This is from a Guardian interview with Paul Auster, the novelist, who has a new, nonfiction book called "Bloodbath Nation."
In the book you say the second amendment, framing the individual’s right to bear arms, was largely ignored until just a few decades ago, when it began to be seen as a fundamental text about what it means to be an American. Why did this happen?
Because of the 1960s – the assassinations and the chaos. People were frightened. And also because of the Black Panthers, who were obviously not white conservatives, but they were the group who originally set forth the argument that gun ownership is a right and that it’s for self-defence. It is hugely ironic: the Panthers were wiped out but their ideas stuck and were adopted by the white right wing. Now, for many, the second amendment has an almost religious component to it. The right to own a gun is seen as a kind of holy grail.
Why shouldn't individual rights have "an almost religious component"? That's the way it looks in the Declaration of Independence.
The Guardian also has an excerpt from the book: "Paul Auster: 'The gun that killed my grandfather was the same gun that ruined my father’s life'" ("In this extract from his new book, Bloodbath Nation, the novelist details the chilling murder his family hid for five decades – and why fixing the US’s deadly relationship with firearms will take gut-wrenching honesty").It's interesting that Auster is writing about death by gunshot when it was so recently — just last year — that his 10-month-old granddaughter died from drugs and his 44-year-old son was arrested for that death and then died from a drug overdose.
And it's interesting that he disparages the religion-like attitude toward rights, when "He has described right-wing Republicans as 'jihadists.'" That blithe injection of religion appears in the above-linked Wikipedia bio. And it makes me wonder, given the quote at the top of this post, if he'd call the Black Panthers "jihadists."
But he's a novelist. I don't expect a novelist to be consistent. I expect a novelist to write aesthetically appealing sentences and paragraphs that channel and manipulate emotion across an exciting narrative arc.
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74 comments:
You may recall that America's earliest gun laws date from the Jim Crow era.
They were designed to leave southern blacks disarmed and defenseless in the face of KKK attacks.
What bilge…
Tim Fairbank said...
You may recall that America's earliest gun laws date from the Jim Crow era.
yep, Gun Control was to Control Blacks.. From the Start, to the End
All the Black Panthers did, was REassert their right to bear arms.
California still had laws on their books allowing Open Carry of rifles.
The Black Panthers did that.. So the laws were quickly changed.
I Guess i need to clarify. Gun Control was to Control blacks, from shooting white democrats.
It was NEVER about stopping blacks from shooting each other
Sad to learn of Auster’s troubles. Even sadder to learn that he is dumping them —or some of the emotional pain he’s suffering from them and the rather confused thinking that pain is producing— all over the public. Maybe with a different character, a different sensibility, this trouble might have led to a magnificent piece of literature; something deeply moving and insightful. But no. It just adds to the tragedy of his case that he is stuck producing banal half-truths.
Just read his wiki. How can you be so educated, so erudite, so…incredible (I’m sure that’s HIS opinion of himself) and be so stupid or dishonest?
Maybe that's when people became aware of the 2nd amendment. Before that, it was a given. Gunracks in unlocked pickups were the norm in rural areas.
What a strange article.
His family's story is tragic, no doubt, and he tells it compellingly. But then:
"The gun had caused all this,"
"I also think about the gun that killed my grandfather – which was the same gun that ruined my father’s life."
Then as he gets into policy, he writes, "America’s relationship to guns is anything but rational, however,"
Here he has a point – but I find his framing of his family's horror as irrational as he finds our continued support for widespread gun ownership. "The gun had caused all this," he writes, as if the gun had agency.
His grandmother had caused all this. His grandmother killed his grandfather, and ruined his father's life. The gun was a handy and effective tool for her to do so. It made it really easy – much easier and likelier than stabbing him or bludgeoning him would have done.
Auster and I see the world and the country very differently. He brings up George Floyd, irrelevantly in my view. He sees hope in the protests that followed. I see a lot of violence and destruction, and a lot of black folks killed by people to whom their lives didn't matter. Secoriea Turner was eight years old. By all means, blame easy access to guns for her senseless, sickening murder – but spare some blame for her murderers, too; and tell me how you'll disarm them and not just me.
Democrats: disarming unacceptable people for 175 years.
"In the book you say the second amendment, framing the individual’s right to bear arms, was largely ignored until just a few decades ago ... "
Gee, why would that be? There is no mystery here. It was largely ignored until the Commie-Pinko lefties decided to accelerate and refine their gun confiscation techniques.
I expect anyone to be honest about historical facts when writing nonfiction even if they are novelists.
But given his fiction, it's little wonder his family is screwed up and he tries to project blame for this on others.
Seeing as they only chose to curtail those rights nationwide in 1938 the nra was founded by former union officers hot take
Well...I don't know how the 2nd Amendment became such if not for a serious and thought out understanding of governmental tyranny and the need- not just the right- but the need for individuals to keep and bear arms. We are the ultimate check, in our checks and balances. It is not that way in any other nation (with the possible exception of Mexico, where the cartels outgun the government- but that's drug infused). In Auster's worldview, the nation must have been founded by jihadist right wingers and only when a supremely thoughtful person on the left considers the topic, do we get clarity.
It was considered a way of life through our first 150 years. It was always considered a part of American life until we got into the 1960s and on- and young people in cities started shooting up each other and all those around them. Drugs opened the door to chaos. It still is the trigger for chaos. And it comes over our unchecked borders by the tons, each and every week.
To say the rest of the nation never gave it a thought until the Black Panthers came along is pretty vacant thinking. It's always been with us. Many (or most?) of us just never felt the need to discuss it. We knew it. We understood it implicitly- as our right. And perhaps the single most obvious right to declare that power in this country rests with the individuals making up the citizenry.
Though we've clearly forgotten that last part.
Paul Auster, the guy who is telling America to get its house in order:
Personal life
Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster,[24] who was arrested on April 16, 2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month old infant daughter, who consumed heroin and fentanyl he was using.[25][26] On April 26, 2022, Daniel, who was found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia, died from an overdose.[27][28] Daniel was also known for his association with the Club Kids and their ringleader Michael Alig, and was present during the killing of fellow Club Kid Andre Melendez.[29]
Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.[2] Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.[30]
He has said his politics are "far to the left of the Democratic Party" but that he votes Democratic because he doubts a socialist candidate could win.[31] He has described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists"[32] and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life."[33]
In September 2009, he signed a petition in support of Roman Polanski, calling for his release after he was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.[34]
Auster needs to learn some history. In 1881 one of the main points of contention (it was a long list) between the Earp and Clanton factions in Tombstone, AZ was a town ordinance that banned carrying guns in town. The Clantons believed they had a right to be armed and the Earps being law enforcement were charged with enforcing the ban.
You know the rest.
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
- Peter Drucker, probably.
They have broken the culture, and now there is chaos.
Under chaos, when people are armed, there will be tragedy.
When people are disarmed, there will be genocide.
Whoever wrote that wiki bio on Paul Auster did him no favors. He doesn't come across as a sympathetic character. Auster might have the knack of stringing together sentences in an elegant or way, but in other areas of human endeavor he is sadly lacking. I'd rather have a stripper mom than a post modern novelist dad.
Asked why the United States now needs gun laws, Bill Clinton replied that it's because the demographics of the U.S. have changed. If you look at the demographics of who is actually committing the vast majority of a actual gun crimes (leaving out suicides), you can see that the problem is indeed demographically confined to one major group of people: people who vote almost entirely for Democrats.
Yeah, this is bilge. Revisionist black history. The 2nd Amendment was passed in 1791. Pretty sure the Black Panthers didn't invent it.
Democrats don't want blacks to own guns, or even exist (see Roe v. Wade and specifically Ruth Bader Meinhof's comments on the subject of why we need abortion.)
But really, who cares? It's good that they're revising history in the direction towards God-given rights such as self-defense.
Whodathunk those would have a "religious" component?
How about if Paul Auster, and all the rest of the gun grabbers like Icky Vicki, the original little old lady from Pasadena, start they gun confiscation dreams by enforcing existing gun laws in the inner cities — the South Side of Chicago would be a great place to start. When they’re through cleaning g up all the inner cities, we can talk some more.
'Why shouldn't individual rights have "an almost religious component"?'
Somehow that seems healthier for the nation than turning pseudo-science scams like Climate Change and Fauci/CDC Covid precautions into articles of faith for leftists,
their academic and media pimps and their dupes.
Ridiculous. America was colonized by English settlers; and the Catholic ones were disarmed in England and here, under anti-Catholic laws that forbade them to own guns. (But commanded them to pay for government guns.) Because they were assumed to be traitors who would use guns against the government of England.
(They also suffered from horse control, being forbidden to own a horse worth more than five pounds, because horses were considered weapons of war. And they largely couldn't inherit things.)
But dissenting Protestants were under a lot of the same laws, which was why the Pilgrims and Puritans got out of England. Being able to hunt and fish freely, and defend themselves, was a big deal.
Although rights for Catholics took a long time to be allowed, rights for dissenters, albeit the right kind for the locality, were big in colonial charters. This does not seem to be talked about in discussions of gun control and gun rights.
Time Magazine has an article on the timeline of gun laws in America.
In the 1930's, machine guns, silencers and sawed off shotguns were controlled as a response to gangster violence.
In the 1960's, gun laws were enacted as a response to the political assassinations. That is the reason given by the article, without mentioning the Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers certainly could have been the motivation for additional gun laws, they certainly weren't passed to inhibit hunters, school gun clubs and homeowners. Until that time, the 2nd Amendment argument was not raised because it wasn't threatened.
"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."
Just so we're all arguing from the same place. The usual suspects will soon arrive to educate us on the meaning.
But there is a religious component to the Second Amendment, as there is to many of the freedoms referenced in the Constitution - namely that our freedoms are self-evident and derive from our Maker - and are explicitly not bestowed upon us by other men. That is what sets our governance apart.
NRA didn't become seriously political till the Gun Control Act of 1968. Do a search sometime on "Guns in America" magazine covers, and you'll see at once the kind of propaganda that raised the 2nd Amendment from obscurity.
“Now, for many, the second amendment has an almost religious component to it. The right to own a gun is seen as a kind of holy grail.“
Add historically illiterate to this person’s list of descriptors.
The guardian is written by dishonest people for dumb people.
A few more facts about Auster: during his presidency of PEN, he turned the institution into a political lobby for famous murderers, especially race rioters, race terrorists, and pedophiles (the run of the mill need not apply). They especially endorsed cops killers and those who brutally attacked multiple women. He handed out honors and scholarships to Weathermen killers, BLA killers, and brutal rapists. Auster himself always had a thing for literary pedophiles. Under him, the organization celebrated Mumia, Susan Rosenberg, Polanski, Benjamin La Guer, Kathy Boudin, Marilyn Buck, and judge-murdering tenured professor Angela Davis. Under him, PEN usually successfully lobbied for and funded the release of murderers, terrorists, and rapists.
He substantially elevated, reinforced and celebrated the social mores that killed his son and murdered his granddaughter, and on their backs, he was richly rewarded for never outgrowing popular academic terroristic nihilism. And since Auster brought up the issue of race, the unhappy fact is that if we removed black killers from our gun crime stats they would barely be different from the Northern European countries he wishes we were more like (at least before they began importing masses of woman-hating minority immigrants).
He is the gun.
For most the country's history, gun rights were seen as a given. You could pretty much own whatever guns you wanted and you knew that your neighbors could do the same. Attempts to regulate firearms was almost always directed as disapproved minorities like the Native Americans and African-Americans, which is one of the reasons the Black Panthers had a legitimate reason to complain.
Honestly, this seems to be another edition of "why are you so obsessed with this thing we are not going to do but you are totally going to deserve when we do."
What a maroon.
Here let me see if I can write similar.
It was a gun that killed my father. But it was a child-size bat that killed my mother. Yet as a boy in the '60s and '70s it was mandated by culture that I play baseball, with a child size bat. Oh, I hadn't thought about how horrendous that was. We must ban the oppressive social pressures on boys having to play sports for the pleasure of others using the very type of instrument that orphaned them.
I wish I'd thought of that when I was forced to play baseball as a child.
See, it's easy to exploit emotions. It is easy to use words to manipulate. Always be thinking and don't let them emotionally compromise you.
BTW, the "Shot heard round the world" as a shot against gun confiscators. So, yeah, it has a religious fervor to it.
The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties.
I remember reading "City of Glass" and "Brooklyn Follies" and was NOT impressed. "Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises... intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature" - sounds about right.
That he's some sort of NYC anti-American leftist doesn't surprise me. That's who gets published. Most of the editors and publishers are cut from the same cloth.
When I was growing up, I think most Americans generally accepted that gun control measures did not violate the 2nd Amendment, either because of the "militia" reference meant that there was no individual right or because the government had a lot of authority to regulate guns notwithstanding such individual right. For that reason, I think the author is on the right track in pointing out that there has been a major, long-term swing in public opinion concerning guns and the 2nd Amendment in the last couple of generations.
Where he's wrong is in attributing the swing to black radicalism. I think a much better explanation is actually Roe v. Wade and its progeny. For better or worse, fifty years of debate and litigation over abortion had the unwitting effect of pounding into Americans' heads that, where a constitutional right exists, it exists, and the state cannot use regulation as a means of trying to prevent people from exercising the right. Over the years, pro-abortion advocates were very successful in striking down state laws that attempted through various means and mechanisms to make it more inconvenient and impractical to get an abortion.
Roe also made it hard to maintain the fiction that the 2nd Amendment did not, in fact, protect an individual right, where the text specifically says, "the right OF THE PEOPLE to keep and bear arms," etc. Whatever ambiguity arguably exists in the text of the 2nd Amendment, there is infinitely greater textual support in the Constitution for an individual right to own guns than there is to have an abortion. Therefore, Roe prompted the American public to see how wrong the consensus view of the 2nd Amendment had become.
There has to be a ‘religious’ component - the whole point is that the rights are above man. By undermining religion, you undermine rights; and ironically put decision making back into a select few.
I have seen multiple comments in social media along the lines that arming black people is a sure fire way to get republicans and the right to ban guns.
It’s astounding how the left leaning people are proud to demonstrate their ignorance and hatred.
Ah, just realized that this is from The Guardian. Pfft. ‘Nuff said.
The Second Amendment was repeatedly cited in state Supreme Court decisions for centuries. Nunn v. State (GA. 1846) struck down a gun law for being contrary to the Second Amendment. The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld concealed carry laws in the 1850s because the Second Amendment protected only open carry.
Ignorance has no solution but learning.
"aesthetically appealing sentences and paragraphs that channel and manipulate emotion across an exciting narrative arc."
In short, Auster blames "the gun" for his grandparents' problems, his father's problems and, implicitly, his own and his children's and his grand-children's problems. He links the different troubles of five generations to a single cause. That's how many novels are written these days - the protagonist starts digging in the past and unearths some vampire event which has been intermittently escaping and following and cursing his family for generations. Compare this lefty narrative arc to Hillbilly Elegy which is equally taken up with a man's response to a chaotic and violence-touched past which in the case of JD Vance includes the Hatfield's and McCoys. There's gun violence for you. But JD Vance came to realize that his only way out was through himself, through his understanding and self control. Moreover, he and his kin believed, as all Christians do, that a root of goodness existed within them rather than that a hopeless social destiny ruled over their lives as Auster implies. Twenty-five hundred years ago, before guns existed, people were confronting the same deep painful, discord in human life which Auster lays out in his mythical family history and way back then, they, too, presented a mythical family history as an explanation. Our first parents, named Adam and Eve, messed it all up for us and each one of us is born into difficulty and tends to respond by throwing gasoline on the flames. But, and here's the difference, according to the Bible, we can get back to original goodness as the spring of our action. There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. With a big effort, with little help from our friends.
Blogger ConradBibby said...
When I was growing up, I think most Americans generally accepted that gun control measures did not violate the 2nd Amendment, either because of the "militia" reference meant that there was no individual right or because the government had a lot of authority to regulate guns notwithstanding such individual right. For that reason, I think the author is on the right track in pointing out that there has been
You must be a lot younger then I am. The "gun control" thing did not exist before the 1960s. Kids had gun clubs at school. It did not occur to anyone I knew that having guns was a "problem."
"I expect a novelist to write aesthetically appealing sentences and paragraphs that channel and manipulate emotion across an exciting narrative arc."
So THAT's why I haven't been published!
“Gunracks in unlocked pickups were the norm in rural areas.”
Pickups in rural Iowa did not become the norm until the 1960s and 1970s, before that most farmers used old cars. Any guns carried in those racks were for hunting, not Black Panther-style self-defense. There may have been a few who came to school with rifles in the rack during deer hunting season, hoping to spot a deer in the hour around dawn and sunset. The rest of the high school boys who did that were hunting girls.
I always liked Condoleeza Rice's family story for why she was pro private gun ownership. She talked about how in Alabama in the 1950's the leaders in their black neighborhood had to be prepared for the likes of Bull Conner and his followers. When their neighborhood was fearful, the black men (including her father, a pastor) came out armed and ready for battle.
I was thinking about Michael Bellesisle's historical travesty when who should comment but Clayton Cramer, the man who took him down.
Way cool, even for Althouse.
The non-violent civil rights movement gets all the press and credit, but there were, in addition to the Panthers, groups like Deacons for Defense.
By the 1950s a lot of African-Americans had served in the military overseas and seen different social arrangements (not to mention observing the complete mess that white elites had made of things), and weren't willing to be shat on any more. Especially in the Southland, once the racist bullyboys had to consider that there were B/black men ready and willing to shoot back based on the 2nd, progress could be made.
Auster seems to be a Vonnegutian 'talented sparrowfart.'
DIE and minority report are ethical articles of faith.
Diversity of individuals, minority of one, is a moral article of faith, unique or uncommonly acknowledged in our constitution upheld by a republican form of government with limited rights.
Sounds like a genetic problem. But it seems to be working itself out.
readering said...
"The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties."
It has, since its inception, been considered an individual right. To test this you can read the volumes of correspondence by the people that signed the Declaration and the Constitution and see if they considered the second amendment a collective right.
I suspect the small town militias that turned out (with their own guns) from Lexington Green to Concord Bridge on April 19, 1775, would have been surprised to learn that the right to bear arms would not become "a thing" until 200 years later.
By the rude bridge that arced the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once th'embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard 'round the world.
everything is new again robert williams, who pushed for self defense for African Americans a precursor to the panthers, who fled to cuba, where he urged armed uprisings on Radio Free America, has gained strange new respect
he was noted in deborchgraves monimbo as inspiration for the Soviet plot, something akin to what one saw in Invasion USA
Lefties really should not even attempt to provide learned commentary on Second Amendment law. They are almost wholly ignorant of the Founding Fathers' motivations for the Second Amendment, the textual analysis of its language, the jurisprudence on this issue since the Amendment was passed, or the statistical, demographic, and criminological realities fueling their simplistic calls for gun control.
Readering offers a typical example of this ignorance when he says: "The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties."
When honest and thoughtful leftist commentators study the issue, like Alan Dershowitz, Sanford Levinson, or Laurence Tribe, they typically come to a very different conclusion. The Second Amendment has always protected the right of the broad mass of the people, from whom the militia is drawn, to be armed.
The best explanation of the archaic language used in the Amendment is offered by rephrasing it in terms of another object that is in common use and ownership by the public: the book. Just as with guns, dictators frequently attack books that threaten their tyrannical rule as by pretending to care about their ill effects on public safety and order.
The language of the Second Amendment reads,
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.
Let's suppose it read instead,
A well educated Electorate being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books shall not be infringed.
This sentence is semantically identical to the actual Second Amendment in every way. Would the likes of Readering seriously argue that a dictator would be allowed by this language to ban books for everyone outside the electorate, i.e. people who had never bothered registering to vote, or foreign tourists, or children who are too young to vote, or resident aliens who had not yet achieved citizenship?
Or worse, would they say that if the government just stopped registering people to vote, thereby abolishing the electorate, that they would then be constitutionally justified in banning books for everyone? Because that is exactly what the evil leftist enemies of humanity argue every day when they tell us with a straight face that the Second Amendment applies only to militias of the sort that existed in Revolutionary times, and that they were all abolished when the National Guard was set up, and therefore the government can ban any gun they don't like.
There can be no compromise with this sort of enemy. They are no longer our countrymen. They are a greater threat to our liberty than Putin, Xi, the drug cartels, and all the terrorists who ever lived, put together and squared. Constant vigorous resistance to their wicked plans to enslave us must be carried out by any means necessary. It starts with teaching your children from a young age to hate the Left-- righteous hatred of monstrous evil being a great and noble moral imperative-- and by teaching them how to shoot.
US Code Title 10, § 246. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of
all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age
and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32,
under 45 years of age who are, or who have made
a declaration of intention to become, citizens of
the United States and of female citizens of the
United States who are members of the National
Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of
the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of
the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
I grew up White, Southern, and middleclass, and it's hard for me to think of a household or family that didn't have a gun. I mostly saw the long guns, those being harder to hide. Most of the men were veterans and didn't freak out about guns even if they didn't have their own.
I'm not talking about 'gun nuts,' just regular folks. The JROTC program had a rifle team and range, and we all were taught basic gun safety and handling with .22 cal. plinkers. (There may have been a parental permission slip required.)
readering said...
"The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties."
*********
OK, readering, how 'bout this hypothetical:
* State A decides it doesn't need its militia, so it disarms and disbans it, and challenges Congress to force them to fund one. (NEVER MIND that the milita requirement was included to allow states to be able to resist foreign or doestic invasion.)
* Do State A residents lose their rights to "Keep and Bear" while that challenge is ongoing?
*And: can you cite legal cases ever since the Framing supporting this "prevailing" legal interpretation you speak of---you know, by providing EVIDENCE?
* Can you cite any other provisions in the Bill of Rights that state action can simply change by fiat?
Can you square your unsupported opinion in view of Heller's holding:
"1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
(b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause. The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.
(c) The Court’s interpretation is confirmed by analogous arms-bearing rights in state constitutions that preceded and immediately followed the Second Amendment. Pp. 28–30.
(d) The Second Amendment’s drafting history, while of dubious interpretive worth, reveals three state Second Amendment proposals that unequivocally referred to an individual right to bear arms. Pp. 30–32.
(e) Interpretation of the Second Amendment by scholars, courts and legislators, from immediately after its ratification through the late 19th century also supports the Court’s conclusion. Pp. 32–47.
(f) None of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation. Neither United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553, nor Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252, 264–265, refutes the individual-rights interpretation. United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes. Pp. 47–54.
The Mafia invented the strategy of fashioning organized crime street gangs as victims of some sort of bigotry… against Italian-Americans.
The Black Panthers were an organized crime street gang. Yeah, I attended college in the late 60s, where I got the full BS artsy-fartsy crap that the Panthers were a community service organization. The Panthers were a black Mafia.
The Panthers liked to talk a lot about killing cops. They got the Chicago cops pretty worked up talking about killing them.
I lived in Chicago during the Panthers’ prime. Murderous organized crime street gang that majored in extortion rackets and in ripping off public funds with fake “social work.”
In the ensuing war between the CPD and the Panthers, I was on the side of the cops. The BLM era has proven that I was correct. Same racket updated. Is the CPD historically corrupt? yes. I’d still rather have them controlling the streets of Chicago than the Panthers.
Blogger Magilla Gorilla said...
That was the Militia Act of 1903.....or 06. Whatever.
Which means that the militia according to the second amendment consists of every citizen with a firearm.
Funny that Auster should make this assertion. I was in fact brought around to my current gun-rights viewpoint by reading the Black Panthers' arguments back around 1970.
A well educated Electorate being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books shall not be infringed.
Good analogy. We could take it further to include slavery and diversity in the Confederate states, masculinism and other class-disordered ideologies in China, redistributive change in progressive Germany, human rites in liberal societies, consensus science in democracies, political congruence in ethical religions, equitable and inclusive, but not equal and reconcilable.
readering said...
The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties.
1/15/23, 9:43 AM
…
I am not a lawyer. My understanding of the Bill of Rights is that all of these are individual rights. The right to free speech. The right to congregate. The right to a Free Press. The right to private property. The right from illegal search and seizure. these are all directed to the benefit of the individual of the groups certainly may benefit from these protections as well. It wouldn’t be strange if the second amendment or the only one not applicable to individuals.
also the blackstone rangers, some of whom became al rukn that group funded by qaddafi
I read one of Auster's books once, because it was recommended by a person whose judgment I respected.
It was tedious and philosophically shallow.
The militias of 1775 were so very different from today's National Guard that it's hard to think that the drafters of the Bill of Rights would have considered the National Guard as the equivalent of an armed citizenry.
I probably said this here before, but I became familiar with Auster's work through a film in which Mandy Patinkin and James Spader are gamblers who lose a bet and are forced to build a wall. Very strange and "Kafkaesque." I was fascinated, but later I found out that all of Auster's work was in that vein. Auster also made an impression as the reader on his own audiobooks. It was refreshing at first, but after a while all the New York tough guy bravado became boring. It might have been better to give another narrator a chance.
Auster seems like the kind of person who takes out his frustrations in political controversies and makes Trump the target of his pent-up anger and resentment. Not that it matters, but Lydia Davis's parents were Communists. Her mother was involved with a spy ring and was briefly connected by marriage to the Cockburn-Flanders family.
The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties.
Bullshit. you're either lying or ignorant. Up until the advent of the Progressive movement the first time around, no one ever thought that the Second Amendment meant anything other than: "Anyone may own any weapon they wish for any reason they wish".
It wasn't until the Progressives made organized crime immensely profitable by banning the production of alcohol, and the resultant turf battles by rival organizations using Tommy guns, that anyone ever started talking about gun control. All the way up to the early 1930's you could but a fully automatic Tommy Gun through the mail from a newspaper advertisement.
U.S. merchant ships (for that matter everyone's merchant ships) sailing out of local waters were universally armed with both crew served and individual weapons, the best that could be afforded, up through at least the Civil War. Were those ship and sailors part of the militia?
Explain Letters of Marque and Reprisal which Congress was given the power to issue. If the owners of those ships were part of the militia, no letters were needed.
Explain how the Rough Riders got the machine guns they used in the Spanish-American War.
Asked why the United States now needs gun laws, Bill Clinton replied that it's because the demographics of the U.S. have changed. If you look at the demographics of who is actually committing the vast majority of a actual gun crimes (leaving out suicides), you can see that the problem is indeed demographically confined to one major group of people: people who vote almost entirely for Democrats.
They also rarely obtain their guns legally anyway.
I forgot to mention that a large proportion of Scots, Irish, and people in rebellious parts of England also were disarmed, whether they themselves had rebelled or not.
A disarmed person was presumed to be a traitor. Simple as that.
So of course anybody who got away to America would be a teensy bit touchy about that.
The prevailing legal interpretation of the Second Amendment was that the right belonged to militias, not individuals. Change began in eighties.
Not to pile on, but... Well, maybe just a little.
It seems to me that the "prevailing legal interpretation's" actually having been the individual-rights one, as ably noted by many above, what readering is talking about might be the prevailing public understanding of the 2A among that portion of the public with which readering is most familiar. That makes sense; the "guns for official military and maybe police groups only" interpretation is still the prevailing belief among that portion of the public.
In the 80s, a lot of things happened. Limbaugh rose to prominence. Reagan was elected, and then reelected in a true landslide. The utter chaos behind the Iron Curtain started to be revealed and ultimately the Soviet experiment was shown to be an abject failure. Cable TV made its first real run at network TV's dominance. Maybe all of the things happening in the 80s that empowered ordinary people to learn about and then embrace the idea of American exceptionalism might have had something to do with more people's becoming familiar with the actual legal interpretation of the 2A?
Trusted slaves on Southern plantations frequently had hunting rifles. On the other hand, the Sullivan Act in NY was to keep guns out of the hands of Irish gangs. Running guns to the Indians was a major crime in the Western states. The 1900 Sears and Roebuck catalog carried pistols, shot guns, and rifles for anyone who could order them. The .22 cal pistol was developed for ladies to protect themselves from mashers. Guns in America have always been a mixed bag.
The Constitution is a social compact with two named parties: "the People" and "our Posterity" (e.g. babies, in the scientific domain humans evolved from conception).
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.
The Second Amendment originates in the idea of individuals rights upheld by a government with limited rights, and while it targets militia service, it is founded in individual education, training, and exercise while and in pursuit of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one. #HateLovesAbortion
Highly recommend Clayton Cramer's book, My Brother Ron.
My husband, not by personal choice, was briefly one research assistant on Bellesiles' gun book. He suspected Bellesiles was manufacturing statistics by misusing estate documents to pretend fewer people owned/inherited/transferred guns between generations. But a graduate student cannot criticize a tenured professor who is telling the intelligentsia what they want to hear. When the egg hit their collective face, we were forced by the university to pay our own way back to Atlanta to Emory to testify to Bellesiles' malfeasance. Just one more insult to injury by our academic betters.
Bellesiles, meanwhile, is still revered in academic circles and landed comfortably at another large university. That sure was a convenient "flood" that "destroyed" his "research notes."
gilbar,
I get what you mean, but this part is (accidentally?) spoken like a True Modern™:
"California still had laws on their books allowing Open Carry of rifles."
Wasn't it, rather, that California had no laws prohibiting it?
Tina,
Bellesiles is back at a large university? Can you name the villain? (Last I heard he was teaching history at a junior college somewhere--travesty enough, mind you.)
he was given two publishing contracts after that fiasco,
History used to be a study of facts, to allow arguments to be tested for sensibility and utility regarding the past, present and future. Leave out enough facts and you can conclude anything.
Black Panthers..."they were the group who originally set forth the argument that gun ownership is a right and that it’s for self-defence."
Thomas Paine disagrees, as did all the nation's founders. Decades later, in the Civil War a lot of soldiers suppied their own weaponry upon enlistment. Heck, Grant allowed the Southern officers to keep their sidearms after the South surrendered.
Auster blames "the gun" that killed his grandfather and ruined his father's life. Pretty strange ordering of the factors.
Per the article, his grandparents were living in Kenosha in the early 1900's and had FIVE young sons. The marriage "broke up" and his grandfather moved to Chicago. Where he began to live with another woman. When granddad came home for a visit in January, his grandmother asked him to fix a broken ceiling light. While he was preoccupied and standing on a chair, she retrieved a pistol and shot him several times. Amazingly, she was acquitted and she moved the family to New Jersey. She was unstable; they were impoverished and moved constantly to stay ahead of the bill collectors. Auster's father had a terrible upbringing, all things considered.
So. Grandfather didn't deserve to be shot but he abandoned his family and moved to Chicago where he shacked up with another woman---leaving his presumably unstable wife to cope alone with five young boys. I presume that Auster has no severe objections to a household where one rifle is possessed. Newsflash: Grandmom would have shot her husband anyway even if her only choice had been a hunting rifle.
"the Black Panthers, who were obviously not white conservatives, but they were the group who originally set forth the argument that gun ownership is a right and that it’s for self-defence."
What a clown.
"...every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.."
That's from the Alabama constitution. It dates from 1819.
Extra points if you can name the Black Panther who wrote it.
"the Black Panthers, who were obviously not white conservatives, but they were the group who originally set forth the argument that gun ownership is a right and that it’s for self-defence."
What a clown.
"...every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.."
That's from the Alabama constitution. It dates from 1819.
Extra points if you can name the Black Panther who wrote it.
Kirk: Bellisles landed at a prestigious public university. U Conn I think. There's a pun to be made there.
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