Right
There was a lot of infringement on the unwritten right to keep and bear arms in England going back 800 years and more. After England became a Protestant state under King Henry the 8th, there began a centuries-long infringement on the right to keep and bear arms depending on whether or not the current monarch was Catholic or Protestant, and depending upon whether or not you were a Catholic or Protestant.
The English 1689 Bill of Rights, from which our Bill of Rights is derived, was enacted after the English Protestants overthrew the Catholics who had been most recently in control of the English government. The English Bill of Rights prohibited Catholics from keeping and bearing arms.
But the history of infringing on what is in the United States, an individual right to keep and bear arms goes back much earlier than the time of the Catholic-Protestant split in England.
Who could bear arms and the types of arms they could bear was largely based on one’s social class in England.
There was no way a peasant was going to be allowed to walk down Main Street, England carrying what we today know as a “broadsword.” Peasants were not even allowed to keep a broadsword in the home. And if you were Welsh, Scottish, or Irish then you did not have rights as far as the English were concerned. Let alone a right to keep and bear arms.
However, the English government did recognize the value of merchants because without them there would be no markets to speak of, and without markets, there wouldn’t be the taxes derived from markets. Not to mention there wouldn’t be the variety of wonderful goods available thanks to traveling merchants. Of what use is there in being a rich nobleman if there is nothing to acquire because the merchants were robbed on their way to your town?
And so, given the dangers traveling merchants faced in Medieval England, they were allowed to carry broadswords. A type of arm their inferior social class would have otherwise prohibited them from keeping or bearing.
By the time the first English colonies were established in America, the males of the English Aristocracy were required by law and custom to openly carry swords. The English poet, Lord Byron, caused a scandal in England in the early 1800s by refusing to carry a sword.
George Washington, long before he became General Washington and then President Washington, carried a sword in public. George Washington carried a sword because he was a man of great wealth and property who considered himself to be a proper Englishman, as did nearly all of the Founding Fathers.
It has never occurred to most people but the American Revolution began as an English civil war. It did not begin as a War for Independence.
In any event, whatever the right to keep and bear arms meant in England, we Americans expanded on the right. Our Second Amendment guarantees the right of everyone who falls within the scope of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for the core lawful right of self-defense.
The American right to keep and bear arms includes Catholics as well as Protestants. The right includes the unskilled, illiterate ditch digger, as well as the rich, high born New England bluebloods who have never lifted anything heavier than a silver spoon to their lips in their entire life. With the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the right to keep and bear arms is the right of all Americans regardless of race. And thanks to a 1924 act of Congress, all Native Americans are American citizens fully protected by the Bill of Rights and equal under the law to every other American citizen.
The Second Amendment was written and voted into law by men of honor. Some of these men even fought duels. Duels are how honorable men settled irreconcilable differences at the time the Second Amendment was enacted. The same was true in England at the time.
This was not so in most of the rest of the world. Assassinations, judicial and executive murder were how differences were settled in the old world. That is also how they were settled in the ancient world, as Julius Caesar learned all too well one day in March on the steps of the Roman Senate Building.
That brings us right back to the last group I described above, the group that the title of this article applies to.
For them, the Second Amendment guarantees a right to “secret advantage and unmanly assassination.” For them, weapons are to be carried concealed so that nobody knows you are carrying a weapon. Because if people around the concealed carrier can’t see that he is armed then the people around the concealed carrier can’t govern themselves accordingly or take steps for self-preservation.
Many of these concealed carriers also own “Black Rifles” also called “Assault Rifles” by opponents of their private possession. They insist that the Second Amendment protects their right to keep and bear assault rifles.
While this is logically inconsistent with their claim that Open Carry can be banned in favor of concealed carry, you have to remember what the Second Amendment means to them.
For concealed carriers, the Second Amendment guarantees a right to commit murder. And since they believe that they can far more easily commit mass murder with an AR15 than they can with a handgun, in their evil little minds they have a right to keep and “bear” assault rifles. In short, they believe they have a right to keep an assault rifle until the time they decide to use it to murder a lot of people.
Continued in Part 2.