Pride of Ignorance

[Subdeacon Joe]

A good read: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357047/pride-ignorance-firearms-charles-c-w-cooke?fb_action_ids=741997872492895&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map={%22741997872492895%22%3A1411865309034823}&action_type_map={%22741997872492895%22%3A%22og.likes%22}&action_ref_map=[]

 

For the sneering consequentialists of the
post-constitutional Left, Justice Antonin Scalia is a bogeyman among
bogeymen and the Second Amendment is an exasperating relic. It should
thus come as no great surprise that Scalia’s considered and thoughtful
comments on the future of firearms law, offered in good faith during a
speech in Montana last week, were met with brash and injudicious
criticism.

As revenge for his responding to the question of
whether private citizens could own rocket launchers with the modest
answer that this “remains to be determined,” the Daily Kos went so far as to suggest
that Scalia, whom the outlet called “Supreme Court Justice Fever
Dream,” was a “crackpot” and “not right in the head.” Over at the more
moderate Daily Beast, meanwhile, Adam Winkler continued to lie
about the nature of the Second Amendment, contending slipperily that
the “insurrectionist understanding” is false and advancing without shame
the smear that “Justice Scalia, that acclaimed lover of originalism,”
is “taking his cues from the Tea Party rather than from the text and
history of the Constitution.”

As it happens, Scalia’s view is not crazy at all. Indeed, it is
the only supportable one. The Left, whose members are typically not
interested enough in the details of firearms law to participate
coherently in this debate, has long neglected to examine the historical
record, preferring instead to dismiss the notion of the right to bear
arms as a check on government as being axiomatically dangerous. This is
to its great discredit. Reflexively to reject the notion that, as Thomas
Jefferson put it in the Declaration, “whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it” is to ignore not only the principles that
undergirded the American founding but also the British common law that
preceded it, the recorded debates surrounding the drafting and passage
of both the federal and state constitutions, and the bulk of the
contemporary jurisprudence.