Second Amendment Trifecta
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The most poorly key secret in American gun control debates is that those favoring gun control have given up denouncing the Second Amendment (the right to keep and bear arms) as a states right. Only Sarah Brady, the aging figurehead of that movement, seems to have missed the memo.
So let us look to constitutional scholars across a broad spectrum in an effort to get poor old Sarah to shut the hell up. I bring as evidence Eugene Volokh, Lawrence Tribe, and Akhil Amar.
Eugene (who I knew back when we were both computer programmers) is considered to be politically right-of-center, as evidence by his collection of compadres at the Volokh Conspiracy. Eugene has been well published on the Second Amendment, and testified before congress on the basis of the right. But one could and would expect someone such as Eugene to defend the right to defend. After all he and his family escaped the former Soviet Union, a place where armed resistance against government power is always fatal.
Then there is Lawrence Tribe, considered to be the con-law darling of the left, which is to be expect of anyone holding a chair at Harvard or residing in the state of Massachusetts. Tribe has been quotes saying such radical things as “The people’s ‘right’ to be armed cannot be trumped by the [Second] Amendment’s preamble.” Indeed he appears to have caught a vest full of flack from fellow liberals when he revised his tome “American Constitutional Law” to expound that the Second Amendment was an individual right .. just like the first, and third, and forth, and fifth …
Finally there is Akhil Amar, who in con law circles is considered an academic’s academic, and a hell of a gentleman to boot. I had the pleasure of meeting Amar at a local skull session and asked discreetly if he felt the Second Amendment protected the right of individuals to keep guns, or the power of the states to arm militias. He said “Yes.”
So we have constitutional scholars from the right, the left, and straight up the middle in perfect agreement that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. Indeed the scope of this belief is so complete and sustained that it is referred to as the “standard model” on Second Amendment theory.
Why then does this conclusion escape the gun control lobby? Why do they pretend that any such thing as “reasonable regulation” can be wedged into the conversation? Yes, yes, I know their collective hypocritical past, so I am not surprised. That not withstanding, the conversation needs to be brought to a close and for the Sarah Brady’s, Josh Sugarman’s, and Rebecca Peter’s of the planet to cease and desist, for the constitution trumps their will power.
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