Reasonable self-defense leaves room for firearms regulation. Exotic and highly destructive weapons could be restricted or banned, because no one needs a machine gun or grenade launcher for protection against ordinary crime.
...Most of the government's gun laws, in fact, would have no trouble passing the self-defense test (as the Heartland Institute calls it in an amicus brief), because most gun laws are reasonable and don't leave people defenseless. As for the insurrectionary purpose of the Second Amendment, the Court could either repudiate it explicitly or pass over it in silence, consigning it to irrelevance.
The self-defense test is good policy, because it aligns the Second Amendment with modern needs and sensibilities. It is good law, because it rescues the amendment from being a dead letter or an embarrassment.
Jonathan Rauch, the only thing irrelevant and embarrassing in this debate is you.
This is what happens when you let the "moderates" drive the bus--they can't find enough of "those people" to run over. It's happened with the "Big Tent" Republicans, and it's happening in the gun rights movement--with the complicity of many who claim political expansion through compromise is more important than fidelity to principles and core constituency.
You would think as someone who champions rights (or at least exploits that perception) for a disaffected minority, Rauch would be more sensitive to first alienating and then abandoning any "subculture." But strict constructionists are an embarrassment. And those militia yahoos? Forget it! Besides, he says, borrowing a line from the Brady Playbook, "No one needs a machine gun."
There were once urbane dandies like Jonathan in 1920's-era Berlin. Many were literate, fashionable, sophisticated...and we know what happened 10 years later under an administration that deemed them "socially aberrant."
But Jonathan is no student of history. Jonathan thinks it can't happen here. Why, the very idea would be laughable if it wasn't such an embarrassment.
Because, you see, the "insurrectionary purpose" according to Jonathan, is "a dead letter." If we bring it up, we relegate the Second Amendment to "irrelevance."
But what Jonathan and those like him can't (or won't) answer are some questions I've addressed before:
[W]hat about human nature has changed?
In a century that has seen two world wars, continual violent political upheaval, genocide and systemic, brutal tyranny and repression, has humanity truly demonstrated a benevolence and maturity that distinguishes our era from those that preceded us? In a culture that breeds gang warfare, rampant violence, city-crippling riots and a national murder rate measured in the tens of thousands, how can anyone credibly claim that the need for individual defense is a relic of the past?
And ultimately, what is this "outdated" Second Amendment really about, if not the preservation of a free people when all other options to defend life and liberty have been exhausted? Against all enemies, individual and aggregated, foreign and domestic. Here is where we must face the core meaning of the awesome power and responsibility that this "obsolete" right places squarely in the hands of the people. Because, ultimately, what this right guarantees you is not a gun, but a choice. A choice, in the final analysis, to submit to evil or to fight it, literally.
You'd never know that if your only exposure to "gun rights" was from great thinkers like Jonathan. And isn't it curious how the reach of such people is always so much longer and their voices so much louder than those of we the embarrassing?
What we haven't established with Jonathan is if he's a willful subversive or just a blind fool. But in the end, it doesn't matter. All we really need to know is if we continue allowing ourselves to be led by him and his kind, he'll be proven right. The Second Amendment will be a dead letter, consigned to irrelevance.
Me, I plan on continuing to be an embarrassment as long as I draw breath.
[Via Carl S]
