THE 2ND AMENDMENT’S FORGOTTEN VALUE

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chadh2o

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http://thelibertychronicle.com/the-2nd-amendments-forgotten-value/
THE 2ND AMENDMENT’S FORGOTTEN VALUE
MARCH 6, 2018 JEFF KIMBLE 1 COMMENT


Calling to mind the 2nd Amendment’s original purpose broadens the gun rights debate to include the societal benefit of widespread gun ownership.

Type A – Scenario 1

A family with a 4 year old toddler pays a visit to friends. The child wonders into the bedroom and finds a loaded pistol in the end stand drawer. After a short time, he pulls the trigger and is killed.

Type B – Scenario 1

A mother who always picks up her 9 month old from day care in the late afternoon has a rare travel day at work and won’t be home until later in the evening. Her husband makes arrangements to pick up the baby. It’s late July and the baby falls asleep on the way home in the air conditioned car. The husband, anxious and focused on a late afternoon business call he needs to make from home, forgets the baby in the back seat of the car parked in the driveway. The baby is discovered two hours later but dies from heat exposure in the summer heat.


Type A – Scenario 2

A 45 year old man commits suicide with a shotgun.

Type B – Scenario 2

A 45 year old woman commits suicide with an overdose of prescription medication.


Type A – Scenario 3

An 18 year old man with a .45 caliber pistol sneaks into a school and kills 6 students before turning the gun on himself.

Type B – Scenario 3

An 18 year old man gets drunk at a party and, driving his new sports car at approximately 110 miles per hour, loses control in a turn and collides with an oncoming car occupied by 6 high school age students in a small SUV on the way to back from a ball game. All occupants of both vehicles are killed.


Type A – Scenario 4

An isolated gunman perched in a hotel room above an outdoor concert in Las Vegas shoots and kills 58 people and injures hundreds more.

Type B – Scenario 4

Terrorists hijack two airplanes and crash them into New York City skyscrapers killing over 2600 people and injuring thousands more.



The public responses to these two types of scenarios is different. Type A scenarios, involving guns, meet with criticism and debate over gun policy and the value of certain types of guns for uses considered to be legitimate in contemporary political discussions. Type B scenarios, involving automobiles, prescription medications, alcohol, cars specifically designed to attain speeds far in excess of any legal speed limit, and airplanes do not meet with any similar criticisms or debates about public policies addressing those instrumentalities or their value to society at large.

Discussions involving gun rights almost always focus on the value that individuals place on guns whereas the value of automobiles, airplanes, medications and even alcohol to society at large are not questioned. Thus, when guns are instruments of human suffering, those who do not appreciate the right to keep and bear arms critique the ‘need’ for guns for individual purposes such as hunting and self-protection. In contrast, because cars, planes, medicines and alcohol have achieved a broader recognition as being valuable to society at large, they are accepted as a fact of modern life as are the pain and suffering their use sometimes brings about. The value of those devices to individuals is not subjected to the same scrutiny as guns. Rarely, if ever do we hear anyone question an individual’s ‘need’ to drink alcohol or drive many miles per hour in excess of the speed limit as part of a larger discussion related to alcohol or automobile deaths.

This is unfortunate. The Second Amendment, like most of the Bill of Rights, was ratified because it was deemed necessary to society at large as a mechanism to preserve liberty. The First Amendment right of a free press was ratified, not to arbitrarily institutionalize the rights of newspapers, but because a free press was deemed necessary to preserving liberty. Thus, the founders understood that a free press was a value to society as a whole. The right against unreasonable searches and seizures wasn’t ratified to protect the rights of individuals to conduct criminal enterprises in their homes, it was ratified because arbitrary acts by government against its citizens cannot be condoned in any free society. Barring unreasonable searches and seizures was understood to provide a benefit to society as a whole.

Somehow the debate over the Second Amendment has almost completely ignored its original “constitutional” purpose. That purpose should be reintroduced into the debate. Doing so will illustrate that the right to keep and bear arms is on par with the rest of the Bill of Rights as having been ratified because the founders recognized its value to society as a whole. The right to keep and bear arms has at least as much societal utility to society as other common instrumentalities of death and severe injury such as cars, planes, medicines, and alcohol.

Like many highly intense political debates, the gun debate has often tended toward hyperbole, emotion, intellectual dishonesty and fallacious argument. This might be even more the case with guns since the right to keep and bear arms is presently exercised and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of citizens for uses which are not directly related to the initial purpose for which the Second Amendment was constitutionally preserved. The debate is made even more convoluted because the initial response to atrocities involving guns is almost always emotional rather than well-reasoned, and always amplified by the national media who seek to capitalize on that emotional response to trigger the policy response they desire – severe restrictions on gun capabilities and on gun ownership. Perhaps that’s why so little of the discussion ever finds its way to a primary focus on the actual reason the Second Amendment was adopted and ratified. I hope a discussion of those issues will bring clarity and reason to the topic. We need to start by being perfectly honest about what the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is all about.



The Second Amendment was ratified so that the people could have the means to defend against any effort to defeat their new constitutional republic.

“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.”

***Much more at the link. It is worth the time to read the entire post.***
http://thelibertychronicle.com/the-2nd-amendments-forgotten-value/
 

tRidiot

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One of the best damn articles I've ever read on the 2nd Amendment. Bravo.

<edit> And I followed the link and read the rest - while the portion quoted here is very very good, the rest of the article is just as good, if not better.

You really should go read it. Takes like 10 minutes - well worth it.
 

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