Purpose of 2nd Amendment?

Whose Rights?

In what's apparently been an ongoing Second Amendment discussion in the Daily Post, Chick Keller asks "A careful reading shows that the (2nd) amendment uses for its justification of personal possession of guns, the necessity for a "well-armed militia.” Since we no longer have (or need) such a militia, hasn't that reasoning gone away, and haven't we returned to a state where individual possession is no longer necessary?" Mr. Keller further opines "This might not mean that people can't have guns, but it would mean that their right to "bear arms" is no longer supported by the Constitution."

Interesting question. I'm not convinced the "well regulated militia" (actual Constitutional wording) doesn't exist, as it has morphed into a National Guard. The Guard itself draws on the general population, as the Founders desired. The Federal Government established the Civilian Marksmanship Program in 1903 in the hopes that we could ensure new recruits or conscripts could shoot straight and know the muzzle from the breech of a 1903 Springfield rifle. This program has more recently been redefined by Public Law 104-106, (10 February 1996) which created the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety.

The Second Amendment has far less to do with defending one's self against crooks, blue helmets, or black helicopters, as some would assert, and more to do with the separation of powers. Some have suggested that self defense and putting food on the table are such basic human rights that the Founders would not have considered these as needing protection. The 2nd's basis was in a broadly disseminated militia to be called on in defense of the nation or state in support of a limited standing army. Its never been considered an unlimited right to own any gun for any reason, even by the current conservative Supreme Court.

So, if some folks don't think that the Constitutional context for private gun ownership is relevant due to our large standing army, military industrial complex, and drone warfare, does that mean the public's right to keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment is no longer supported by the Constitution?

I'm not sure I buy into the idea that we can casually dispense with portions of the Bill of Rights merely because they don't seem relevant to some of us. If the public no longer values the 2nd Amendment, it can do what is right and proper: repeal or modify it. That has been done with the 18th Amendment (Prohibition), which was repealed with the 21st. Such a mechanism is far less ambiguous to the public, the courts, Congress, or the Executive Branch.

That said, the 2nd Amendment is not only clear in its statement that the people own the right to keep and bear arms as the underpinnings of a well regulated militia, but it is symbolic of a distribution of power away from a central Federal authority. Many Conservatives value it for not only its literal empowerment of the citizen owning a gun, but in its distrust of a Federal authority owning all the guns. I don't think that notion is going to go away any time soon, and indeed, may be inflamed by thoughts of removing 2nd Amendment protections. Perhaps we need to find a less polarizing way to solve our gun violence problem than by scrubbing the Bill of Rights of one of its ten guarantees of freedom.

The Shooting Triangle

Shooting Triangle

If you get the Albuquerque Journal, you might have read Leslie Linthicum's Sunday piece, Gunfire Resonates in Roswell in Uncommon Way, about the recent Roswell school shooting.  Rare in the aftermath of these events, Ms. Linthicum tells us we have the chance to respond with "intelligence, nuance, and grace". Usually, we respond with finger pointing, accusations, and calls from the NRA to arm ourselves to the teeth or calls from their opponents to disarm ourselves and restrict gun ownership. Most of the time, the rest of us watch and listen as these opponents shout past each other.

The Fire Triangle

I had a simple thought on this topic, and it mirrors that old idea of a fire triangle. To start a fire, you need fuel, oxygen, and heat. To get a shooting, you need a gun, a gunman, and "heat", i.e., an unrestrained action that most of us would not commit. To avoid a shooting, one needs to only cut out one leg of the triangle just as you would cut out one leg of the fire triangle. One doesn't need to ban fuel just as one doesn't need to ban guns. One does need to eliminate that lethal combination of all three legs of the triad.

One can start at any apex. Start with the gun. If you don't need a gun or are not trained or qualified to use one in self defense, don't own one or keep it securely locked up for those hunting or target shooting trips. I'm not in the camp of those who say we have an unqualified need for more good guys with guns, just as we don't need more untrained firefighters at the fire station or untrained cops on the beat. Its a hard job that requires a lot of training and mental preparation. If you are not ready, don't go there.

Its a little more difficult to eliminate the more fallible human. But that goes to things like more careful evaluation of parole or its conditions and how we treat mental illness and family dysfunction. It also includes more comprehensive but reasonably administered background checks to screen prohibited purchasers from the market. It means tougher penalties and vigorous prosecution of straw purchasers, as recently discussed in the National Catholic Reporter.  It preferrably means family and individual control on access, and personal responsibility. If we had more self control, Big Government would have less to do. Unfortunately, the days of easy access to firearms, especially by schoolkids, needs to be examined critically. My brother keeps his guns locked in a safe so unqualified hands cannot reach them. That's a far cry from his and my own youth, where the school bus would drop us off and we would grab the guns and go hunting. If you are having a party where the liquor flows, its time to lock things up. If you are having a tough time of it due to job, family, or personal issues to the point of worrying about yourself, turn over your weapons to a trusted friend or family member or give them the safe key. Eliminate the human compulsion by eliminating yourself from being armed, even if only temporarily.  I don't like to suggest waiting for a restraining order to be filed, because that means the match is already lit.

Finally, the heat. Seems to me that in this day and age, the first thing a lot of people resort to when emotions heat up to a festering boil is a weapon, whether it be angry words, fists, or more lethal quantities such as a shotgun or AR-15. When the heat is on, its time instead to make sure one of the other two elements of the triangle are missing until the heat passes. One's first action should be to walk away and begin a count to ten, or make a call to a trusted friend or the family priest. Not a run to that bedroom drawer or gun case.

I'm not sure how we accomplish this gun analogy to avoiding fire, but instead of always concentrating on adding or subtracting guns, maybe we ought to look to all three corners of that shooting triangle instead of only one of the corners. Few of us have no fuels in our homes. We read newspapers, live in wood structures, and have wood burning stoves. Most of us own matches. What we eliminate is the catastrophic combination

 Eliminating guns is a hot button issue that raises rather than lowers tempers. All we really need to do is control that lethal combination. Maybe we will have more luck.

When words fail us....

More later.

With a tip of the hat to Erika and others who stand up to abusive authority.

Overblown--How We Inflate the Terrorism Threat, and Why We Believe Them

Driving to Santa Fe this morning, I found myself listening to a BBC broadcast on terrorism. Luck me, since they were interviewing Woody Hayes Political Science Professor John Mueller from Ohio State.

I took two Poli Sci courses (National Security Policy and a history of modern conflict in the 20th Century) from John Mueller back when he was teaching at the Univ of Rochester which luckily, coincided with my undergraduate tenure there.

Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. New York: Free Press, 2006. Information about the book

Video below from The Daily Show.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Gun Show at Pueblo Complex: Irrelevant Battle of Style Rather than Substance

Nancy Schick's editorial in Sunday's Los Alamos Daily Post boils down to one issue. She does not like guns, sees them only in the context of school shootings, and does not want the school district to be in any way associated with guns or a gun show. She is certainly entitled to her opinion, but her opinion should not be the basis of Schools policy.

First of all, I take issue with the tone of her essay. The Los Alamos Sportsman's Club (of which I am a member, but speaking for myself here) bears little resemblance to "...a white-supremacist hate group or to the Socialists Workers’ Party...".  Why this comparison or its slippery slope inference is made other than to enflame emotions is beyond me, but it distracts from the point and is beneath the dignity of the civil discourse I am used to in this community, which has, so far, allowed for reasonable discussion between people of widely different political persuasions without too many resorts to low blows. The last thing Los Alamos needs is an emotionally driven fight between citizens with the schools caught in the crossfire. Furthermore, the letter closes with argumentum ad misericordiam rather than with anything resembling a sound basis for public policy.

As far as the Schools renting surplus space to LASC, as others have reminded us, the Pueblo Complex is not a school. Robert Pirsig's Church of Reason essay in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind, reminding us that the brick and mortar appearance of a building does not always tell us what is going on inside. The Schools rent surplus space out to help maintain their bottom line. The Schools' rental to a credit union, a truck rental agency, LANL, and others does not constitute an endorsement of any of these activities (including, I presume, an endorsement of the continued maintenance and safeguarding of the nation's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, which, after all, pays for the Schools) but plain old good business sense. Likewise, rental of Middle School space to craft fairs is a business decision, although I doubt any would object to a crafts fair.

Indeed, schools across the country rent to religious organizations to help maintain the bottom line. These are carefully crafted agreements that do not constitute an endorsement of a particular faith or even an endorsement of religion. That is especially good in my opinion, since some religions take issue with the very science taught in our schools.

Finally, back to the gun show. Los Alamos is an incredibly safe community. The fact that this is a safe community does not provide any data suggesting that firearms ownership or a gun show that has been going on for some 17 years is in any way antithetical  to safety.  While Ms.Schick makes clear her distaste for guns, nowhere does she put forth an  argument demonstrating that the gun show endangers students, puts the Schools at risk, or leads to crime. Indeed, by supporting the JNROTC marksmanship program, the LASC has supported the teaching of safe gun handling and helped the team reach national stature. Furthermore, the men and women I encountered at the show  are a broad cross section of the community. The Schools should no more discriminate against our holding a gun show when renting out space than it would discriminate against any other respectable Los Alamos community group. Even Socialists ;-)

Big Brother is Watching, Listening, and Generally Making a Nuisance of Himself: Welcome to the National Security Surveillance State

Now

Then

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.- O'Brien speaking to Winston Smith in 1984

Add to that "the object of surveillance is surveillance". As a Democrat who twice contributed funds to Barack Obama's presidential campaigns, I'm more than a little miffed that the candidate who campaigned on openness has become a President with a cavalier attitude towards the NSA's domestic surveillance program. The 4th Amendment is pretty clear on stuff like needing warrants for searches, and  prohibiting unreasonable searches or seizures. Yet, under cover of official secrecy, the FISA court has reinvented itself and has made classified interpretations of public law, thus allowing the NSA and Executive Branch to decide in secret when it needs a warrant and what is reasonable, in other words, it can wipe its collective ass with the U.S. Constitution.

Efforts to make the public "more comfortable" with the government's "classified law" and its lying about its snooping make a silk purse of legal sow's ears. There is, to be sure, scant comfort that we wouldn't even be having the conversation had not Edward Snowden spilled the beans on the activity. Its never a good thing when a junior operative (or anyone, including Daniel Ellsberg) makes far reaching decisions on the boundaries between Constitutional law vs. releasing classified information, which is why we should not be repeatedly playing fast and loose with the Constitution, public trust, and thus willfully creating more Daniel Ellsbergs as honest civil servants become compelled to blow the whistle. U.S. Senators knew of this problem, complained repeatedly to the United States Attorney General (in 2011 and 2012), and nothing was done. Perhaps Senators Wyden and Udall should have spilled the beans. They certainly have more standing. But all remained secret, hence the Snowden fiasco. As I have said in the comments section of the NY Times, if Mr. Snowden deserves his day in court, then Mr. Obama deserves his day defending himself in front of the U.S. Senate.

...Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
-Bruce Cockburn, from The Trouble With Normal

As a nation, we've allowed ourselves to be far too complacent in the face of a rising Big Brother ever since the 9-11 attacks or perhaps even long before that seminal event. Unless we change our complacency to government overreach, we will eventually find that what we once considered unthinkable becomes the new normal. Much of this unconstitutional conduct goes on in secret and some of it benefits powerful private corporate entities that profit from our complacency. Hence secret overreach has powerful clients and the folks who do this work have powerful friends in Congress to rationalize and support their efforts.

So what really bugs me is not the surveillance, but that the public was lied to and had secret policy made behind our backs. Indeed, we may be willing to consent to many of the NSA's activities as reasonable in an unreasonable world. Just ask us. In an ideal world, I think PATRIOT should be repealed and replaced by a law with more stringent safeguards.  The public should give (or deny) through our vote, consent to what we consider a reasonable level of government surveillance over our private lives, given the world we now live in. The Supreme Court should reign in FISA's breadth and confine it to narrow questions of operation rather than letting FISA secretly re-write the U.S. Constitution's protections--this is the most egregious offense, in my opinion, to a democratic government subject to rule by the law of the land made in our names. Of course, its the Chief Justice who appoints FISA judges, much of Congress has drunk the Kool-Aid, and the President seems to have bought into the Nixon Doctrine: "If the President does it, that means its not illegal". This is not an ideal world.

Long Live B-B, eh? 

Students for an Orwellian Society

Original Intent

Sanity must prevail, but the 2nd Amendment has a history that the left doesn't want to acknowledge.

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.

New Mexico Gun law and State Constitutional provisions can be found here. (BTW, I don't know anything about the Southern New Mexico Militia, so don't take this as a blessing of the site owners).

No right is absolute, and although the Founders, as recorded in such places as the Federalist Papers, argued that "a well regulated militia" was inexorably tied into the people's individual right to bear arms, that doesn't mean they thought every farmer should have a twelve pounder double-shotted with grape and canister aimed at the front porch. Neither does it mean we should all be carrying around enough firepower to fight a land war in Afghanistan. One has to balance individual rights with the public safety. Yes, finding that balance is a real chore and requires trust, individual responsibility, and logic. The more freedom one has, the more responsibilities one shoulders for the public good.

Some useful quotes from the old white farts that go to Heller vs DC.

"If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an
army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the
liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little,
if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who
stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their
fellow-citizens." - Alexander Hamilton

"Before a standing army can rule the people must be disarmed; as they are
in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot
enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people
are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops
that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States." - Noah Webster

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who
approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but
downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably
ruined." - Patrick Henry

"Be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of
the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the
United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms..." - Samuel Adams

"And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not
warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms." - Thomas Jefferson

Speaking of sanity, or the lack thereof. Perhaps the problem is not so much the availability of guns, but the unavailability of prudence, common sense, and self-restraint. For example: