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Given the
reichish makeup of the present Supreme
Court, it was clearly a foregone
conclusion that they would consign
Washington D.C.’s prohibition of
handguns to the compost heap and let
the bullets fly once again in that
troubled city.
I shall never
understand the almost conscious and
willful empty-headedness of judges or
attorneys who, first of all, refuse to
acknowledge that there are two clauses
in the Second Amendment and, second,
that when the Founding Fathers talked
about “arms,” they were talking
muskets that took three or four
minutes to load and that fired off one
shot. They had no ken of automatic
weapons that fire rounds of
ammunition, and they certainly knew
nothing of handguns.
If,
then, as conservative Supremes like
Scalia, Thomas and the rest of the
Gang of Four insist, we should
interpret the Constitution with the
ultimate strictness of a librarian
imposing silence on a reading room,
why don’t they truly reflect the
intent of the Founding Fathers and
admit that, while we all have a right
to bear arms, those arms must be
muskets?
I
would have no problem with their
“interpretation” of the Second
Amendment if indeed people were
keeping muskets in their homes to ward
off intruders. By the time you got
your musket loaded and ready, the
intruder most likely would have
departed. Or, if the intruder were
Aunt Mary coming for an unexpected
visit, you would have time, while
jamming your powder, to rectify your
intent and not blast her to kingdom
come.
Furthermore,
we could forget all this concealed
weapon business. If all we had were
muskets, people could drag them
anywhere they pleased, along with all
the accoutrement needed to get off a
shot, and no one would be concerned.
Want
to take your musket into a bar? Go
ahead. If you get into a dipsy-do with
a fellow binger, the bartender or
bouncer will be all over you before
you can load and fire.
Or
lug your musket into a church, a
school, a library, a park or any other
place where guns are now forbidden.
Who cares? Before
you can prop up your musket or realize
that your powder is wet, you will be
surrounded by people looking rather
stern and wagging fingers at you.
No,
the Founding Fathers obviously had no
idea that their notion of the right to
bear arms would be interpreted as it
is now. In fact, they would have been
astounded at the stupidity of such
interpretations, if only because they
recognized the futility of using
muskets to settle personal disputes or
blow off some loudmouth who was
charging too much for crack cocaine.
What
they did understand was that muskets,
when used by a militia or any large
group of men en masse, were effective.
And given the times, when revolutions
or uprisings were not out of the
question, it would make sense for
citizens to legally possess muskets
that would be ready to go if the state
or federal government had need of an
armed force to quell a rebellion. Or
indeed, if the government itself
became overly authoritarian and
returned to its British roots.
Hence
the dependent clause immediately preceding
the main clause of the Second
Amendment.
I
have written elsewhere of the Latinate
construction of this amendment.
Suffice it to say here that
disregarding the dependent clause
dealing with a well-regulated militia
is to grossly violate the intent of
the grammar and the language used in
the amendment’s construction. The
point is that grammatically the main
clause about the right to bear arms is
totally dependent on the militia
clause.
Yet,
this is exactly what the majority in
the recent Supreme Court decision
about the amendment did. By cavalierly
dismissing the militia clause, these
strict constructors of the
Constitution virtually sanctioned a
new amendment that is totally alien to
the intent of the Founding Fathers.
In
the upcoming election, we should all
be heavily concerned with the question
of appointments to the Supreme Court.
While Republicans blather about
leftist political agendas relative to
court interpretations, it has become
all too clear that the right-leaning
members of the court have become the
real activists when it comes to
mangling the Constitution.
In this
particular case, obeisance to the NRA
was hardly quiescent. And
the real intent of the Founding
Fathers was so mutilated as to be
abstruse and incomprehensible.
July
2, 2008
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