.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion striking down New York’s “proper cause” requirement to get public carry licenses, has claimed that “the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense.” This claim is false. It represents the greatest hoax yet perpetrated upon the American people.
— Allan Lichtman, NY Daily News: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment hoax
Allan wants you to know that even though only six states require proper cause to get a permit to carry or own, in some cases, that this covers a quarter of the US population. He further reports that there is a lower firearm death rate in these six states. As normal, he doesn’t bother to report any other violent crime statistics. He also carefully words it as “firearm deaths” which includes all homicides, justified or not, suicides and accidents. Since most firearm deaths are from suicide the CCW argument doesn’t really have any bearing.
He then goes on to argue that the second amendment is a collective right. He does it via an appeal to authority, quoting a NRA memo from 1955 that said that the 2a was a collective right. This is similar to the arguments about Ronald Reagan signed gun control bills while he was governor of California, leaving out that he later became much more pro-gun rights.
Allan continues with the theory that because the reason for the right to keep arms was given, it only existed for members of the militia. He fails to mention all the state laws that said that there was an organized militia as well as an unorganized militia consisting of all men.
Then he starts into the same old game. The founders were bad men creating bad laws because they didn’t include blacks, women, indians, and all the rest. Added to this is the use of negatives to prove a positive. Allan claims that nobody ever spoke of an individual right, thus the right must be assigned to the militia. As normal he fails to quote “the right of the people”. Somehow the people that agonized over every period and comma felt that it would be understood that “the right of the people” actually meant “the right of members of the militia”
Feel free to read his article. Know your enemy.
Typical ignoramus. All this information is out there. One almost has to deliberately ignore it.
97th Congress
2d Session COMMITTEE PRINT
THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
——–
R E P O R T
OF THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
NINETY-SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
eagle crest
FEBRUARY 1982
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
I had several of those, a green covered booklet.
HTML page at
guncite[dot]com/journals/senrpt/senrpt.html
Correct me if I am wrong but when the colonies formed militias, each man was expected to bring his own arms and ammunition when he joined up, thus maintaining a well regulated militia in the minds of the framers would necessitate that each fighting age male possess his own “military grade” weapon. This would make the distinction between collective and individual right so interwoven that to argue one without the other is inane on the face of it.
A history professor is going to tell us all what the constitution really means by quoting a memo from the NRA. . Funny I can’t find that organization’s judicial authority in the constitution.
A *LIBERAL* history professor, at that. Weird, huh?
And here I had thought that The NRA was The Bogeyman, hiding beneath liberals’ beds, used to frighten liberal children. “If you don’t finish your kale, The NRA will eat your brain!”
History professor? The guy is obviously a quack moron. Trying to argue with him is like trying to argue ethics with Stalin.
For a refutation, two books will serve: “That every man be armed” by Stephen Halbrook, and “Stopping power” by Neal Schulman. There are of course many more, such as the famous “The racist roots of gun control” by Clayton Cramer, but those two do a comprehensive job of pounding that idiot’s arguments into the dirt.
At the very end of the article, the jackass author undoes all his previous arguments with this:” The solution for Americans who care about gun safety is to heed the advice of the late Justice John Paul Stevens and launch a movement to repeal the Second Amendment.
That right there makes it clear that they all know, all too damned well, that the 2nd amendment is precisely a restriction on government not the people and also that it neither gives or allows anything, but means exactly what it says: “The Right of The People to Keep And Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed”; a right of each and every individual American.
These elitist snobs simply don’t like the idea that the unwashed masses they look down their supercilious noses at can have those icky guns that make it possible to tell those bastard sons of bitches to go to hell and if necessary hasten the trip there.
As always — someone who wants you disarmed intends to do something bad to you.
“Always treat your enemy like he IS your enemy, for invariably he will treat you the same way”, Tsun Tzu..
So apparently allen was there when the 2A was written
Well then. It’s clear the good professor of history not only doesn’t understand history, but he can’t diagram a sentence. If you can diagram a sentence, you can understand the 2nd Amendment.
.
But never let facts – or grammar – get in the way of one’s own prejudices.
One of Neil Schulman’s essays in “Stopping Power” goes over that in detail, working with a professional grammarian for the purpose