F6 - the change of the NRA position is interesting too .. lol .. did you notice (from the one i linked before) .. back in the '20s and 30's the 2nd Amendment was not even part of the gun debate ..
that one felt to fit so well to yours i just had to attach it .. lol .. seriously couldn't yelp meself .. oh, this is a bit old, just found it on going for a 'gun laws ok' cartoon ..
The 6 craziest state gun laws
Posted by Dylan Matthews on December 16, 2012 at 3:09 pm .. 283 Comments
Yesterday, Sarah looked at a number of gun control measures that could prevent mass killings like Friday’s massacre in Newtown, Conn. But it’s worth noting that at the state level, gun laws have been getting laxer, not more stringent, in recent years, and at times preposterously so. Here is a sampling of the most lenient state gun laws in the country, to give a sense of exactly how lax the current legal regime is.
Volunteers with the Vermont Long Trail Patrol make their descent. (George Henton/For The Washington Post)
1. Concealed carry at 16 — with no permit: Most states that allow people to carry a concealed weapon on their person require gun owners to obtain a permit before doing so. But four states — Alaska, Arizona, Wyoming and Vermont — allow concealed carry without any permit. That means, the Brady Campaign’s Brian Malte tells me, that Jared Loughner was in full compliance with Arizona law up until the moment he used his concealed weapons to kill six people and severely injure Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Vermont, however, stands out .. http://www.atg.state.vt.us/issues/gun-laws.php .. from the pack because it allows people as young as 16 to conceal carry without parental permission, as well as buy handguns. So a Vermont teenager aged 16 can’t legally go to an R-rated movie alone or join the military, but he can buy a handgun and carry it in his jeans and be completely within the limits of the law.
Dwight Schrute brings a gun to work. (NBC Universal)
George Zimmerman faces charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Martin was killed in Florida, which follows the American Legal Exchange Council (ALEC) model law. (Reuters)
3. License to kill, even in public: A class of laws, called “castle doctrine” statutes by supporters, in most states clarify that homeowners who feel threatened in their domicile have no duty to retreat from threats or to refrain from the use of deadly force. But most states also have such laws that apply to conflagrations in public places, far removed from the shooter’s “castle.” That is, these 34 states .. http://smartgunlaws.org/shoot-first-laws-policy-summary/ .. allow people to use deadly force when they feel threatened in public.
These laws vary in severity. Five states, including Ohio and Missouri, only provide for the use of deadly force when the threatened party is in a vehicle. But most states with laws along these lines, most notably Florida, follow the American Legal Exchange Council (ALEC) model law .. http://alecexposed.org/w/images/7/7e/7J2-Castle_Doctrine_Act_Exposed.PDF , which bans police from arresting people who use deadly force in public unless there is probable cause that they did not act in response to a perceived threat, and which grants broad immunity from prosecution and civil action to shooters in such case. Indeed, someone who shoots and kills in such a circumstance can himself sue law enforcement agencies if they press charges.
Some researchers have found that castle doctrine laws of this scope, frequently dubbed “stand your ground” laws, have caused a statistically significant increase .. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/06/11/study-says-stand-your-ground-laws-increase-homicides/ .. in homicide rates. The most notorious case where such statutes came into play was the Trayvon Martin case in Sanford, Fla., where George Zimmerman pursued and killed Martin because he states he perceived a threat, despite Martin having no weapons and not having interacted with Zimmerman at all. Zimmerman was eventually charged with second-degree murder by a special prosecutor after the state’s attorney declined to press charges. Zimmerman could still have the charges dismissed under the “stand your ground law” if he demonstrates to a judge that he felt threatened.
Members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League gather in July 2010 to celebrate a new law permitting open carry of guns in bars. (Dayna Smith/For The Washington Post)
4. Open carry without a permit: Most legal disputes around carrying guns in public involved concealed carry. But open carry, which is arguably more threatening to surrounding community members, is largely unregulated. Thirty-five states allow open carry of handguns without a permit, while only three (plus the District of Columbia) ban it outright. Forty-seven states plus the District allow open carry of long guns (that is, rifles or shotguns) in public, while only three ban it.
Newly minted secretary of state nominee and noted non-8-year-old John Kerry wields a shotgun. (Charlie Neibergall / AP)
5. 8-year-olds with shotguns: Federal law mandates that licensed gun dealers only sell long guns to individuals 18 and older, and handguns to individuals 21 and older. But not all legal gun sellers are federally licensed. For instance, many gun show participants sell guns legally without a federal license. That means that many under 18 and 21 are capable of buying guns legally. As mentioned above, Vermont allows children as young as 16 to buy handguns without parental consent.
What’s more, federal law allows all individuals 18 and older to possess handguns, and has no minimum age .. http://smartgunlaws.org/minimum-age-to-purchase-possess-firearms-policy-summary/ .. for long gun possession. Only 20 states and the District of Columbia have a minimum age for long gun possession. The age is usually set at 18, but in New York it’s only 16, and in Montana it’s 14. So in Helena, one can legally own a shotgun before graduating from 8th grade. And in the 30 states with no such minimum age, you could own one when you’re in elementary school.
Further, only 28 states and the District set a minimum age for sales from unlicensed gun dealers. Twenty-two states, then, have no such minimum age. And in three states, the minimum age for sales only applies to long guns. So in 22 states it is perfectly legal for an 8-year-old to pick up a handgun at a gun show, though he cannot legally possess it. In 20 states that 8 year old can both legally buy a shotgun and possess it.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (The Washington Post)
6. Guns at schools: In 2010, Kansas passed .. http://cjonline.com/legislature/2011-05-14/concealed-gun-law-perplexes-lawmakers .. a law allowing the concealed carry of guns in K-12 schools, in violation of the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act, which criminalizing the carrying of firearms in specified school zones. That act was ruled unconstitutional in U.S. v. Lopez .. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/514/549/case.html .. as exceeding the federal government’s powers under the Commerce Clause, and a revised statute was passed that limits the ban to guns “involved in interstate commerce,” so it is possible that the Kansas statute does not run afoul of federal law in all cases.
.. the article may be a bit dated, but i liked the top picture .. and yessiree .. there is muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch more in that minnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnni of yours .. it's loaded ..
I love it. Abortion is no where to be found in the constitution, but the left says its there. And we have a complete amendment dedicated to people having the right to own guns, but that's not really there according to the left.
Flashback: How Republicans and the NRA Kneecapped the ATF
—By Tim Murphy - Thu Jan. 17, 2013 4:11 AM PST
Thirty years ago, the National Rifle Association saved its biggest adversary from extinction. It got just what it wanted. Driven to act by last month's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, President Barack Obama on Wednesday called on Congress to pass new laws banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and targeting gun traffickers, and he announced 23 steps his administration is taking to better enforce existing law. With Republicans threatening to block any legislation—and some extreme GOPers calling for impeachment if Obama acts alone—reform, as could be expected, will not be easy.But should Obama gets what he wants, he'll face another major challenge: his own Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Over the last three decades, gun activists and lawmakers have purposefully hindered the ATF and carefully molded the agency that enforces gun laws to serve their own interests, stunting the ATF's budget, handicapping its regulatory authority, and keeping it effectively leaderless. The bureau Obama is counting on to lead his gun control push is a disaster…by Republican design.
The problems are obvious. The agency that Obama said "works most closely with state and local law enforcement to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals" has the same of number of agents as the Phoenix Police Department. Its budget has barely budged in decades (as the Department of Homeland Security has grown flush with post-9/11 funding). It has fewer investigators than it did in 1973. And its acting (and part-time) director, B. Todd Jones, commutes to work from Minneapolis, where he works full-time as a US attorney. It hasn't had a permanent director for six years. The NRA blocked Obama's earlier appointee, Andrew Traver, in part because Traver had once attended a meeting of police chiefs that focused on gun control. At the unveiling of his gun violence prevention package, Obama announced he would seek to make Jones the permanent (and presumably fulltime) chief of the ATF.
To understand how the ATF became the weakest of law enforcement agencies, you have to go back to President Ronald Reagan's first term. The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the first major piece of gun control legislation since the Capone days, led the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Department of the Treasury to sprout a third responsibility: handguns. With the market for moonshine collapsed—due to a global spike in sugar prices—the division's primary investigative responsibility for most of its history withered. The new mandate to regulate arms sales filled the void. It also made the bureau a natural foil for the nascent gun lobby, and the NRA, whose leadership was fast transitioning from a moderate coalition of sportsmen to a band of true believers, went to work to make the agency a pariah. Republicans and Democrats alike hammered the agency for years. Appearing in a 1981 NRA-produced film, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) charged, "If I were to select a jackbooted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF." A 1982 Senate report blasted the agency's supposed "practically reprehensible" enforcement tactics. Leading the charge was Reagan. On the campaign trail, he'd bashed the ATF and vowed to dissolve it. Once in Washington, Reagan, with the NRA's backing, proposed folding the ATF into the Secret Service—the two branches of the Treasury most unlike all the others. ATF agents would help the Secret Service handle its beefed-up responsibilities of campaign years and expand its investigative powers. It would have been a death sentence for the bureau. But then the NRA had had a change of heart. The organization's strategists came to worry that if gun law enforcement was handed to the Secret Service, one of the few federal agencies with a reputation for competence, gun owners might actually have something to fear. And, they feared, that if the agency did become part of the Secret Service, they'd lose an easy target.
"If it weren't for the NRA and the liquor industry, there would be no ATF today."
The NRA realized, "'Oh my God, we're gonna lose the ATF!'" recalls William Vizzard, a professor of criminology at California State University-Sacramento, who worked for bureau at the time. "It would have been like removing the Soviets during the Cold War, for the Defense Department—there's nobody to point to."Working in conjunction with the liquor lobby (which had its own misgivings about suddenly being regulated by the Customs Service), the NRA coaxed a friendly lawmaker, Sen. James Abdnor (R-S.D.), into scuttling the merger by inserting language in a budget bill. As Vizzard puts it, "If it weren't for the NRA and the liquor industry, there would be no ATF today, because the merger with the Secret Service would have just gone ahead."Once the NRA had saved the ATF, it focused on how to neuter it. Four years after bargaining for the preservation of the ATF, the NRA helped Congress formally handcuff the agency, in the form of the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act. The law, which included a handful of token regulations (such as a ban on machine guns), made it all but impossible for the government to prosecute corrupt gun dealers. It prohibited the bureau from compiling a national database of retail firearm sales, reduced the penalty for dealers who falsified sales records from a felony to a misdemeanor, and raised the threshold for prosecution for unlicensed dealing.Perhaps most glaringly, the ATF was explicitly prohibited from conducting more than one inspection of a single dealer in a given year, meaning that once an agent had visited a shop, that dealer was free to flout the law.
John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, called the bureau "a jackbooted group of fascists."
Those restrictions haven't changed over the last two decades. "There's no other law enforcement entity in the country that has any restriction remotely like that," says Jon Lowy, the director of the legal action project at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. But the NRA wasn't done; over the next decade-and-a-half, it worked with Congress to run up the score. Following the joint ATF and FBI raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993—which NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said was "reminiscent of the standoff at the Warsaw ghetto"—Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) launched a Firearms Legislation Task Force to hold hearings on perceived ATF abuses. His deputy, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), called for the bureau to be disbanded. LaPierre, channeling Dingell, called ATF agents to "jackbooted thugs," prompting former president George H.W. Bush to resign his NRA membership. During the George W. Bush administration, The gun lobby delivered another big blow. In 2003, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) inserted a series of amendments into a Department of Justice appropriations bill that prohibited the ATF from sharing information on weapons traces to the general public—effectively restricting researchers from detecting trends and potential loopholes in current policy. (A 1996 NRA-backed budget likewise prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying the health effects of gun ownership.)
The same year, Congress, backed by the NRA, split the ATF off from the Department of Treasury and stipulated that its director be confirmed by the Senate, effectively giving the gun lobby veto power over who would run the agency. Since then, the ATF has simply gone leaderless. No nominee has been confirmed by the Senate after that policy went into effect—not even President Bush's pick. Without job security, acting ATF directors have had none of the political capital needed to reform the agency or run it at full throttle.And the hits have kept on coming. Last year's "Fast and Furious" gun-walking scandal caused yet another interim director to resign under pressure from gun rights activists and shed light into cases of corruption and depreciating morale at the bureau. LaPierre and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) alleged a conspiracy on the part of the ATF and the White House to use Fast and Furious to push FOR massive arms confiscation. Around the same time, Fox News analyst Dick Morris typified a resurgent line of 1990s thinking when he all but justified the murder of federal agents: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over'—well, they're beginning to have a case. "The ATF's challenges haven't gone overlooked by the White House. In his remarks Wednesday afternoon, Obama outlined the urgency of making Jones a full-time director. He's right; the rest of his agenda just might depend on it.
"If we can save up about $200 real quick...we can go to the next gun show and find a private dealer and buy ourselves some bad-ass AB-10 machine pistols." - Columbine killer Eric Harris, who was 17 years old at the time The 1994 Brady Act introduced an essential law enforcement tool to help keep guns out of the hands of criminals: background checks.
To date, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has prevented nearly 1.8 million criminals and other prohibited purchasers from buying guns. The law also has a deterrent effect—prohibited purchasers are less likely to try to buy guns when they know comprehensive background check requirements are in place.
Unfortunately, current federal law requires criminal background checks only for guns sold through licensed firearm dealers, which account for just 60% of all gun sales in the United States. A loophole in the law allows individuals not “engaged in the business” of selling firearms to sell guns without a license—and without processing any paperwork. That means that two out of every five guns sold in the United States change hands without a background check.
Though commonly referred to as the “Gun Show Loophole,” the “private sales” described above include guns sold at gun shows, through classified newspaper ads, the Internet, and between individuals virtually anywhere.
Unfortunately, only six states (CA, CO, IL, NY, OR, RI) require universal background checks on all firearm sales at gun shows. Three more states (CT, MD, PA) require background checks on all handgun sales made at gun shows. Seven other states (HI, IA, MA, MI, NJ, NC, NE) require purchasers to obtain a permit and undergo a background check before buying a handgun. Florida allows its counties to regulate gun shows by requiring background checks on all firearms purchases at these events. 33 states have taken no action whatsoever to close the Gun Show Loophole.
Gun Show Loophole Headlines
How the Gun-Control Movement in America Got SmartWednesday, February 6, 2013 Here is how advocates of gun control used to talk about their cause: They openly disputed that the Second Amendment conferred the right to own a gun. Their major policy goals were to make handguns illegal and enroll all .., Read More > http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/rss/go/37039
13 Key Questions and Answers about US Gun Violence Sunday,February 3, 2013 How much gun violence is there in the U.S.? There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm. 6,220 .., Read More > http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/rss/go/37031
12 Separate Polls Show Americans Support Gun ControlThursday, January 31, 2013 Another day, another poll showing a majority of Americans favor many of the proposed gun control measures being discussed in Congress right now. Today's poll comes from the University of Connecticut and the Hartford Cour.., Read More > http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/rss/go/37019
In 33 states, private gun owners are not restricted from selling guns at gun shows. Buyers who purchase guns from individuals are not required to submit to the federal background checks in place for licensed dealers. Critics say that firearms can be obtained illegally as a result, calling it the “gun show loophole.” Proponents of unregulated gun show sales say that there is no loophole; gun owners are simply selling or trading guns at the shows as they would do at their residence.
Federal legislation has attempted to put an end to the so-called loophole by requiring all gun show transactions to take place through FFL dealers. Most recently, a 2009 bill attracted several co-sponsors in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. However, Congress ultimately failed to take up consideration of the legislation.
Big money isn't the only secret to the National Rifle Association's success. Yet is it the key to defeating it?
By Alan Berlow and Gordon Witkin, Center for Public Integrity | Wed May. 1, 2013 6:00 AM PDT
NRA president David Keene (left) watches as executive vice president Wayne LaPierre testifies before the Senate in January. Fang Zhe/Xinhua/Zuma
.. it's very long .. two bits from the first page ________________________
"The issue is not so much how much the NRA gives any senator or member of the House, it's how they can make their lives miserable." ________________________
Among the 42 Republicans who voted against stronger background checks, 40 are rated A or A+ by the NRA, meaning they virtually always vote with the NRA. Among the 41 Democrats who voted in favor of stronger background checks, 35 received ratings of D or F from the gun organization.
Gregg Lee Carter, .. http://web.bryant.edu/~gcarter/bio/bio.html .. a professor of sociology at Bryant College in Rhode Island and the editor of Guns in American Society, generally agrees with Keene's view on the role of money, although he states the case differently. "The issue is not so much how much the NRA gives any senator or member of the House, it's how they can make their lives miserable. And how they make their lives miserable is they e-mail 'em, they call 'em, they fax 'em, they show up at meetings. The typical person who is for gun control is very different from the [pro-gun] person calling you or being right there, being an annoyance, hassling you personally. They're much more activist than the other side and that's what really produces their gains."
Yet when it comes to campaign contributions, Carter says that the amount contributed by the NRA is most often a minuscule percentage of a House or Senate candidate's overall campaign budget. "Money is important," he says, "but that's not what it's really about."
It is difficult to say with any precision how often lawmakers are swayed by the gun lobby's money or its endorsements. But there's no question some fear the NRA's ability to make their lives miserable. Suffice to say that at least two Democrats who are up for reelection in 2014 and voted with the NRA against tighter background checks—Begich of Alaska and Pryor of Arkansas—were probably unwilling to test their luck.
Still think it is wise to bear arms since it is the only thing between the people and a government that may turn tyrannical.
I trust the vast majority of law abiding citizens more than I do the government. That's why I don't need the NRA to lobby for me, I believe bearing arms helps maintain a democracy.
The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun. Today, millions believe they did. Here’s how it happened.
By Michael Waldman
May 19, 2014
“A fraud on the American public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum.
Twenty-five years later, Burger’s view seems as quaint as a powdered wig. Not only is an individual right to a firearm widely accepted, but increasingly states are also passing laws to legalize carrying weapons on streets, in parks, in bars—even in churches.
Many are startled to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capital’s law effectively banning handguns in the home. In fact, every other time the court had ruled previously, it had ruled otherwise. Why such a head-snapping turnaround? Don’t look for answers in dusty law books or the arcane reaches of theory.
So how does legal change happen in America? We’ve seen some remarkably successful drives in recent years—think of the push for marriage equality, or to undo campaign finance laws. Law students might be taught that the court is moved by powerhouse legal arguments or subtle shifts in doctrine. The National Rifle Association’s long crusade to bring its interpretation of the Constitution into the mainstream teaches a different lesson: Constitutional change is the product of public argument and political maneuvering. The pro-gun movement may have started with scholarship, but then it targeted public opinion and shifted the organs of government. By the time the issue reached the Supreme Court, the desired new doctrine fell like a ripe apple from a tree.
***
The Second Amendment consists of just one sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Today, scholars debate its bizarre comma placement, trying to make sense of the various clauses, and politicians routinely declare themselves to be its “strong supporters.” But in the grand sweep of American history, this sentence has never been among the most prominent constitutional provisions. In fact, for two centuries it was largely ignored.
The amendment grew out of the political tumult surrounding the drafting of the Constitution, which was done in secret by a group of mostly young men, many of whom had served together in the Continental Army. Having seen the chaos and mob violence that followed the Revolution, these “Federalists” feared the consequences of a weak central authority. They produced a charter that shifted power—at the time in the hands of the states—to a new national government.
“Anti-Federalists” opposed this new Constitution. The foes worried, among other things, that the new government would establish a “standing army” of professional soldiers and would disarm the 13 state militias, made up of part-time citizen-soldiers and revered as bulwarks against tyranny. These militias were the product of a world of civic duty and governmental compulsion utterly alien to us today. Every white man age 16 to 60 was enrolled. He was actually required to own—and bring—a musket or other military weapon.
On June 8, 1789, James Madison—an ardent Federalist who had won election to Congress only after agreeing to push for changes to the newly ratified Constitution—proposed 17 amendments on topics ranging from the size of congressional districts to legislative pay to the right to religious freedom. One addressed the “well regulated militia” and the right “to keep and bear arms.” We don’t really know what he meant by it. At the time, Americans expected to be able to own guns, a legacy of English common law and rights. But the overwhelming use of the phrase “bear arms” in those days referred to military activities.
There is not a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation in Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor was it mentioned, with a few scattered exceptions, in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor did the U.S. House of Representatives discuss the topic as it marked up the Bill of Rights. In fact, the original version passed by the House included a conscientious objector provision. “A well regulated militia,” it explained, “composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
Though state militias eventually dissolved, for two centuries we had guns (plenty!) and we had gun laws in towns and states, governing everything from where gunpowder could be stored to who could carry a weapon—and courts overwhelmingly upheld these restrictions. Gun rights and gun control were seen as going hand in hand. Four times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule that the Second Amendment protected individual gun ownership outside the context of a militia. As the Tennessee Supreme Court put it in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”
***
Cue the National Rifle Association. We all know of the organization’s considerable power over the ballot box and legislation. Bill Clinton groused in 1994 after the Democrats lost their congressional majority, “The NRA is the reason the Republicans control the House.” Just last year, it managed to foster a successful filibuster of even a modest background-check proposal in the U.S. Senate, despite 90 percent public approval of the measure.
What is less known—and perhaps more significant—is its rising sway over constitutional law.
The NRA was founded by a group of Union officers after the Civil War who, perturbed by their troops’ poor marksmanship, wanted a way to sponsor shooting training and competitions. The group testified in support of the first federal gun law in 1934, which cracked down on the machine guns beloved by Bonnie and Clyde and other bank robbers. When a lawmaker asked whether the proposal violated the Constitution, the NRA witness responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” The group lobbied quietly against the most stringent regulations, but its principal focus was hunting and sportsmanship: bagging deer, not blocking laws. In the late 1950s, it opened a new headquarters to house its hundreds of employees. Metal letters on the facade spelled out its purpose: firearms safety education, marksmanship training, shooting for recreation.
Cut to 1977. Gun-group veterans still call the NRA’s annual meeting that year the “Revolt at Cincinnati.” After the organization’s leadership had decided to move its headquarters to Colorado, signaling a retreat from politics, more than a thousand angry rebels showed up at the annual convention. By four in the morning, the dissenters had voted out the organization’s leadership. Activists from the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms pushed their way into power.
The NRA’s new leadership was dramatic, dogmatic and overtly ideological. For the first time, the organization formally embraced the idea that the sacred Second Amendment was at the heart of its concerns.
The gun lobby’s lurch rightward was part of a larger conservative backlash that took place across the Republican coalition in the 1970s. One after another, once-sleepy traditional organizations galvanized as conservative activists wrested control.
Conservatives tossed around the language of insurrection with the ardor of a Berkeley Weatherman. The “Revolt at Cincinnati” was followed by the “tax revolt,” which began in California in 1979, and the “sagebrush rebellion” against Interior Department land policies. All these groups shared a deep distrust of the federal government and spoke in the language of libertarianism. They formed a potent new partisan coalition.
Politicians adjusted in turn. The 1972 Republican platform had supported gun control, with a focus on restricting the sale of “cheap handguns.” Just three years later in 1975, preparing to challenge Gerald R. Ford for the Republican nomination, Reagan wrote in Guns & Ammo magazine, “The Second Amendment is clear, or ought to be. It appears to leave little if any leeway for the gun control advocate.” By 1980 the GOP platform proclaimed, “We believe the right of citizens to keep and bear arms must be preserved. Accordingly, we oppose federal registration of firearms.” That year the NRA gave Reagan its first-ever presidential endorsement.
Today at the NRA’s headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, oversized letters on the facade no longer refer to “marksmanship” and “safety.” Instead, the Second Amendment is emblazoned on a wall of the building’s lobby. Visitors might not notice that the text is incomplete. It reads:
“.. the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The first half—the part about the well regulated militia—has been edited out.
***
From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun. The first to argue otherwise, written by a William and Mary law student named Stuart R. Hays, appeared in 1960. He began by citing an article in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine and argued that the amendment enforced a “right of revolution,” of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called “The War Between the States.”
At first, only a few articles echoed that view. Then, starting in the late 1970s, a squad of attorneys and professors began to churn out law review submissions, dozens of them, at a prodigious rate. Funds—much of them from the NRA—flowed freely. An essay contest, grants to write book reviews, the creation of “Academics for the Second Amendment,” all followed. In 2003, the NRA Foundation provided $1 million to endow the Patrick Henry professorship in constitutional law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University Law School.
This fusillade of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship insisted that the traditional view—shared by courts and historians—was wrong. There had been a colossal constitutional mistake. Two centuries of legal consensus, they argued, must be overturned.
If one delves into the claims these scholars were making, a startling number of them crumble. Historian Jack Rakove, whose Pulitzer-Prize winning book Original Meanings explored the founders’ myriad views, notes, “It is one thing to ransack the sources for a set of useful quotations, another to weigh their interpretive authority. … There are, in fact, only a handful of sources from the period of constitutional formation that bear directly on the questions that lie at the heart of our current controversies about the regulation of privately owned firearms. If Americans has indeed been concerned with the impact of the Constitution on this right … the proponents of individual right theory would not have to recycle the same handful of references … or to rip promising snippets of quotations from the texts and speeches in which they are embedded.”
And there were plenty of promising snippets to rip. There was the ringing declaration from Patrick Henry: “The great object is, that every man be armed.” The eloquent patriot’s declaration provided the title for the ur-text for the gun rights movement, Stephen Halbrook’s 1984 book, That Every Man Be Armed. It is cited reverentially in law review articles and scholarly texts. The Second Amendment professorship at George Mason University is named after Henry. A $10,000 gift to the NRA makes you a “Patrick Henry Member.”
The quote has been plucked from Henry’s speech at Virginia’s ratifying convention for the Constitution in 1788. But if you look at the full text, he was complaining about the cost of both the federal government and the state arming the militia. (“The great object is, that every man be armed,” he said. “At a very great cost, we shall be doubly armed.”) In other words: Sure, let every man be armed, but only once! Far from a ringing statement of individual gun-toting freedom, it was an early American example of a local politician complaining about government waste.
Thomas Jefferson offers numerous opportunities for pro-gun advocates. “Historical research demonstrates the Founders out-‘NRAing’ even the NRA,” proclaimed one prolific scholar. “‘One loves to possess arms’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, the premier intellectual of his day, to George Washington on June 19, 1796.” What a find! Oops: Jefferson was not talking about guns. He was writing to Washington asking for copies of some old letters, to have handy so he could issue a rebuttal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secretary of state. The NRA website still includes the quote. You can go online to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with Jefferson’s mangled words.
Some of the assumptions were simply funny. In his book on judicial philosophy, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, lauded Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm’s “excellent study” of English gun rights, noting sarcastically, “she is not a member of the Michigan Militia, but an Englishwoman.” But a historian fact-checked the justice: “Malcolm’s name may sound British, and Bentley College, where Malcolm teaches history, may sound like a college at Oxford, but in fact Malcolm was born and raised in Utica, New York, and Bentley is a business college in Massachusetts.”
Still, all this focus on historical research began to have an impact. And eventually these law professors, many toiling at the fringes of respectability, were joined by a few of academia’s leading lights. Sanford Levinson is a prominent liberal constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1989, he published an article tweaking other progressives for ignoring “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.” “For too long,” he wrote, “most members of the legal academy have treated the Second Amendment as the equivalent of an embarrassing relative, whose mention brings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, family members. That will no longer do.” Levinson was soon joined by Akhil Reed Amar of Yale and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe. These prominent progressives had differing opinions on the amendment and its scope. But what mattered was their political provenance—they were liberals! (One is reminded of Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal: someone so open-minded he will not take his own side in an argument.)
***
As the revisionist perspective took hold, government agencies also began to shift. In 1981, Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in 24 years. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch became chair of a key Judiciary Committee panel, where he commissioned a study on “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” In a breathless tone it announced, “What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The cryptologist discovering invisible writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence in the Disney movie National Treasure could not have said it better.
Despite Hatch’s dramatic “discovery,” a constitutional right to gun ownership was still a stretch, even for the conservatives in Reagan’s Justice Department, who were reluctant to undo the work not only of judges, but also of democratically elected legislators. When Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, commissioned a comprehensive strategy for jurisprudential change in 15 areas ranging from the “exclusionary rule” under the Fourth Amendment to public initiatives to private religious education, it did not include a plan for the Second Amendment.
But in time, the NRA’s power to elect presidents began to shift executive branch policies, too. In 2000, gun activists strongly backed Governor George W. Bush of Texas. After the election, Bush’s new attorney general, John Ashcroft, reversed the Justice Department’s stance. The NRA’s head lobbyist read the new policy aloud at its 2001 convention in Kansas City: “The text and original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.”
In the meantime, the “individual right” argument was starting to win in another forum: public opinion. In 1959, according to a Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans favored banning handguns; that dropped to 41 percent by 1975 and 24 percent in 2012. By early 2008, according to Gallup, 73 percent of Americans believed the Second Amendment “guaranteed the rights of Americans to own guns” outside the militia.
Over the past decade, the idea of a Second Amendment right has become synonymous with conservatism, even with support for the Republican Party. In 1993, for example, the New York Times mentioned “gun control” 388 times, and the Second Amendment only 16. By 2008, overall mentions of the issue dropped to 160 but the Second Amendment was mentioned 59 times.
***
In the end, it was neither the NRA nor the Bush administration that pressed the Supreme Court to reverse its centuries-old approach, but a small group of libertarian lawyers who believed other gun advocates were too timid. They targeted a gun law passed by the local government in Washington, D.C., in 1976—perhaps the nation’s strictest—that barred individuals from keeping a loaded handgun at home without a trigger lock. They recruited an appealing plaintiff: Dick Heller, a security guard at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, who wanted to bring his work revolver home to his high-crime neighborhood. The NRA worried it lacked the five votes necessary to win. The organization tried to sideswipe the effort, filing what Heller’s lawyers called “sham litigation” to give courts an excuse to avoid a constitutional ruling. But the momentum that the NRA itself had set in motion proved unstoppable, and the big case made its way to the Supreme Court.
The argument presented in District of Columbia v. Heller showed just how far the gun rights crusade had come. Nearly all the questions focused on arcane matters of colonial history. Few dealt with preventing gun violence, social science findings or the effectiveness of today’s gun laws—the kinds of things judges might once have considered. On June 26, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to own a weapon “in common use” to protect “hearth and home.” Scalia wrote the opinion, which he later called the “vindication” of his judicial philosophy.
After the decision was announced, Heller stood on the steps of the court for a triumphant press conference. Held aloft behind him was a poster bearing that quote from Patrick Henry, unearthed by the scholars who had proven so important for the successful drive: “Let every man be armed.”
* * *
In January 2014, liberal activists jammed a conference room at the Open Society Foundations in New York City. They were there to hear former NRA president David Keene. “Of course, we really just invited David to coax him into giving us the secret of the NRA’s success,” joked the moderator.
Improbably, the gun movement’s triumph has become a template for progressives, many of whom are appalled by the substance of the victories. Keene was joined by Evan Wolfson, the organizer of Freedom to Marry, whose movement has begun to win startling victories for marriage equality in courts. Once, conservatives fumed about activist courts enforcing newly articulated rights—a woman’s right to reproductive choice, equal protection for all races. But just as they learned from the left’s legal victories in those fields, today progressives are trying to re-learn from their conservative counterparts.
One lesson: patience. The fight for gun rights took decades. Another lesson, perhaps obvious: There is no substitute for political organizing. A century ago the satirical character Mr. Dooley famously said in an Irish brogue, “No matter whether th' Constitution follows th' flag or not, the Supreme Coort follows th' iliction returns.” Before social movements can win at the court they must win at the ballot box. The five justices in the Heller majority were all nominated by presidents who themselves were NRA members.
But even more important is this: Activists turned their fight over gun control into a constitutional crusade. Modern political consultants may tell clients that constitutional law and the role of the Supreme Court is too arcane for discussion at the proverbial “kitchen table.” Nonsense. Americans always have been engaged, and at times enraged, by constitutional doctrine. Deep notions of freedom and rights have retained totemic power. Today’s “Second Amendment supporters” recognize that claiming the constitutional high ground goes far toward winning an argument.
Liberal lawyers might once have rushed to court at the slightest provocation. Now, they are starting to realize that a long, full jurisprudential campaign is needed to achieve major goals. Since 2011, activists have waged a widespread public education campaign to persuade citizens that new state laws were illegitimate attempts to curb voting rights, all as a precursor to winning court victories. Now many democracy activists, mortified by recent Supreme Court rulings in campaign finance cases (all with Heller’s same 5-4 split), have begun to map out a path to overturn Citizens United and other recent cases. Years of scholarship, theorizing, amicus briefs, test cases and minority dissents await before a new majority can refashion recent constitutional doctrine.
Molding public opinion is the most important factor. Abraham Lincoln, debating slavery, said in 1858, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” The triumph of gun rights reminds us today: If you want to win in the court of law, first win in the court of public opinion.
The one caveat is that it's not Republicans, so much as the forces of the anti-American, gun-toting, religious and corporate Right that have taken over the GOP who are responsible for papa's brand new bag. The Right is Darth Sidious to the GOP's Anakin Skywalker, Angelina Jolie to foreign-born children.
.. yeah, Australia has nut-jobs, too .. at least though we don't commit fraud on our constitution with the goal of selling killing machines to as many citizens as we possibly can .. yup, extra stupidly, that includes children ..
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