The Atlantic Has Entire Piece Premised on Long-Debunked Argument for Gun Control

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The text of the Second Amendment is pretty clear. It’s not written in legalese where you need a law degree to understand what it really means, It shouldn’t take centuries of jurisprudence to interpret it correctly, either. It is what it says.

However, if I had a time machine and could go back and help guide the Founding Fathers, I’d advise them to drop that opening clause entirely or at least rephrase it to something like “A well-armed population being necessary to the security of a free state.” Something that wouldn’t be reinterpreted years later as language drifts to mean something else.

Of course, we know that “well regulated,” at the time of the founding, simply meant “properly functioning” or something along those lines. The problem is that many people don’t want to accept that.

Over at The Atlantic, they have an entire piece premised on that failure to accept reality titled, “Don’t Forget the First Half of the Second Amendment,” with the subtitle, “The amendment doesn’t prohibit gun regulations; it demands them.”

Sure.

Anyway, the text itself:

But this version of the Second Amendment ignores the first half, which reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” The Supreme Court barely contemplated the text’s meaning in Heller, asking no more than whether it could be given a logical link or a purpose consistent with what it dubbed the “operative clause”—wherein the amendment, in the Court’s view, protects an individual right to possess a weapon. The first half of the Second Amendment is at times also anachronistically associated with the question of whether the right to possess a weapon is tied to service in a “well regulated Militia”—a view the Heller majority rejected. Missing from this reading, however, is any consideration of the constitutional significance of what is necessary to maintain the “security of a free State.” What does this security entail? Are Americans secure in a free state when they live in fear of the next violent act that might be perpetrated by the bearer of semiautomatic weapons? Are Americans secure in a free state when they are told that more resources should be spent on arming teachers, or training students to duck and cover and keep silent, as if in a new cold war, only this time the enemy is ourselves?

Recently, a dude plowed his car into a group of people in Liverpool who were just celebrating their local soccer team’s big victory. More than 50 people were injured, some seriously.

No gun was needed.

I wrote this morning about two gangs going at one another in an Australian shopping mall with machetes. No gun was needed there, either.

The idea that security means being free of fear is asinine, but we’ll get to that in a moment. In the meantime, let’s note that millions of Americans feel safer owning a gun than when they don’t have one. Whose feeling of safety is more important? Who has priority?

Especially when the worst mass murders in American history didn’t involve a gun at all. From 9/11 to Oklahoma City, guns weren’t needed to induce terror in the population. Are we to be free of planes or fertilizer?

Moving on…

The gun lobby argues that the political, psychological, and emotional attachment to the ready availability of weapons for some is a value too precious to contemplate rethinking our collective approach to gun regulation. Any regulation that might lead to imposing far more restrictive licensing and background checks, or to limiting the availability of particular kinds of weapons, would be too costly to their selective understanding of constitutional freedoms. According to the gun lobby, individuals engaged in their own fantasy of the heroic citizen equipped to do battle against tyrannical government agents would suffer incalculable collective costs were Americans to restrict their access to weapons. If the choice were the lives of children or the political imagination of a vocal group of armament activists, whose costs should matter more? The inconvenience of some or the lives of others?

A selective understanding of the Constitution? Who is it here ignoring the phrase “shall not be infringed” by claiming that the opening clause demands gun control? Let’s be real here. The gun industry and those of us who support gun rights have debunked this entire premise a thousand times and will likely have to do it a thousand more, but even if it was remotely accurate in the idea that the perception of security was valid, the whole “shall not be infringed” thing still trumps every other argument you’d care to produce.

The Second Amendment provides an answer. The “security of a free State” matters. Our security is a constitutional value, one that outweighs absolutist gun-rights claims by NRA lobbyists, or Oath Keepers and other insurrectionist groups who hold their access to weapons dear for use in an imagined anti-tyranny quest. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer the costs of the actual tyranny that living in a state of fear of mass gun violence creates.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech placed freedom from fear as one of four essential human freedoms. Translated to our modern gun crisis, this freedom can be realized only when individuals no longer have easy legal access to armaments that put them “in a position to commit an act of [mass] physical aggression against any neighbor.” Children today do not have this freedom from fear. Just to live in society and go to school, they must endure regular active-shooter drills, because the gun lobby has opposed any regulation that would keep weapons out of the hands of those whose activities remain legal up until the exact moment when they start shooting children and teachers. Proposals to make schools more like fortresses only add to the costs children bear rather than addressing the root constitutional problem—that insufficient regulation of guns impairs the liberties of all.

Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms were things he manufactured for political purposes. They had no basis beyond helping him get him elected. And please, spare me the freedom rhetoric from a man who rounded up Japanese Americans and interned them in what were literally concentration camps, even if they were better run than the Nazi version.

Roosevelt wouldn’t have known what freedom was if it walked up to him and granted him the use of his legs again. Another of his Four Freedoms was freedom from want, after all, which is literally impossible because people will always have wants that they interpret as needs.

Honestly, the fact that The Atlantic ran this is annoying. No, I don’t expect better from them, but I do find it worrying that they still can’t comprehend the reality of what the Second Amendment actually means here. I’m baffled that anyone still thinks this is a valid argument.

Unfortunately, here we are, where people with mental disabilities get a chance to write for a major publication and have their inane ramblings taken seriously by those who think they’re better than the rest of us.