{"id":60701,"date":"2020-10-13T23:20:02","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T04:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=60701"},"modified":"2020-10-13T23:25:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T04:25:17","slug":"60701","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=60701","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The question isn’t whether Durbin is that stupid, rather, it’s why he believes everyone else is ignorant.
\nThe Court, in Heller<\/em>, and later in Caetano<\/em>, addressed that idiotic point and buried it.<\/p>\n

\n

The Founders Wanted You to Own an AR-15<\/a><\/p>\n

In his questioning of Amy Coney Barrett regarding an Indiana case about a non-violent felon and his constitutional right to bear arms, Illinois senator Dick Durbin dropped numerous<\/a><\/em>\u00a0false claims about Chicago gun crimes. But he topped it all off with one of the most egregiously inane arguments used against the private ownership of guns:<\/p>\n

When that Second Amendment was written . . . we were talking about the likelihood that a person could purchase a muzzle-loading musket.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Durbin went on to say that the logical conclusion of the \u201coriginalist\u201d position on firearms should be that the Founders were referring to flintlock muskets rather than modern \u201cmilitary weapons.\u201d (A purposefully misleading labelling of semi-automatic rifles that Democrats are trying to ban.)<\/p>\n

Originalism, of course, isn\u2019t the same as\u00a0literalism<\/em>. Even it were, Durbin would be wrong.<\/strong> Because the right to self-defense isn\u2019t predicated on any one specific weapon but a principle. Which is why the Second Amendment doesn\u2019t guarantee the right of individuals to \u201ckeep and bear Kentucky rifles\u201d any more than the First Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to \u201cwrite on parchment paper\u201d or to worship \u201cin Anglican and Presbyterian churches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contemporary legislators have the hubris to believe that the Founders hadn\u2019t envisioned any kind of technological advances in firearm technology. It\u2019s an argument tantamount to claiming that free-speech protections are not operable because James Madison couldn\u2019t foresee the incredible speed with which information can be disseminated on the Internet.<\/p>\n

Not only did legislators in the late 18th-century witness the advent and adoption of long-range Pennsylvania rifles \u2014 ones that could fire at 300 yards with decent precision rather than 50 yards with none \u2014 but they were likely acquainted with the existence<\/a>\u00a0of weapons such as air-powered repeating rifles that could fire .46-caliber lead balls about 40 times before losing muzzle velocity. No Founder ever said, \u201chey maybe we made a mistake.\u201d In fact, in the subsequent 150 years \u2014 through the rise of the revolver, the repeating rifle, and the gas-powered automatic weapons \u2014 no one ever challenged the idea that the Second Amendment protected anything but an individual right.\u00a0Heller<\/em>, the decision that so infuriated leftists, simply reaffirmed what had been obvious to everyone since 1789.<\/p>\n

The Second Amendment is predicated on the principle that people have the right defend themselves and their liberties. The right to bear arms, in fact, is older than the right to free speech or freedom of religion. The English Bill of Rights, a document cataloging the crimes of James II and codifying the \u201cancient and indubitable\u201d rights of English citizens in 1689, includes the right \u201carms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.\u201d Well, for Protestants. By 1765, William Blackstone, whose writings helped define the English common-law legal system, wrote that \u201cthe natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not one Founder mentioned anything about \u201chunting\u201d or \u201cskeet shooting\u201d during the debates over the drafting of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The founding generation believed that firearms should be used to guarantee the universal and inalienable liberties of the people laid out in the Constitution \u2014 whether they were in the government or not. Thankfully, there is no need of insurrection now. But the presence of armed citizenry is always a good bulwark against tyranny. Just in case.<\/p>\n

And a musket simply won\u2019t do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The question isn’t whether Durbin is that stupid, rather, it’s why he believes everyone else is ignorant. The Court, in Heller, and later in Caetano, addressed that idiotic point and buried it. The Founders Wanted You to Own an AR-15 In his questioning of Amy Coney Barrett regarding an Indiana case about a non-violent felon … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60701"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60705,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60701\/revisions\/60705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}