The Law and Justice Room
The Second Amendment Doesn’t Say What You Think It Does is an interview of Michael Waldman who wrote The Second Amendment: A Biography by Mother Jones's Hannah Levintova. I offer it as a strawman to shoot down.
...As America grapples with a relentless tide of gun violence, pro-gun activists have come to rely on the Second Amendment as their trusty shield when faced with mass-shooting-induced criticism. In their interpretation, the amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms—a reading that was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 2008 ruling in District of Columbia. v. Heller. Yet most judges and scholars who debated the clause’s awkwardly worded and oddly punctuated 27 words in the decades before Heller almost always arrived at the opposite conclusion, finding that the amendment protects gun ownership for purposes of military duty and collective security. It was drafted, after all, in the first years of post-colonial America, an era of scrappy citizen militias where the idea of a standing army—like that of the just-expelled British—evoked deep mistrust.
...MW: There are surprises in this book for people who support gun control, and people who are for gun rights. When the Supreme Court ruled in Heller, Justice Scalia said he was following his doctrine of originalism. But when you actually go back and look at the debate that went into drafting of the amendment, you can squint and look really hard, but there’s simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting. Emphatically, the focus was on the militias. To the framers, that phrase “a well-regulated militia” was really critical. In the debates, in James Madison’s notes of the Constitutional Convention, on the floor of the House of Representatives as they wrote the Second Amendment, all the focus was about the militias. Now at the same time, those militias are not the National Guard. Every adult man, and eventually every adult white man, was required to be in the militias and was required to own a gun, and to bring it from home. So it was an individual right to fulfill the duty to serve in the militias.
...MW: Yes. And that might be noteworthy for some. There were plenty of guns. There was the right to defend yourself, which was part of English common law handed down from England. But there were also gun restrictions at the same time. There were many. There were limits, for example, on where you could store gunpowder. You couldn’t have a loaded gun in your house in Boston. There were lots of limits on who could own guns for all different kinds of reasons. There was an expectation that you should be able to own a gun. But they didn’t think they were writing that expectation into the Constitution with the Second Amendment.
OK, so the strawman isn't their assumption of gun violence--@zelmo is still waiting for his guns to move.
It's also not the controvery over whether the 2nd protects a collective or individual right. I happen to think Scalia wrong in Heller. It is a collective right, of the people, not in the modern liberal socialist sense of the word, but in the premodern world where people were defined by the social, hierarchical relationships, from family on up. "...the amendment protects gun ownership for purposes of military duty and collective security."
Nor is a strwman found in the contention the amendment was not about "individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting." Those uses are individual, personal, mundane in fact, but not political, and the Constitution is, if anything, political.
No, to me the strawman is found in to overemphasis on militia and military duty. While the interview acknowledges the militia was the people back then--"Every adult man, and eventually every adult white man, was required to be in the militias and was required to own a gun, and to bring it from home", it commits the anachronism of converting that to a modern military sense.
Of course you may disagree and may find even more strawmen.
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Originally Posted by Chris
