{"id":83142,"date":"2022-07-07T14:31:35","date_gmt":"2022-07-07T19:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=83142"},"modified":"2022-07-07T15:12:36","modified_gmt":"2022-07-07T20:12:36","slug":"83142","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=83142","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They&#8217;re also mistaken that the 2nd amendment &#8216;gives&#8217; us rights.. Of course, even the Supreme Court, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/supremecourt\/text\/92\/542\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">way back in the 1800s<\/a>, properly recognized that it was a restriction, <strong><em>on the government, <\/em><\/strong><em>not the people!<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/townhall.com\/columnists\/anncoulter\/2022\/07\/06\/what-liberals-get-wrong-about-the-second-amendment-n2609860\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">What Liberals Get Wrong About the Second Amendment<\/a><\/p>\n<section id=\"article-body\">Must we really respond to the &#8220;musket&#8221; argument again?Apparently so. It&#8217;s all the rage among Democrats right now.New York Gov. Kathy\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.governor.ny.gov\/news\/video-audio-rush-transcript-governor-hochul-issues-response-supreme-court-ruling-striking-down\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Hochul\u00a0<\/a>(Democrat) and Illinois Gov. J.B.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/illinois-gov-pritzker-says-founding-145623027.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Pritzker<\/a>\u00a0(Democrat) both think it&#8217;s quite brilliant to claim that, if we care what the framers of the Constitution meant, then the Second Amendment applies only to &#8220;muskets&#8221;!In The New York Times, a couple of professors (Democrats, but you knew that) asked: &#8220;Is a modern AR-15-style rifle relevantly similar to a Colonial musket? In what ways?&#8221; They liked their argument so much, the op-ed was titled, &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/07\/01\/opinion\/guns-supreme-court.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A Supreme Court Head-Scratcher: Is a Colonial Musket &#8216;Analogous&#8217; to an AR-15?<\/a>&#8220;[<em>Frantically waving my hand<\/em>]: Yes, professors, it&#8217;s exactly analogous.The Second Amendment does not refer to &#8220;muskets&#8221;; it refers to &#8220;the right of the people to keep and bear arms.&#8221; &#8220;Bear&#8221; means to carry, so any handheld firearm carried by the military can be carried by the people. Just as the musket was once carried by our military, the AR-15 is a handheld arm (technically, the less powerful version of the automatic M-16) carried by our military today. As soon as the U.S. military goes back to muskets, then muskets it is!<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;m not here to refute idiotic arguments. These guys may as well claim that the First Amendment protects only speech delivered in pamphlets and sermons, but nothing communicated on television, the internet, or with poster boards and Magic Markers.<\/p>\n<p>The Second Amendment is nearly the only prescriptive policy in a document that liberals have been trying to pump their nutty ideas into for 50 years. Unfortunately for them, there&#8217;s nothing in the Constitution about a right to dance naked in strip clubs, contraception, marriage or sticking a fork in a baby&#8217;s head.<\/p>\n<p>But on the right to bear arms, our Delphic framers were nearly Tolstoyian with their explosion of words: &#8220;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.&#8221; (An earlier draft of the amendment specifically defined &#8220;militia&#8221; as &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/73718\/second-thoughts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">composed of the body of the people,<\/a>&#8221; but was rejected as redundant.)<\/p>\n<p>In the boldest affirmation of their worldview, the framers announced our natural,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.cornell.edu\/supct\/html\/07-290.ZO.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">God-given right to self-defense\u00a0<\/a>&#8212; against the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=1465&amp;context=nulr\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">government, against criminals, and against assailants the government can&#8217;t or won&#8217;t stop<\/a>. Free people prepared to defend themselves are the nucleus of the republic. It&#8217;s the most beautiful thing in the whole Constitution. Here, at last, the Founding Fathers told us something specific they want us to do:<em> Teach the boys to shoot.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;right to bear muskets&#8221; crowd &#8212; protected by taxpayer-supported armed guards, or cordoned off from the public by phalanxes of security officers in the lobby of, for example, NBC&#8217;s television studios in Rockefeller Center, before they return to their homes in crime-free, lily-white neighborhoods &#8212; tell us to focus on the freakishly rare mass shooting.<\/p>\n<p>The highest estimates of mass shootings &#8212; including by gang warfare, drive-bys, drug wars and domestic murder-suicides &#8212; put the number of deaths at under<a href=\"https:\/\/www.statista.com\/chart\/19376\/number-of-mass-shootings\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00a0400<\/a>\u00a0per year, or approximately the same number of Americans who drown in swimming pools every year. Four hundred, out of more than\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/fact-tank\/2021\/10\/27\/what-we-know-about-the-increase-in-u-s-murders-in-2020\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">20,000 murders<\/a>\u00a0annually.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why, despite the media&#8217;s best effort to terrify suburban moms about weirdos shooting at crowds, nearly half of Americans prefer self-reliance to the government taking away our guns and promising to protect us.<\/p>\n<p>In 2020, the Year of Our Floyd, gun sales went through the roof. The previous high for gun sales was in 2016, with about 16 million guns sold. But in 2020, as BLM tore through our cities, Americans bought\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/joewalsh\/2022\/01\/05\/us-bought-almost-20-million-guns-last-year---second-highest-year-on-record\/?sh=3f5ccc2f13bb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">22.8 million\u00a0<\/a>guns. The following year saw the second-highest record for gun sales, at 19.9 million purchases.<\/p>\n<p>By now,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/264932\/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">44%<\/a>\u00a0of Americans report living in a gun-owning household. Thirty-two percent say they personally own a gun.<\/p>\n<p>As much as I&#8217;d like to institutionalize the crazies &#8212; for their sake, as well as ours &#8212; the risks from bad faith actors at present are too high. With anti-gun zealots on the rampage and the U.S. attorney general siccing the FBI on parents who complain at local school board meetings, the most likely result would be marijuana-crazed schizophrenics continuing about their days unmolested, while gun owners get locked up.<\/p>\n<p>In any event, it appears that the lunatics aren&#8217;t heavily armed, anyway. Here&#8217;s a demographic breakdown of gun ownership in 2022, according to Gallup:<\/p>\n<p>Republicans 50%<br \/>\nDemocrats 18%<br \/>\nConservatives 45% (Oddly, Gallup calls them &#8220;<em>self-identified<\/em> conservatives,&#8221; as if Gallup would never use this cruel epithet without consent of the accused.)<\/p>\n<p>Liberals 15%<br \/>\nMen 45%<br \/>\nWomen 19%<br \/>\nSoutherners 40%<br \/>\nEastern residents 21%<\/p>\n<p>Gallup left out one category. The subgroup most likely to own a whole buttload of guns, but not admit it: gang members and other recidivist felons protected by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailynews.com\/2021\/01\/11\/judge-rejects-da-gascons-policy-on-cop-killer-case\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">George Gascon<\/a>\u00a0and other Soros D.A.s.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Being a rational people, Americans are more worried about those guys than the random rifle-bearing psycho in a woman&#8217;s dress.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They&#8217;re also mistaken that the 2nd amendment &#8216;gives&#8217; us rights.. Of course, even the Supreme Court, way back in the 1800s, properly recognized that it was a restriction, on the government, not the people! What Liberals Get Wrong About the Second Amendment Must we really respond to the &#8220;musket&#8221; argument again?Apparently so. It&#8217;s all the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=83142\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,24,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-rights","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83142","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=83142"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83161,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83142\/revisions\/83161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}