Gun control advocates and gun rights activists have very different views on firearms, which is to be expected. We on this side of the discussion value the right to keep and bear arms, while that side would take everything they possibly can and then try to figure out how to take the rest.
But everything hinges on what the Constitution, via the Second Amendment, allows.
That’s where we’ve had a ton of arguments over the years, and it’s clear they’re not going to end anytime soon.
Anti-gunners maintain that gun control is, in fact, constitutional, which is funny since it’s not laid out anywhere in the Second Amendment at all, but even assuming that they’re right to any degree, the big problem is that when they read up on the issue, they tend to stop when they get to something they feel like they can use.
Take this piece from The Daily Kos, for example. The author refers to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s decision in Heller, and offers this:
Scalia’s opinion, noted that, like speech, firearm ownership can be restricted. In so writing, he built an explicit wall between gun prohibition and gun control. This matters because gun cuckoos like Ted Nugent and others are successfully pretending that there is no such distinction. They’ve been able to keep alive the THEY’RE GONNA TAKE ALL OUR GUNS! myth. It’s time that those Americans who support reasonable gun control measures use Heller in the fight for reasonable legislation.
Did he build such a wall?
Scalia did say there was a certain amount of gun control that was permissible, unfortunately, which I disagree with, but what happened here is that the author, Mark Ira Kaufman, simply read to that point and then stopped. He didn’t see that there were limits on gun control that stopped well short of prohibition.
Further, let’s keep in mind how many anti-gunners think Bruen was decided wrongly, including Kaufman here, who earlier in the piece argued that the Second Amendment protects the states’ rights to have guns, because the government definitely needs to protect the government from being disarmed by the government.
Scalia’s decision permits prohibitions on guns in “sensitive places,” which was repeated in the Bruen decision. It wasn’t intended to be read as overturning machine gun bans and laws against violent felons owning firearms.
But it also wasn’t an invitation to open up the gates on gun control and flood the entire nation with new gun laws. Hell, Kaufman used a picture with Scalia and a quote from the Heller decision outlining just that, but not comprehending that even if he argued there were acceptable lines, anti-gunners keep going well beyond those.
Further, the decision has been refined more than a bit via Bruen, where we know what is required for a gun control law to be upheld as constitutional, which almost nothing being churned out of anti-gun states and think tanks actually meets.
This is just one example of a million.
Another, of course, is how they don’t read much of the Second Amendment itself past “A well regulated militia,” and then miss the whole “shall not be infringed” thing.
The truth is that your rank-and-file anti-gunner doesn’t actually care about anything beyond winning. They want to provide just enough cover that lawmakers and activists can pretend they’re righteously following the Constitution itself with their anti-gun jihad–one that most definitely will actually end in gun confiscation, at least for most of us–and not because they actually understood it.
They want the guns. They want our guns.
And they’ll be as dishonest as they can to get them.
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