Rep. Jamie Rankin Beclowned Himself in Opening Remarks at Gun Hearing

Rep. Jamie Rankin isn’t going to be on the Christmas card list of any gun rights group you care to name. He’s a vehement anti-gunner and that’s where his bread is buttered. That’s not going to change.

Which is fine, I suppose. He’s in the minority right now, so all he can do is bloviate and then sit there and be impotent in his gun rights animosity.

But bloviate he shall, and he did.

In opening remarks in a subcommittee meeting on Tuesday, Rankin decided to display his burning stupid for the entire world to see, then sent out a press release with his remarks.

Awfully swell of him, really.

The problem is that my Republican colleagues have completely deformed the Second Amendment. They say it gives you the right to overthrow the government. Our former colleague, Matt Gaetz often claimed that the Second Amendment “is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.”

This purported right to overthrow the government means that the people must enjoy access to munitions equivalent to that of the government’s arsenal. As our colleague, Representative Chip Roy, argues, the Second Amendment was “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.” And my friend Representative Lauren Boebert says that the Second Amendment has “nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.” 

Despite all of this pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric about how the Constitution provides a right of civil insurrection, the actual Constitution, in a half-dozen different places, treats “insurrection” and “rebellion” not as protected rights but as serious and dangerous offenses against our government and our people.

And yet, our Founding Fathers also made it very clear that when the government became tyrannical, it was the duty of the people to throw off the chains of oppression and fight back, not just with words but with weapons.

I mean, they’d just engaged in their own rebellion, their own insurrection, and thrown off those precise chains. They knew that no government could be created that couldn’t, in time, come to oppress the people. They wanted to prevent that, which includes the right to keep and bear arms.

Look at Europe for a moment. Their right to keep and bear arms has long disappeared, and now they’re being arrested for memes. People in England are legitimately worried about being arrested for praying in their homes if they live too close to the wrong establishment.

That’s not freedom.

Then Rankin proves that he hasn’t read any current events over the last decade or so, at least with regard to the Supreme Court.

The Constitution also thoroughly rejects the right-wing fantasy that random bands of disgruntled citizens can claim the powers of the institutional “Militia” to commit violent acts against public officials. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 reserves “to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress”. This intergovernmental cooperation is how we come to have what the Second Amendment calls for in its first clause: “a well-regulated Militia.”

The Supreme Court has been clear that the Second Amendment’s reference to a “well-regulated militia” means well-regulated by the government. Not the Proud Boys and not the Oath Keepers. In 1886, the Court upheld an Illinois law criminalizing private paramilitary groups as a legitimate measure “necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.” The “militia” is not some reserve power to rebel against the government but the well-organized instrument by which state and federal governments have opposed domestic violence.

First, the right to keep and bear arms is separate from creating your own private paramilitary group. I disagree with that ruling, personally, but a private paramilitary group is a different thing and is not expressly protected by the Constitution, thus permitting that law to stand.

Yet the Heller decision expressly stated that the Second Amendment is not a collective right, it’s an individual one which means it’s not “well-regulated by the government.”

In short, there have been a lot of Supreme Court cases since 1886, so if that’s your only citation, then you haven’t kept up with much of anything.

You can go and read the rest of it for yourself if you like. All it’ll do is show you that Rankin is a freaking moron. I said he was going out of his way to look stupid when I reacted to this on X, but most people figured it wasn’t out of his way in the least. That’s certainly fair.

I’m just glad he’s in the minority, because stupid people like him would set us up for the very tyranny that people like him think is already upon us.