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Responses To The Revisionist Salon Piece


Subdeacon Joe

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https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2017/12/17/salon-shoots-second-amendment-kills-american-history-mistake/

 

Then they go on to this bit of nonsense:

For example, James Madison who, as a young member of the Virginia legislature, introduced a bill for the “Preservation of Deer” which penalized persons “. . . who shall bear a gun out of his enclosed ground unless whilst performing military duty. . .”

This is simple dishonesty. By use of strategic ellipses they make it seem like it is illegal for someone to carry a weapon off their own property. If one goes to the actual text:

deer-hunting-guns.jpg

 

The plain text says if you are caught illegally taking deer, the prohibition on carrying your weapon off your property is part of the performance bond of the offender and it is only valid for a year. This, I’ll note from my own experience poaching, is a lot less than happens to you today in Virginia if you get caught spotlighting deer from your truck. It doesn’t take away a general right to carry firearms, it is clearly not a “gun control” law. It is a restraint placed upon someone convicted of a crime.

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454741/salons-second-amendment-911-truthers-screed-misses-mark

 

As for the “Framers’ intent” and the “historical context,” both of these line up squarely on the side of what is, for good reason, described as the “Standard Model.” It cannot be repeated often enough that the “odd” position in the debate over the Second Amendment is not the one taken by the Supreme Court, but the preposterous “collective right” theory that Asner, Weinberger, and a handful of other truthers have taken to peddling in the modern era. To “study the history,” as Asner commands, is to discover this immediately, and thereby to realize the absurdity of the claims that the United States was “founded on gun control”; that our “American forefathers limited any and all freedoms when they clashed with public safety”; and that, ultimately, the Constitution was written because “the Founders were afraid of guns.” It wasn’t. They didn’t. And they weren’t. Rather, they understood that they had entrenched within the federal Constitution the principle that, as St. George Tucker put it in 1803, The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Amendments to C. U. S. Art. 4, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government Which meant, as William Rawle wrote in his seminal A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, that: The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. Or, as outlined by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in his influential 1833 work, Commentaries on the Constitution, The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpations and arbitrary power of rulers; and it will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them. Know who else wrote like this? James Madison, a man whom Asner and Weinberger inexplicably cast as a “scared’ gun-controller. A quick reading of Federalist 46 – in which Madison distinguished repeatedly between “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation” and “the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed” — should suffice to disabuse anybody of the first position. In Europe, Madison observed in the same document, “governments are afraid to trust the people with arms”; in America, those people had won independence, and they would do so again if it came to it. There is no way of squaring this document with the claim that Madison was either against the private ownership or arms per se, or that he wished it to be contingent upon militia service. (Those who are interested should also read this excellent explanation of how brazenly the pair is lying about Madison’s “Preservation of Deer” bill.)

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454741/salons-second-amendment-911-truthers-screed-misses-mark

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