The Disingenuous 2nd Amendment ‘Debate’

The Pro-Gun Argument is a Loser, Yet Thousands Keep Dying as Nothing is Done

This is another piece that first appeared in a slightly different format on https://robertvanwey.substack.com/. This article is free to all readers.

In a previous article discussing how the National Rifle Association (NRA) is nothing more than a fraudulent enterprise, came this controversial (to some) statement:

Perhaps no scam on Earth has been so purposely lethal despite the volumes of contrary, and painful, evidence as the 2nd Amendment Scam in the United States. Unlike any developed country in history, the United States has entertained a veritable war zone on its streets for decades. Defenders of the status quo — yes, there are far too many people who have found ways to morally twist themselves into essentially defending hundreds of mass shootings, many of which kill young children — use tortured arguments about the 2nd Amendment to make their case.

That statement prefaced an article about scam organizations and individuals, not the 2nd Amendment itself. Surprisingly, it received no feedback on it. Nevertheless, despite putting that out there more than six months ago, the persistent carnage on the streets of America continues to prove it true. With several more bloodbaths to account just since the drafting of this article, it is high time to address it.

The most recent mass shootings themselves have claimed more than 60 victims with at least 18 dead; thousands more names adorn their own tombstones from previous events over the last year alone.

The Meaning of the Second Amendment

Before discussing the meaning of the Second Amendment, here are the words of it as the founders ultimately entered them into the Bill of Rights:

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.

Many describe the problem in interpreting the Second Amendment in terms like this: “[T]he eloquent men who wrote ‘we the people’ and the First Amendment did us no favors in the drafting of the Second Amendment.” That quote by historian Michael Waldman summarizes the presumption that a key issue in discerning the meaning of the amendment is its wording and construction. Its lexical and grammatical layout, Waldman implies, obscures its meaning, and thereby leaves open any number of interpretations. The evidence suggests that such arguments are flat-out wrong.

It is not poor grammar or syntax that defines the amendment. Kari Sullivan of the Duke Center for Firearms Law explains that,

[T]he Amendment is written in a variety of English that no longer exists. Since none of us are native speakers of late 18th century American English, we cannot expect to have good intuitions about its grammaticality or interpretation.

Sullivan correctly points out that syntactical changes in language happen over long periods of time and can therefore be rather challenging to interpret centuries after the drafting of the analyzed text. To correctly understand the intended meaning, one must examine language usage at the time of the amendment’s drafting. Curiously, this is the basis of the methodology that justices who have routinely gutted any restrictions on gun ownership assert is the only proper way to understand Constitutional protections (such people are often referred to as Originalists or Textualists, depending upon their emphasis on the contemporaneous history or the linguistic meaning of the text).

The current era’s precedent-setting court unpacked the Second Amendment by supposedly employing both originalism and textualism. What it produced is both astonishing in its dishonesty and unsurprising in its partisanship, but we will return to that in the proper place. An honest breakdown of the Second Amendment demands an analysis based on the language at the time of its drafting, corroborated by what the drafters themselves had to say about their intentions.

Sullivan describes the apparent grammatical peculiarity of the clause construction of the amendment this way:

The Second Amendment consists of a subordinate clause, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, followed by a main clause, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The main clause sounds perfectly grammatical in present-day English (if we ignore the extra comma, which does not seem to have been significant). The subordinate clause with being, however, seems to have something wrong with it. This is because the being-clause precedes the main clause, and the two clauses have different subjects. The last example of this type in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA; a 475-million-word balanced corpus of American English 1820–2019) is from 1923. Since this type of being-clause fell into disuse around a hundred years ago, it is reasonable that modern readers would not have good intuitions about its grammaticality or its meaning.

Thus, if the text itself indeed matters, one must proceed by comparing contemporaneous texts that utilize the same construction — which in this case means well over a century old. Sullivan provides numerous examples in another paper, wherein she also illustrates their meaning.

To show their relevance to the organization and purpose of the Second Amendment itself, she analyzes 976 being-clauses within the works of James Madison, who was the primary drafter of the Second Amendment. Since the Second Amendment adopts the same construction as other writings of Madison and his contemporaries, the most realistic reading of the Second Amendment requires following the orientation set forth in those texts.

Read this way, the meaning in modern terms is simply that the “Second Amendment explicitly protects only ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms’ for the purpose of a well-regulated militia, and does not address non-infringement for other reasons, such as self-defence” [emphasis added].

Others who have taken an approach built on a linguistic analysis agree. Chi Luu notes that, in addition to these constructive parallels, the language use at the time understood the phrase “to bear arms” to mean to engage in military service, not to individually carry weapons. Luu points to Madison’s original draft of the amendment, which read “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.” The sum and substance of this draft of the amendment makes clear that it was about protecting the right to collect and carry weapons for purposes related to participating in militia activity.

Indeed, Professors Dennis E. Baron, Richard W. Bailey, and Jeffrey P. Kaplan explained this to the Supreme Court directly in an amicus brief on the Heller case (more on this case below). Heller became the turning point in the judicial ‘understanding’ of the meaning of the amendment. The professors’ analysis goes very much farther into detail, and should be read by anyone wishing to join the discussion. For the argument here, the pertinent part of their brief went like this:

The term “bear arms” is an idiom that means to serve as a soldier, do military service, fight. To “bear arms against” means “to be engaged in hostilities with.” The word “arms” itself has an overwhelmingly military meaning, referring to weapons of offense or armor of defense. In every instance we have found where the term “bear arms” (or “bearing arms” or “bear arms against”) is employed, without any additional modifying language attached, the term unquestionably is used in its idiomatic military sense. It is only where additional language is tacked on, either to bend the idiom by specifying a particular type of fighting or to break the idiom by adding incompatible language, that the meaning of “bear arms” deviates. In the Second Amendment, the term is employed in its natural, unadorned state and, therefore, one must conclude, was used idiomatically to refer to military service.

Ignoring the common meaning of the language in use at the time of drafting goes against today’s typical judicial interpretation of statutes, or at the least violates the supposedly originalist philosophy of statutory interpretation. But before getting into that, at a simpler level the presumption in law is that the words of a legal text — whether an amendment, statute, regulation, or code — each matter and were selected for a particular reason. In other words, it is simply disingenuous to ignore whole sections of a piece of legal text to impute a desired meaning on another.

Yet some, like Nelson Lund of George Mason University School of Law, presume to do just that. Lund writes, “It is self-evident that the Second Amendment’s preambular phrase alludes to a reason for guaranteeing the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” In Lund’s view, the so-called preambular phrase, which declares the necessity of a militia to secure a free state, merely represents a rhetorical flourish emplaced for placating political concerns of the time.

To support this assertion, Lund tries to separate what he believes is the “command” of the second clause (the prohibition of any infringement) from any qualification made by the first. By analogy, he compares it to a hypothetical sentence spoken by a hypothetical dean: “The teacher being ill, class is cancelled.” His comparison goes like this:

Nothing about the dean’s prefatory phrase, including its truth or falsity, can qualify or modify the operative command. If the teacher called in sick to watch a ball game, the cancellation of the class remains unaffected. If the dean was secretly diverting the teacher to work on a special project, still there will be no class. If someone misunderstood a phone message, and inadvertently misled the dean into thinking the teacher would be absent, the dean’s order is not thereby modified in the least.

This fails the logic test. To begin, these are not comparable examples. The Second Amendment contains a directive “shall not be infringed.” The teacher example proffers a declaration, “class is cancelled.” In the latter case, the basis for the declaration is that the teacher is ill, buttressed by the underlying assumption that the teacher will not come to class. The statement therefore is to articulate that there is no reason for students to come either.

What is literally spoken, that the teacher is ill, is simply to satisfy the receiver’s curiosity. In any case, the example contains no command. Nevertheless, the opening clause remains important to the subsequent clause. It justifies the result of the notice given. The latter phrase could stand on its own, but the reasoning for it would remain unknown and thus may carry less weight, meaning some students might still come if their goal is to meet with the teacher irrespective of whether class is in session.

Even if the teacher example contained a direct command more akin to the Second Amendment’s, such as “students shall not come to class,” the analogy fails. This is because in that case, the “teacher being ill” does in fact control the subsequent clause. The identity of the “class” in this example almost certainly depends upon the identity of the teacher. And these two elements combined (which teacher and what class) thereby identify the students, the subjects of the command, who are not to come to class. So, in either case, Lund’s analogy does not hold up.

Lund stretches it further: “The Second Amendment’s grammatical structure is identical, and so are the consequences. Whatever a well regulated militia may be, or even if no such thing exists, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is not to be infringed.” The grammar of the two — the amendment and Lund’s teacher analogy — may match insofar as both contain a being-clause, but the differing action involved in the second phrase of Lund’s teacher example makes the comparison of the two incongruous.

In his teacher example, the preceding clause justifies the declaration made in the second. Using the edited version of the teacher example, the preceding clause identifies the scope of the command, which when put that way is in fact identical to the construction of the Second Amendment. In all three occurrences, the being-clause at the beginning of the overall structure has some impact on the following main cause, and for commands specifically, it dictates the direction and scope of the command. The analogy, if anything, provides counter-evidence to Lund’s own argument.

It makes no sense to assume that the founders wrote an entire clause from some spurious motivation, and we do not interpret the law that way in virtually any other context if the interpreter is engaging in honest analysis. Drawing from an axiomatic law school example, if a statue said, “The park being a public place, sleeping on benches shall be prohibited,” no one would assume that the text in the second phrase meant all benches anywhere.

Therefore, the only rational presumption — even adopting Lund’s examination — is that the first clause of the Second Amendment informs the aim of the directive given in the second. We may debate what exactly a militia is or who it includes, but we cannot reasonably argue whether its existence matters to the issue of what can legally be infringed. Put simply, it must.

Lund clearly wanted to find a specific interpretation within the verbiage, and could only do so by eliding pieces of it. For him, infringement upon individuals can only derive from language he likes. For instance, he asserts later in his paper that in order to impose regulations on the individual within the allowances of the amendment, it should have been written as follows: “The people shall have a right to promote the security of a free state by keeping and bearing such arms as are suitable for use in a well regulated militia.” Alas, it was not crafted that way, but that is immaterial.

If Lund’s preference were followed, then any law someone dislikes must be rewritten to adhere to their desires, regardless of what the law currently says. Within that framework, law would lose all meaning. Similarly, arbitrarily ignoring specific language within a statute would equally render the law useless. Could we, in Lund’s view, be allowed to dismiss the words “shall” or “not” in certain statutes when they contradict certain groups’ wanted outcome?

The various iterations of the amendment proposed at the time of drafting further support the notion that the militia clause provided the basis for its purpose. For example, the House committee entertained several earlier versions of the amendment that tie the prohibition on infringement to the existence of a militia in terms more familiar to modern grammar:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

Here, the amendment draft supports the prohibition on infringement related to militia arms by asserting that a well-regulated militia best ensures a free state as the basis for the prohibition, but the sentence construction remains at least somewhat ambiguous if read under current grammatical and lexical comprehension. Keep in mind that at that time “to bear arms” was widely understood to engage in military service.

Importantly, the text then bans compelling those with religious objections to serve in such military bodies, which helps the reader comprehend the importance of military service to the overall purpose. The edited version that followed makes it a little clearer:

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed; but no one scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.

Yet another draft elucidates the underlying purpose for which the founders sought explicit enough verbiage:

That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

Had the founders proceeded with one of these versions, maybe fewer would debate the meaning because their grammatical construction appeals at least a little more to modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, the founders had no obligation nor reasonable chance to assume what the common syntax of English might look like some two centuries later. Oddly, some advocates of the individual right interpretation strain to present this progression of edits as ‘proof’ that the founders intended to address an individual right. Returning to Lund, he deciphers this evolution as follows:

All the major changes made during the congressional process increased the clarity with which the Second Amendment protects an individual right, not a right of the states to maintain military organizations. The conscientious objector clause was dropped. The reference to a “well armed militia” was eliminated. The description of the militia as an entity “composed of the body of the people” was omitted. Each of these phrases could have suggested that the right to keep and bear arms was somehow restricted to the context of military service.

Viewed in their historical contexts, all these changes make sense. Nearly all of the debate on the above iterations of the Second Amendment’s text centered on the religious-objector portion; as a professor of Constitutional law, it seems Lund should have known this. Legislators worried that including it would provide a loophole for the federal government to preclude people from serving in militias by labeling them as religiously scrupulous, thereby subjecting the potential efficacy of militias to the whims of the federal government.

In addition, the Quakers of Pennsylvania were “the only colony where abled-bodied men were not required to join a local militia. Quakers were deeply distrusted by the people of other colonies, especially after refusing to fight in the War of Independence due to their pacifist beliefs. Everybody assumed they would refuse to participate in any future militia called up by the federal government.” Dru Stevenson explains the influence of this on the debates:

[T]he debates provide strong historical clarification of the perceived need for militias. The debates also reveal the significance, for those in Congress, of the existence of groups that refused to participate in militias, the expediency of reassuring those groups that they would not be subject to conscription, and the problems of funding the militias and sourcing firearms.

Lund turns this debate on its head by suggesting that the elimination of the objector language somehow suggested a lean toward an individual right to possess weapons unimpeded by law. But, the debate about it among the drafters proves precisely the opposite. Framers of the amendment were vociferously defending the rights and resilience of militias, and their freedom from government interference, not individual rights. Eliding the reference to a “well-armed” militia reflected the actual state of militias at the time — few were well-armed. Thus, the founders probably saw this phrase as irrelevant, unhelpfully limiting, or otherwise troublesome.

Finally, omitting “the militia as an entity ‘composed of the body of the people’” seems to lean toward the understanding that a militia constituted a rather specific entity embodied by a select group of people — not all people — an interpretation that backs the understanding that the amendment speaks to a prohibition on infringing arms directly related to militias themselves and not to individuals. Moreover, the “body of the people” at the time reflected “an overlapping identity exist[ing] between people as civilians and government as a ruling authority.” Therefore, if anything, the inclusion of the phrase likely seemed redundant.

Throughout the debates, protecting some individual right almost never came up. Historian Korie Beth Brown explains why: “Because of the rural nature of the country and the need to hunt for food, firearms were not in and of themselves thought of as an extension of personal freedoms, but rather as necessities of daily living. The Amendment was written to guarantee against government tyranny, not to prohibit the regulation of firearms.” The various tinkerings with the language had everything to do with protecting the independence of militias, not individuals.

Furthermore, numerous colonies and (later) states had already imposed all kinds of laws precluding “dangerous” people from owning weapons, laws that never entered the debates surrounding the Second Amendment. For example, the Acts of the Grand Assembly of Virginia in 1680 included laws prohibiting African Americans from possessing weapons without a permissive certificate from their “master.” Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Massachusetts passed similar laws in the decades following. No one disputed these infringements, or even acknowledged them, during debates on the formulation of the Second Amendment, despite that these laws remained in effect at the time.

It is also important to understand another critical factor that brought the Second Amendment into the convention debates in the first place. Supporters of it sought to protect the south from slave revolts and feared that the abolitionists in the north might utilize federal power to inhibit southerners from forcibly putting down such upheavals.

While some might reasonably argue that the founders concerned themselves with an oppressive government coming to power, this worry did not inform the only topic of debate in constructing the amendment. In fact, militias by and large performed very poorly in the war against the British, instilling no confidence in people like George Washington that such militias might serve as a protective body against oppression whatsoever.

Framers worked to protect the independence of militias, partly to compromise with southern lawmakers who sought to preserve their lawful ability to conduct violence against slaves, but had no compulsion to protect individual rights and did not even mention any relation between the Second Amendment and the vast canon of existing laws that already infringed on individual firearms rights. The success of Lund’s argument rests on conveniently overlooking these facts.

Regardless, where the arming of the people came into the discussion, “the people” were almost never disentangled from militias. Madison opined on this in detail in the Federalist Paper number 46:

Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.

Clearly, Madison associated “the people” keeping and bearing arms with doing so in the capacity of a militia. One may argue the particulars of organization and logistics, but it is disingenuous to impute any meaning to the prohibition on infringement as related to the individual, at least within Madison’s view. Changes proposed to the Second Amendment by certain states also focused on the militia aspect, and vanishingly few embraced or suggested any concerns about the infringement clause relating to the individual.

Amendments Proposed by the Virginia Convention June 27, 1788, in Creating the Bill of Rights: the Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress 19 (Helen E. Veit et al. eds., 1991) (proposing among other things, “[t]hat the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated Militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free State[,]” and “[t]hat any person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms ought to be exempted upon payment of an equivalent to employ another to bear arms in his stead” ); Amendments Proposed by the New York Convention July 26, 1788, in id. at 22 (proposing similar language but omitting religious-objector provision); Amendments Proposed by the New Hampshire Convention June 21, 1788, in id. at 17 (proposing that “Congress shall never disarm any Citizen unless such as are or have been in Actual Rebellion”)

The single instance in which a hint toward an individual protection was suggested did not make it into the final language of the amendment. This is telling because New Hampshire’s explicit use of the word “citizen” in place of “the people” indicated a need to differentiate it, which only adds strength to the presumption about whom constituted “the people” throughout the debates.

Moreover, several states’ constitutions and other documents declared rights related to bearing arms. These provisions routinely articulated these rights in the context of protecting militia arms. The Pennsylvania Declaration of Independence (1776), for example, articulated it this way:

That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

Massachusetts’s Declaration of Rights from 1780 stated:

The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it.

One might find a few more examples wherein an individual right was proposed or otherwise articulated related to a protection on the right to possess weapons, but the evidence is unequivocally clear that the emphasis was on the common defense. And these states did not include any individual provision in their various proposals for drafts of the Second Amendment (except New Hampshire). An individual right, where rarely it was invoked, almost never stood on its own. The founders’ debates, early states’ constitutions and declarations, the text within the documents themselves, all address the related right in terms associated with militias and/or collective defense. Self-proclaimed originalists who ignore this context are being disingenuous.

The Heller disgrace

Although the section below traces the line of jurisprudence regarding the Second Amendment, it is worthwhile here to examine a part of one specific case: District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008).

In that case, Justice Antonin Scalia went to great lengths to apply his desired meaning to the Second Amendment. His vigorous efforts at finding a protection of the individual’s right forced him into a dishonest escapade of lexical and historical twisting. Notably, Scalia’s textualist philosophy required in his own words:

look[ing] for meaning in the governing text, ascrib[ing] to that text the meaning that it has borne from its inception, and reject[ing] judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extratextually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences.

More simply, he explained “It’s what did the words mean to the people who ratified the Bill of Rights or who ratified the Constitution.”

In purporting to decipher the meaning of the amendment, Scalia began in Heller by asserting, “In interpreting this text, we are guided by the principle that ‘[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.’” Scalia drew this line from previous cases, United States v. Sprague, 282 U.S. 716 (1931) and Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheat. 1, 188, 6 L.Ed. 23 (1824). (Note that Sprague was about the Constitutionality of the 18th Amendment; Ogden concerned the Commerce Clause; neither had anything to do with the Second Amendment).

In any event, Scalia first ‘rephrased’ the amendment to convert it into presumably “normal and ordinary” grammar usage understandable today: “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” This rendition on its own adds little more specificity, which is why Scalia’s rewriting should have followed Madison’s pattern of construction instead of merely creating a different ambiguity where there is none in the original.

Scalia used his rewriting to claim that the preambulatory clause (about militias) supplies the purpose for the directive in the second. But he absconded from this idea almost immediately by stating, “a prefatory clause does not limit or expand the scope of the operative clause.” Indeed, as fallacious as Lund’s argument, this separation renders a full half of the text pointless or diminishes it to mere expositional rhetoric. Put differently, if the preceding clause’s stated purpose does not at all affect the subsequent clause, why put it there?

Whether Scalia or others like it or not, the stated purpose of a command necessarily affects its scope. He acknowledged this, writing “while we will begin our textual analysis with the operative clause, we will return to the prefatory clause to ensure that our reading of the operative clause is consistent with the announced purpose.” In other words, the ‘prefatory’ clause does in fact matter in that it “pronounces the purpose” of the directive in the subsequent clause, and thus could lead to the limitation or expansion of the succeeding clause to bring the command in compliance with that purpose.

Scalia zeroed in on the phrase “the people” to impose an individual-based directive within the infringement section of the amendment. In support of this argument, he cited three other sections of the Constitution invoking the same phrase: the preamble, section two of Article I, and the Tenth Amendment.

The language of the preamble bears little relevance, given that virtually all seem to agree it offers no legally binding sentiment. Assuming it refers to anyone within the newly minted United States does not help in any way to define it elsewhere in different contexts.

Section two of Article I denotes that “the people” will elect the members of the House. Notably, at its inception, “the people” here consisted of a restricted class that excluded women or minorities and many white men as well. This also does not help Scalia’s argument.

The Tenth Amendment delegates powers not enumerated in the Constitution to the states or “the people.” Again, this only meant certain people — an implied restriction if not an overtly stated one.

What none of these provisions upon which Scalia hung his deliberative hat have, however, are a specifying clause preceding them. To wit, none bother to categorically define to which people they refer while the Second Amendment explicitly does. Scalia’s understanding of what this portended undercut his own argument. He concluded, “Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right.” This illustrates that unlike in other places within the Constitution, the founders deemed it critical to ensure the Second Amendment expressly defines what people it means — those in or associated with militias, even if Scalia refused to read it that way.

Scalia attempted to belabor his failing point by quoting United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 (1990):

‘[T]he people’ seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution . . . . [Its uses] sugges[t] that `the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.

Notwithstanding the erroneous nod to the Second Amendment, the remaining amendments spoken of here also do not delineate who the people are because none of them needed to do so; a general naming sufficed. Scalia admitted as much while simultaneously ignoring the implication on the Second. He wrote, “This contrasts markedly with the phrase ‘the militia’ in the prefatory clause [of the Second Amendment]. As we will describe below, the ‘militia’ in colonial America consisted of a subset of ‘the people’ — those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range.” Scalia obviously recognized that the opening clause of the amendment did in fact ‘markedly’ delimit the second, but that was not the result he wanted. That is why he blundered ahead by simply dictating that half of the amendment bears no meaning: “We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.”

In the next sections, Scalia engaged in a semantic dance that contradicted both textualist and originalist philosophy. First, he parsed the phrase “keep and bear arms” into its component parts, as if that was how the people of the time understood it. In other words, he subjugated the meaning of the phrase to each individual word to suggest that the amendment prohibits the infringement of conduct relevant to each of those words.

Backing his arguments through reference to numerous contemporaneous texts, Scalia’s entire lexicological lesson nevertheless still depended upon ignoring the first half of the amendment. For instance, what difference does it make to define what arms are, or what it means to bear them, without considering the context in which said arms are in fact carried? A drunk driving statute, as a comparison, does not prohibit driving by itself, but dismantling such a statute as Scalia did here would lead to that result. But Scalia did not address that most key factor in the analysis. Instead, as above, he summarily decided that “bear arms was unambiguously used to refer to the carrying of weapons outside of an organized militia” based only on selections from other texts that furnished no relevant context. None of his vocabularic exploration supported his “unambiguous” conclusion.

After declaring his edict about the meaning of bearing arms, he then addressed what the amicus writers explained about the contemporary (to the drafting of the amendment) understanding of the term “bear arms.” To dismiss the widely accepted temporally relevant connotation of the phrase (serving in a military capacity), Scalia unilaterally added to it a required preposition (against). Without the word ‘against’ butted up to the ‘bear arms’ phrase, Scalia determined that the common understanding at the time could not mean what people then thought it meant.

As if this settled the issue, Scalia noted that his arbitrarily added preposition requirement appears in the Declaration of Independence, and from that concluded that that single use defines all uses of the term. In his usual arrogant manner, he fabricated a way to extend the idiomatic expression of the un-addended phrase to a point of absurdity. Through this linguistic gerrymander, Scalia essentially claimed that to ‘bear arms’ in any capacity other than against someone or something relegated the phrase to meaninglessness. That would be akin to saying that the word “dance” has no meaning if it is not followed by “with” and some object. Unfortunately for him, the only absurdity emerging from this portion of his analysis was the analysis itself.

Without unraveling the remainder of his largely specious arguments, understand that the primary flaw infected them all. In every case where he attempted to eschew the military component associated with the infringement at issue in the main clause of the amendment, he never bothered to mention the fact that the being-clause precisely sets up that military context.

As an example, he cited other phrases that are sometimes used in a military context, but opined that “no one thinks that those other phrases also had special military meanings.” But this is false because those other phrases as well as the one at issue here do in fact have “special military meanings” when adjacent text or concurrent comprehension says they do, whether directly or by implication. That is how the English language works.

That those same sequences of words are sometimes used in “nonmilitary contexts” has no relevance to their meaning when context is provided. One does not confuse the meaning of the idiom “bought the farm” when it precedes or succeeds a discussion of someone’s swiftly failing health. Scalia’s entire diatribe fails every logical measure making it clear that he sought only to scribble enough words to make a series of terrible arguments sound smart, solely to reach his desired holding.

The view held by many — even those who support restrictions on guns — is that the Second Amendment is “confusing” or otherwise opaque, leading to vociferous debate about what it protects. This is intellectually lazy and provably wrong. Studies of contemporaneous grammar and the works of Madison and others utilizing the same grammatical structure amply clarify the text. Discussions surrounding the drafting of the amendment and its various iterations, and the fact that virtually no one anywhere raised the issue of protecting an individual right, clearly indicates the purpose of the amendment.

Finally, it strains credulity to the point of breaking that in the Second Amendment — arguably the second most important amendment of the Bill of Rights based on its position — the founders aberrated from the rest of the document by adding a euphuistic preambulatory phrase only there.

In other words, no reasonable argument explains why the founders would apply a rhetorical opening to an amendment only once throughout the entire document in a section explaining a critical prohibition. That is because there is no reasonable argument. Any interpretation failing to account for the first clause of the Second Amendment is simply dishonest. And for about two centuries, courts and Constitutional scholars implicitly or explicitly agreed. It was not until gun manufacturers found a ripe market, boosted by a corrupt lobby and supplicant politicians and judges willing to sell the souls of their countrymen, that things changed.

History of the Second Amendment in Court

In possibly the first case implicating the Second Amendment to reach the Supreme Court, in 1875, the Court did not approach the question of whether the amendment concerns militias or individuals. Instead, it only held that the amendment prohibited Congress from imposing firearm restrictions. States, on the other hand, could protect their citizens in any way they saw fit as the Second Amendment did not constrain them.

This case carried with it a great deal of controversy, and does not sit well in the historical record. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, arose out of criminal convictions related to the Colfax Massacre in 1873, in which armed white men killed more than a hundred African American men over a political dispute. Its light examination of the Second Amendment developed out of an effort by the Court to obviate protections of Due Process for African Americans, thus it found that the Fourteenth and other amendments did not apply to states, including the Second.

Eleven years later, in Presser v. Illinois, the Supreme Court reiterated that the amendment only applied to the federal government, but added a key point. Illinois laws that “only forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

Perhaps the most important of the early cases, in United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), the Supreme Court ruled that the militia clause of the Second Amendment controls the remainder of it. Justice McReynolds wrote for the majority, “In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” The court provided more detail on how it reached this conclusion:

The Constitution as originally adopted granted to the Congress power — ‘To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.’ U.S.C.A.Const. art. 1, § 8. With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.

Unsurprisingly Scalia contorted this in Heller, rewriting the Miller holding as follows:

It is entirely clear that the [Miller] Court’s basis for saying that the Second Amendment did not apply was not that the defendants were “bear[ing] arms” not “for … military purposes” but for “nonmilitary use,” [citation omitted]. Rather, it was that the type of weapon at issue was not eligible for Second Amendment protection.

This is misleading. The Miller Court spent most of its time articulating what a militia is, and the types of weapons militia members typically carry. But underlying the entire holding was whether the weapons being carried (or prohibited) pertained to their use in furtherance of the militia’s mission. The court wrote, “Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”

Scalia’s summary of the crux of this case is obviously misconstrued. While the holding focused on the type of weapon, the determination that it did not enjoy constitutional protection depended entirely on the fact that bearing militia weapons could not be infringed. Put another way, without the predicate being-clause of the Second Amendment, perhaps no weapon could have been banned. But because the clause exists, the ban could apply to any weapons unrelated to furthering the goals and purposes of a militia.

Again, Scalia missed the point (probably purposefully) that for most of the country’s history the militia clause of the Second Amendment determined the parameters of the command in the infringement clause. His misdirection was necessary because Miller stood as the precedent for seven decades, and in Heller he desperately wanted to overturn that precedent.

In 1942, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Cases v. United States, 131 F. 2d 916, held that “The right to keep and bear arms is not a right conferred upon the people by the federal constitution.” Discussing Miller, the court then noted that:

[T]he federal government can limit the keeping and bearing of arms by a single individual as well as by a group of individuals, but it cannot prohibit the possession or use of any weapon which has any reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.

Despite this seemingly concrete determination, the court later vacillated on what might constitute a “reasonable relationship” the possession of a certain weapon might have on the “preservation or efficiency” of a militia. It noted that in its time, “Commando Units” ostensibly used any kinds of weapons, which complicates the regulation of any weapons under the amendment — at least insofar as Congress was concerned. Weapons the court thought might be excluded included antiquated, ornamental, or otherwise peculiar weapons. Taking this path toward defining what weapons the Second Amendment protects would lead to what the court believed an inoperable result. On this the majority wrote:

T]o hold that the Second Amendment limits the federal government to regulations concerning only weapons which can be classed as antiques or curiosities, — almost any other might bear some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia unit of the present day, — is in effect to hold that the limitation of the Second Amendment is absolute… according to it Congress would be prevented by the Second Amendment from regulating the possession or use by private persons not present or prospective members of any military unit, of distinctly military arms, such as machine guns, trench mortars, anti-tank or anti-aircraft guns, even though under the circumstances surrounding such possession or use it would be inconceivable that a private person could have any legitimate reason for having such a weapon. It seems to us unlikely that the framers of the Amendment intended any such result.

From there, the Court declined to impose a general rule or standard on evaluating Second Amendment cases and instead deferred to ruling on them on a case-by-case basis. The Court missed a stark opportunity to restate the Miller discussion of militias and perhaps further define their construction.

While Miller spilled a lot of ink on what militias do, it did little to clarify what constitutes membership in one or how a person might illustrate his association with one, and the Cases Court did not pick up the mantle. People like Lund attempt to disparage the Cases holding for this reason, to some degree justifiably so, but he, Scalia, and others of their ilk tend to characterize this as evidence that no such clarity can ever exist. From this, they conclude that the militia clause of the amendment should simply be ignored. This is, to use Lund’s choice word, “vaporous.”

Lund attempts to accentuate this point. Look closely at his passage elucidating his disdain for the judicial trajectory following Miller.

The Second Amendment purports to protect the “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” but it turns out that they only have this right to the extent that the government chooses to include them in its armed forces. Similarly, one might conclude that only registered lobbyists are protected by the First Amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Or that only government bureaucrats are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures….” All three of these examples are preposterous, and it is a sad fact that one of them has become the law in large parts of this nation. [Citations omitted].

In this passage, Lund gives away the game about how he and likeminded folks interpret the Second Amendment. Notice anything missing? The repeated methodology is to ignore the entire first clause of the amendment as if it either does not exist or carries no meaning, or to paraphrase it in a manner convenient to the point being made.

His comparisons to text from the First or Fourth Amendments depend upon ignoring the being-clause of the Second to bestow upon them any validity, and frankly make no sense regardless. But again, it is an intellectually vacuous argument to begin from the standpoint that the framers of the Bill of Rights injected only into the Second Amendment language that carried no meaning or purpose beyond the rhetorical. Because it is ostensibly too hard to establish a method for determining a rule regarding association with or participation in a militia, or to define a militia itself, people in Lund’s camp like to pretend that we simply do not have to.

Nevertheless, to uphold this argument, Lund criticizes 19th century scholars who seemed to suffer far less from the evident difficulty of the problem. Take, for example, a section of text from Thomas M. Cooley’s The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America (1880):

[T]he militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. But the law may make provision for the enrollment of all who are fit to perform military duty, or of a small number only, or it may wholly omit to make any provision at all; and if the right [to keep and bear arms] were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of this guaranty might be defeated altogether by the action or neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. [Emphasis mine]

Lund, Scalia, and others simply dislike this take, or that the founders clear meaning indicated to all but them that the prohibition on infringement was meant specifically for militias and the people “from whom the militia must be taken” and no one else. Contemporaries of the amendment’s drafting, scholars in the succeeding century, and courts alike, however, found no merit in or need to even consider arguments otherwise. As above, a legitimate debate can be had regarding the identity of the people who might be “taken” to form a militia, but to exclude this question from consideration entirely is anything but legitimate.

The moral and perhaps legal corruption of the gun industry and its sycophants led to the perversion of law and precedent born in the Heller case, and its subsequent disfigured progeny. Heller became the case to turn more than 200 years of consensus into the present-day poignant political debate. This abhorrent ruling contributed perhaps more than any other to the twisted and stupid stream of arguments some pose about gun regulation in America.

In the above discussion concerning the fraudulent examinations of the meaning of the Second Amendment, Justice Scalia’s name emerges quite often. That is because Scalia was the architect of the current legal paradigm that continuously allows the near-daily massacre of people in America. The blood of hundreds of thousands of people stain the hands of this disgrace of a justice.

On cases of public interest or controversy, the American Supreme Court notoriously absconds from its role as impartial jurists and adopts the role of partisan ideologues far too often, but especially so more recently. It did exactly this in Heller. And since then, the high court has maintained its partisan position on the issue and lower courts remain bound by its deplorable precedents.

Heller arose from a case in the District of Columbia (D.C.) where law prohibited the possession of handguns in most circumstances. Dick Heller, a D.C. special police officer applied for a permit to carry a handgun outside the duties of his job, but the District refused. The Appellate Court agreed with applicant Heller that he had an individual right under the Second Amendment to carry the gun and ruled the D.C. ban on handguns unconstitutional. The case moved to the Supreme Court.

After engaging in the tortured, illogical, and non-originalist/non-textualist interpretation of the meaning of the Second Amendment as articulated above, the Supreme Court wrote a great deal on the debates about militias during the formulation of that amendment. Like Scalia’s bogus statutory interpretation — one that involves neglecting or misconstruing whole sections of text — the majority also forayed into its own fantastical version of history.

Indeed, as part of its historical examination, the majority led by Scalia found obvious text to mean something entirely different. For example, it quoted the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution which stated “The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence.” For the Court, this passage demanded ignoring a “narrow meaning” in place of a larger one (i.e., the one this court wanted where it implied the protection of an individual right).

In defense of this interpretation, the Court referred to an 1825 libel case in which that court stated “The liberty of the press was to be unrestrained, but he who used it was to be responsible in cases of its abuse; like the right to keep fire arms, which does not protect him who uses them for annoyance or destruction.” The logical reach that is necessary to say this somehow suggests a protected individual right within the Second Amendment or the very obvious text of the Massachusetts Constitution is nothing short of breathtaking.

Scalia, who wrote for the majority, also cited several state analogues to the Second Amendment passed between 1789 and 1820. All nine of them articulated the protection of firearms possession for the purpose of the common defense. Some also mentioned some iteration of self-defense, but every single one referred to the common defense, just as the Second Amendment’s “prefatory” clause does, but the Court nonetheless somehow plucked from all this evidence that the founders intended to specifically protect an individual right.

When it came to militias themselves, Scalia wholly rewrote history to suit his predetermined holding. To be fair, he crafted his description of them principally from the Miller case, despite that case’s own historical inaccuracies. He wrote, “the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.”

Of course, many males were excluded from serving in militias, particularly people of color, and Scalia conveniently obfuscated the fact that militias were routinely used to forcibly put down revolts by ‘excluded’ people. Indeed, as already discussed, the protection of militias under the Bill of Rights emerged primarily to preserve the legality of this kind of state-sponsored oppression.

Regarding the legality of militias, Scalia also pretended that militias somehow comprised entities independent of the color of authority. Five minutes of research enables one to find an abundance of laws across the states related to militias, federal laws, and even participant rosters. There was even a law passed in 1903 literally called the Militia Act.

In most states, failing to serve in militias led to the levying of fines or other punishment. States typically treated militias formed outside of this paradigm as rogue and unlawful groups seeking to sow “anarchy & confusion.” It was within this context that the founders composed the Second Amendment; few concerned themselves with individual rights no matter how badly Scalia and his majority wanted to believe it. As Professor of History Noah Shusterman explains:

If one starts by asking, not whether or not the amendment protected an individual right, but why the amendment was included in the first place, a very different set of concerns become paramount. Those concerns revolved around the militia. The men of the founding generation spent an inordinate amount of time debating the respective roles of citizens’ militias and professional armies — a discussion which had been a major topic of political debate in the Anglophone world since the 1690s, when John Trenchard and Walter Moyle published “An Argument, Shewing that a Standing Army in Inconsistent with a Free Government.” Those ideas, though never dominant in England itself, found a welcoming audience in British North America. They were key to complaints about British soldiers’ presence in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, then ramped up after the 1770 Boston Massacre and the fighting at Lexington and Concord, and were the source of Jefferson’s complaint in the Declaration of Independence that England “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.”

From that Shusterman concludes:

Historians are not required to limit themselves to those questions that people in the past explicitly posed, but we do have to acknowledge the risks involved when we impose our own. In this case, the question of an individual right to bear arms did not make sense in a society where everyone eligible for militia duty was required to participate… And yet, the ruling in Heller required a decision on just this matter. This difficulty is why the ruling deserved to be answered 5–4 one way or the other. Heller is not bad history because it rules that individuals had the right to bear arms outside of participation in the militia. It is bad history because it viewed the individual right to bear arms as why the amendment was written in the first place; it is bad history in its claim that the Second Amendment protected “only individuals’ liberty to keep and carry arms.”

Even if one assumes Scalia proffered an honest, if mistaken, historical view of militias, it would make sense that he would then formulate his opinion via his oft-espoused originalist philosophy within that ahistorical framework. But Scalia did not even do that.

For instance, Reva B. Siegel points out that a foundational element of the majority opinion in Heller relies upon its definition of “bear arms,” yet it adopted its definition by following the version of it given in a 1998 Supreme Court case, not the definition understood at the time of the framing of the amendment. How Scalia navigated this is laid out above, but the evidence supplied to the Court in the form of amicus briefs and the opinion’s own citations indicate that Scalia was fully aware of the etymology of the phrase, but its contemporaneous meaning did not fit within his ideological bent.

Thousands upon thousands of pages dissect the Heller opinion, with many defending it. The defenses, however, tend to follow the same trend of ignoring inconvenient features of the text or history. As Justice Breyer wrote in his dissent of Heller, the majority can criticize the citation to sources that largely delegitimize its reasoning, but “it cannot ignore their existence.”

Moreover, as discussed in detail above, the majority could not find any explicit support for the contention that the drafters of the amendment sought to protect or even seriously thought about an individual right. The majority, nonetheless, assumed such concerns existed, despite its deriding of similar assumptions when those assumptions contradicted its reasoning. Justice Breyer characterized the majority’s Constitutional approach as lacking “transparency,” and that it contained no “sound legal basis for launching the courts on so formidable and potentially dangerous a mission” as navigating the tumultuous legal waters resulting from the upending of two centuries’ worth of jurisprudence on what the Second Amendment says or protects.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, a Supreme Court case that followed Heller, overturned a 109-year-old law in New York State that demanded a person demonstrate a “proper cause” to receive a license to carry a handgun. The law required an applicant to show that “he is of good moral character, has no history of crime or mental illness, and that ‘no good cause exists for the denial of the license’.” Notably, the Bruen court purported to follow “a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history,” a history which the court previously (in Heller, and elsewhere) roundly ignored. Moreover, the court averred:

The test that we set forth in Heller and apply today requires courts to assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding. In some cases, that inquiry will be fairly straightforward. For instance, when a challenged regulation addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century, the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.

For the court, the 109-year history of New York’s statute at issue was not long enough. It wanted to see a historical lineage spanning back to the 1700s, all the while ignoring all the implications and parallels of the laws on the books back then that infringed on individual rights to carry, across numerous jurisdictions. In other words, it adopted something like a “have your cake and eat it too” methodology of interpretation. In fact, the entire foundation of Bruen relied on the rabbit Scalia pulled from the magical hat of supposed Constitutional inquiry wherein he retrieved from thin air an individually based Second Amendment right no judicial magician in the two centuries prior could find. Of note, the justice writing for the majority in Bruen was the abjectly corrupt Clarence Thomas.

Since the Heller and Bruen decisions, courts continue to adopt increasingly ludicrous lines of reasoning about gun control and the Second Amendment. For example, the 5th Circuit Court — where law goes to die — in United States v. Zackey Rahimi, struck down a statute forbidding dangerous people from possessing a firearm on the basis that government authorities could “detain[], prosecute[], convict[], and incarcerate[]” someone once they’ve committed a violent crime, so attempting to prevent the crime by prohibiting such people from obtaining a gun in the first place must be unconstitutional.

For the morally bereft Fifth, the ahistorical and lexically challenged Heller and Bruen decisions mean that a person retains an unfettered right to possess a weapon until such time he or she uses it to actually commit a violent crime. The Zackey Rahimi court applauded the “triumph of originalist reasoning that faithfully interprets and applies the Second Amendment” in Bruen particularly to support its travesty of a ruling.

In any event, ideological courts, especially the Supreme Court, have since Heller continued on a path toward not just loosening, but destroying any semblance of regulation on firearms possession. The reasons for this in light of the current situation in the United States are hard to fathom, though corruption undoubtedly has a great deal to do with it.

Seemingly day-by-day, new reports come out documenting the profound levels of corruption in the nation’s highest court. The gun lobby throws gobs of cash almost exclusively to Republican politicians, who continue to parrot the lobby’s idiotic assertions about gun control despite even their own constituencies’ withering support. These politicians accept such bribes peacefully, knowing that they or their brethren long ago legalized the practice.

Justices on the Court likewise seemingly need no legal protection because they can just ignore the rules altogether. Despite otherwise preferring to be treated as the smartest people in all the land, when called out for their ethical (criminal) missteps, they simply feign ineptness. They continue to rule on cases for which they have clear conflicts of interest, so it will surprise no one should someone one day uncover bribes thrown by the gun lobby directly to corrupt jurists — if that has not already happened.

This history of judicial and scholarly interpretation is not the only canon that the gun lobby and its followers choose to distort. Even the very nature of the history of the United States itself became a target, one so thoroughly propagandized that an overwhelmingly large swath accepts its perversion without question or critical thought. Such ignorance is steadily maintained by the entertainment industry, concerned only with profits though perhaps itself partly unaware of the mythology it presents as reality.

Glorified Guns, and Gun Control

America has long had a gun violence problem, but also a deep history of regulation. Its national mythos glamorizes the violence, but generally ignores the control. Among the most popular narratives — one that is infinitely mischaracterized — is the gun-slinging “Old West.”

Hollywood has embraced this erroneous folksy tale ad nauseum, bringing to high levels of fame names like Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and Wyatt Earp, as well as actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Burt Lancaster who portrayed them. Depictions of “high noon” duels provide the crescendos of serious and comical movies alike, a nod toward the supposed rugged individualism and bravado of the time. The reality, however, was much different.

Adam Winkler, Professor at UCLA, notes that “Frontier towns — places like Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge — actually had the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation.” While guns provided necessary protections in the unsettled wildlands, cities and towns routinely demanded that visitors submit their weapons to the local police for the duration of their stay. In Western towns, the second most common cause of arrest (after dunk and disorderly conduct) was illegally carrying a firearm. And in most of these towns, gun violence was exceedingly rare, averaging less than two murders per year.

Many states throughout the 1800s already had on the books or eventually enacted gun control laws, especially in the south. Challenges to these laws usually lost. When they did not, legislators reacted swiftly. In Kentucky, for example, when a plaintiff prevailed over the existing gun law, the Kentucky legislature amended its constitution to permit future bans.

Places that did not legislate gun control suffered the most violence and a relatedly despicable reputation. The railroad town of Bodie, California, for example, held a reputation for vigilantism and street violence. Mark Twain derisively wrote about it in an article for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. A rendition of the word Bodie came to describe terrible or violent people.

Many publications from the time period indicate strong popular support for gun control throughout much of the Western territories. The narratives within those documents illustrate what common-sense should herald today, that more guns create graver danger. The editor of the Black Hills Daily Times of Dakota Territory in 1884 astutely observed that carrying a gun also increased the hazard to the carrier himself, another fact that today’s gun rights advocates have converted into a bizarro trope of alternate reality.

In other words, the ‘good guy with a gun is all that stops a bad a guy with a gun’ idea was then and is now a myth, but people of the past were not fooled about it. Even the famous cowboy six-shooter became the subject of bans, including in Texas in 1882. Cattle ranchers unitedly declared “The six-shooter loaded with deadly cartridges is a dangerous companion for any man, especially if he should unfortunately be primed with whiskey. Cattlemen should unite in aiding the enforcement of the law against carrying of deadly weapons.”

Romanticizing the violence of the Old West, and guns specifically, started — unsurprisingly — as a marketing ploy of gun manufacturers themselves. In the mid-1800s, Colt and Winchester began advertising guns in a way that connected city dwellers to the perceived excitement of the West. Winchester’s slogan, “the gun that won the West,” remains known to this day and Colt sold its Model 1873 under the moniker the “Frontier Six Shooter.”

These marketing tactics proved so successful that they became commonplace among manufacturers. And from that, the legend of the gun-slinging West was born. Even today, over a century later, this fabricated history carries with it rampant acceptance and substantial profits. In August 2021, for example, the gun that allegedly “killed Billy the Kid” auctioned for over $6 million. And of course, Hollywood “Westerns” brought in the largest box offices for most of the years between 1920 and 1960.

Still, throughout the time from the Old West days into the 21st century, despite their mythologized past, guns remained highly regulated in many — if not most — towns and cities across the United States, and courts, legislators, and the public hardly batted an eye.

In the 1960s, gun control temporarily came into even higher favor when African Americans began to assert their own right to carry. In California, as news spread that the Black Panthers openly carried firearms on the streets the legislature there quickly passed legislation to restrict it, known as the Mulford Act. Shockingly, the NRA supported the Act. Perhaps less shockingly — based on whom it sought to restrict — this was perhaps the only time that the NRA opposed this or any kind of gun control law.

Also of note, the legislation’s drafter and the person for which it was named, Don Mulford, was a Republican from Oakland. When Governor Ronald Reagan later described why he supported the law, he wrote,

The Black Panthers had invaded the legislative chambers in the Capitol with loaded shotguns and held these gentlemen under the muzzles of those guns for a couple of hours. Immediately after they left, Don Mulford introduced a bill to make it unlawful to bring a loaded gun into the Capitol Building. That’s the bill I signed. It was hardly restrictive gun control.

Reagan’s recount was false. The group did enter the capitol with weapons, but they did not “hold” anyone and in fact told the police they were there to protest “racist Oakland police” and to proclaim their right to bear arms. Police confiscated their guns, but returned them after unloading them. Within about thirty minutes, the protestors left.

In addition, Mulford introduced his bill months before this demonstration happened. Harvard historian Caroline Light said of the affair, “The Mulford Act criminalized the open carry of firearms, and was designed specifically to disenfranchise and to disarm members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense because they were demonstrating in public — carrying firearms openly to shed a spotlight on police violence against Black and brown people in California.”

Since the 1960s, support for gun control began eroding amongst self-described Republicans — except in cases where such legislation prohibited Black Americans from ownership or carry rights. Even before the first scrawling of the Second Amendment, gun control laws targeted Black Americans whether current or freed slaves or, later, emancipated people. Laws allowed whites to seize firearms from Blacks in states like Florida. Chief Justice Roger Taney of the infamous Dred Scott case argued giving Black people citizenship would also give them the right to carry guns — something he clearly did not want — and codes enacted following the Civil War criminalized the possession of guns by Black people in many states. Even today, among the loudest pro-gun demographics, white Republicans, support for looser gun laws diminishes when asked whether they should also apply to Black Americans.

The Shifting View on Gun Control

Americans largely supported gun control laws for the first two centuries after the ratification of the Second Amendment, including in the frontier regions. Few believed any constitutional provision prevented the state-level restriction of the individual possession or carrying of firearms, and most legal authorities recognized the Second Amendment only as a protection for militias and their participants. Even the NRA’s mission before the 1960s focused on promoting gun safety and marksmanship, and did not bother with gun control issues whatsoever.

The shift in some Americans’ attitudes toward guns and gun rights did not occur until the end of the 1960s into the early 70s. Around that time, two significant societal changes occurred. First, the social policy system that existed since the era following World War II substantially eroded. Despite widespread public support and even significant enough political backing to pass new or continue social programs like Social Security, Healthcare, and others, by 1973–74, most of the proposed advancements fell to the wayside.

Versions of the principal programs survived, but often in a stale or diminished capacity. Some, like healthcare for all, or imposing healthcare requirements on most employers, failed altogether. Of the survivors, welfare programs suffered the greatest blow, raising benefits by just 13% during the 70s while the cost of living increased by 68%.

Toward the end of the decade, staple industrial jobs of the previous two decades began drying up, in some places quickly. Corporate profits began surging during this period as average worker wages stagnated. In short, institutions that helped maintain at least some level of economic parity gave way to elite greed, bolstered by allies in political office who gleefully enabled a rapid and dramatic widening of the gulf between the top and bottom of the economic ladder.

As the social fabric frayed, it left a deepening void between the rich and everyone else. Crime, violence, and the drug trade surged in to fill the vacuum. Between the late 1960s and 1990, murders in New York City soared from around 10 per 100,000 people to more than 30.1. In the 1970s alone, the overall crime rate rose by almost 27%, with the number of adult felons growing by 40.7%. This growth reached its height in 1990, followed by a far slower decline over the next decade.

Since the turn of the 21st century, national crime rates declined precipitously bringing the current rates down to levels not seen since the 1950s. Despite the steady erosion in crime rates starting in 1991, political and media groups continuously propagated stories about extreme and abundant crime over the next decades, giving rise to changing views on gun control. In a 1999 poll, for example, only 26% of respondents identified self-defense as a reason for owning or carrying a gun. Less than two decades later in 2015, 63% of respondents named self-defense, despite a by-then massive drop in crime rates across every category.

Opponents of gun control still beat the drum of personal risk and high crime rates to prevent the passage of virtually any gun legislation. In other cases, they argue that the reduction in crime in the last decades correlates with the rise in gun ownership. The former proposition is provably false, and no evidence supports the latter. Taken together, they simply defy logic.

On the former, as noted in the previous paragraph, nationwide crime is down to rates not seen in 70 years. So, how then can the NRA claim that shootings in New York City in 2020 increased by an “astounding” 95%? To make such assertions, it unleashes percentages without offering the requisite context for those numbers. According to the New York Post, New York City endured 776 total shootings in 2019. That number alone sounds high, but the population in July 2019 was 8,336,817. Seven hundred seventy-six (776) is 0.0093% of that population. The total number of shootings in 2020 in New York reached 1,531 — a roughly 95% increase from the year before. That same year, the population had grown to 8,804,194 — nearly half a million more than the year before.

The increase in shootings in 2020 therefore comprised only 0.0173% of the population — an increase of 0.008% of the per capita rate from 2019 to 2020. In 1990, there were 2,605 murders in New York City, suggesting that the number of shootings was far higher. So, the NRA’s 95% number suddenly seems all but inconsequential, and 2020’s numbers were a considerable aberration driven mostly by the COVID pandemic. (In 2021, shootings had already resumed dropping and have continued dropping since).

Certain media outlets today engage in hyperbolic performances to influence the gun control debate. Fox News, notorious for its business model built on lies, fraud, and defamation, actually puts nonsense on air like this:

Gun control is entirely fraudulent. The Democratic Party claims that guns cause violence. That’s the core claim, and it is a lie.

Despite its regular spewing of blatant idiocy like this, even its loyal audience can see past such rhetoric; 87% of voters in one of Fox’s own polls called for increased regulation like criminal background checks for gun buyers.

Fox’s impotent progeny, Newsmax (now slowly growing as Fox tanks beneath the weight of the exposure of its repeated deceptions), also claws at ratings from gun control propaganda. In one instance, it gave air time to Erich Pratt who accused gun control advocates of “using [the Uvalde] tragedy to cower pro-gun Republicans.” Of course, to try and bolster his point Pratt fell back on the tired trope that Chicago “proves” gun control doesn’t work.

As if his comments were not preposterous enough, he proudly asserted that “it’s gun control that has contributed to this mass shooting that we saw in Texas.” The outlet frequently boasts ridiculous commentary on the subject, often repeating drivel like:

The deal on ‘Gun Control’ currently being structured and pushed in the Senate by the Radical Left Democrats, with the help of Mitch McConnell, RINO Senator John Cornyn of Texas, and others, will go down in history as the first step in the movement to Take Your Guns Away,

or that expanding ‘red-flag laws’ (those that prevent people with a demonstrable history of violent behavior from purchasing or possessing guns) is “very dangerous and very concerning, just from a constitutional legal standpoint.”

On the correlation between rising gun ownership and lower crime, despite however badly the NRA and its media mouthpieces want their audiences to believe or how often they state it, places with looser gun laws and higher ownership rates do not have lower crime. In fact, states with loose gun laws have among the highest gun crime rates across the nation and those rates leach into neighboring localities that have tighter gun restrictions.

To illustrate the point, Hawaii has among the strongest gun laws in the country, and has among the lowest death or crime rates associated with guns. Notably, Hawaii does not border any other state. The city of Chicago, on the other hand, sits in a state ranked 7th among the strongest gun laws, yet has an exorbitantly high shooting and gun death rate. What is the difference? More than 50% of the guns used in crimes in Chicago come from bordering or nearby states with weak gun laws, such as Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, respectively ranked 30th, 38th, 23rd, and 40th in the strength of their gun laws. Despite this, Illinois still has lower per capita gun-related crime than any one of those states.

Murder by firearm is higher in nearly every state with loose gun laws than those with strict ones, just as states with higher rates of gun ownership have higher rates of gun deaths regardless of the purpose (i.e., suicide, accident, or intentional). As the courts continue to eviscerate common-sense gun laws in states that wish to enact them, mass shooters are finding it easier to obtain their instruments of death. More guns equal more of the bad that comes with them — crime and death — plain and simple. Any other asserted argument is purposely false or spouted by someone clearly uninformed on the issue.

As legislation on gun control became an increasingly partisan issue, driven by ideological media like Fox and Newsmax, so too did the public opinion on it. In 2021, for example, 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents but just 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners backed passing stricter gun laws. (Fox and Newsmax’s audience comprises almost 100% self-identified Republicans).

In the same year as that poll, 26,328 people died by suicide and 20,958 by murder (both by gun), a total of 47,286, or a population equivalent to many large suburbs. As a matter of volume, Texas — a very gun friendly and Republican majority state — outpaces every other state in gun deaths per year. In 2020, it suffered 4,164 gun deaths, nearly 9% of all gun deaths in the nation. These numbers align with places led by the politicians who profusely oppose any gun controlling legislation.

Just as states with lax gun laws see the highest rates of gun violence, so do states that are run by politicians who hold views opposing gun control. And on this, the stark divide is by party. Republicans have adopted anti-gun control as a badge of honor (and foolishness, but more on that in a minute). This has much to do with to whom the gun lobby routinely doles out huge campaign contributions. The chart below illustrates the highest recipients of gun lobby money.

Source: Open Secrets

Gun Lobby Corruption

While plenty deserve the blame behind this tragic situation, perhaps none deserve it more than the National Rifle Association (NRA) — notwithstanding politicians and judges, of course. Despite a membership of just 5 or less million (a tiny fraction of the US population), the NRA has wielded considerable political power. Through a vast lobbying and donation fund (with virtually all donations going to the one party who routinely votes against nearly all gun restrictions), the NRA has adeptly kept politicians in its pocket for quite some time now, green-lighting their prolific spreading of lies, stupidity, and dangerous rhetoric about gun restrictions.

Despite even its own membership supporting many gun restrictions, the NRA has fought against mostly all of them. It maintains support of its membership by perpetuating myths such as that the police will start knocking down doors to forcibly seize people’s guns. It is why people like Randy Conner, a pistol and rifle instructor for the NRA from Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, can say such cognitively dissociated things like, “No one wants to see the violence you see in schools and stuff today… But I don’t think taking the guns away from ordinary citizens is going to change any of that at all.” If not ordinary citizens, who is pulling all of these triggers?

The NRA has almost certainly evolved into a full-fledged scam, enriching its executive leadership, their families, and friends through fundraising off of excessive fearmongering and money laundering. Notwithstanding the lies it peddles to maintain its relevance, the principals of the NRA appear to have been fleecing their membership for years. The Attorney General of New York State filed suit in 2020 accusing the NRA of diverting:

millions of dollars away from the charitable mission of the organization for personal use by senior leadership, awarding contracts to the financial gain of close associates and family, and appearing to dole out lucrative no-show contracts to former employees in order to buy their silence and continued loyalty.

You can read the entire complaint here.

In response to the suit, the NRA first unsuccessfully attempted to move it to another county. When that failed it then tried — and again failed — to dismiss it. Following that, the NRA attempted to file bankruptcy to avoid paying any potential fines should it lose, but that was rejected by a Texas bankruptcy court that stated that the bankruptcy was filed in bad faith. Upon yet another defeat, the NRA beseeched the court with a counterclaim in which it asserted the Attorney General was on a “witch hunt” (sound familiar?). That, too, was rejected. When the NRA attempted to inject the substance of this dismissed counterclaim into its upcoming trial, New York State Supreme Court Justice Joel Cohen denied the motion. Attorney General Leticia James said of the court’s denial:

For over two years, the NRA and its senior management have used every tool and trick to try and avoid the consequences of their bad actions. Bringing up arguments that have already been rejected is just the latest example of how far the NRA will go to distract from the serious charges of misconduct it is facing. I will continue to fight tirelessly to bring the NRA and its senior executives to justice and ensure all people, companies, and not-for-profits adhere to the rule of law in New York.

Dueling suits between the NRA and its former PR firm, Ackerman McQueen, also took place throughout this saga. The NRA ultimately settled and paid the PR firm around $12 million. Reports brought into evidence in that case noted “a damning assessment of financial relationships between the [senior leaders of the NRA] and various vendors and individuals” perhaps going back into the 1990s. Read the long, sordid history here.

Curiously, one of the defendants, the NRA’s former CFO, filed a motion to exclude the accountant’s testimony that included the report as an exhibit in the New York Attorney General’s case. It is unclear whether this issue has been decided, but history is not on the side of the former CFO.

Now, full disclosure here, I worked for the New York Attorney General’s office for a decade. From that experience I can tell you that it is exceedingly rare that that office tries a case for which it does not have troves of damning evidence. It is exceedingly probable that the NRA will lose. I do not have any insider information on the case.

Attorney General James’ suit is not the end of the problems for the NRA. In the New York case, an AG victory could require each of the current and former executives named in the suit to pay full restitution, more than $60 million. Moreover, the four executives, including CEO Wayne LaPierre, could no longer be permitted to serve on the board of a New York charity ever again.

Previously, a judge rejected James’s request to dissolve the NRA, but James’s office might appeal based on the tenuous reasoning of the court on that issue. Washington D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine also sued the NRA, for much of the same fraudulent conduct, but as it pertains to his jurisdiction. What happens next remains to be seen, but publicly available evidence alone indicates that the NRA only propones its anti-gun views these days to profit off of the dupes within their diminishing organization for their executives pecuniary benefit.

The question is, why is enforcement against these frauds almost always only a civil action? It turns out, criminal action may be forthcoming should either of these attorneys general uncover provable criminal conduct.

Update: On February 23, 2024, the New York State Attorney General’s Office released a statement announcing victory in court against the NRA and its principals:

The jury found that Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and former Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Wilson “Woody” Phillips were liable for financial misconduct and corruption in managing the organization. The jury concluded that LaPierre abused his position for his personal benefit and steered lucrative contracts to friends and relatives, including spending millions of organization dollars on lavish travel, private planes, expensive clothing, and more. LaPierre was found to have caused the NRA $5.4 million in damages and must pay $4.35 million. The jury also determined that Attorney General James has shown cause for removal of LaPierre from the NRA based upon his violations.

The jury also found that the NRA failed to properly administer charitable funds and violated state laws that protect whistleblowers. Phillips and the current General Counsel and Corporate Secretary John Frazer were found liable for failing to uphold their duties as nonprofit executives. Phillips was ordered to pay $2 million in damages. Frazer and the NRA were also found liable for making false statements on the NRA’s regulatory filings.

Funded by a vastly powerful and wealthy gun lobby, captained by an adjudicated corrupt NRA, politicians and pundits have fallen over themselves to propagate any number of provably false, illogical, or frankly laughable assertions about gun control or gun violence in the United States. The word ‘laughable’ here is used with a sharp barb of dark irony. Nothing is funny about the hundreds of thousands of bodies — far too many of them children — buried over the last few decades, put to death by a scourge heaved upon them by the specious motivation of profits. Or, in the case of politicians, levied upon them by a desperate cling to power by those whose intellect and ability would otherwise preclude them from even the most menial of occupations. Tightening gun laws works to reduce the problem, though it won’t solve it. But some would rather insist that the sky is green than do anything at all.

Source: The New York Times

Politician and Pundit Lies and Stupidity about Gun Control

The idiocy in the gun debate is a party-driven phenomenon, backed by courts of the same ideological bent. The courts’ desire to allow unfettered access to guns suffers from a litany of bad decisions, untenable reasoning, and ideologically pre-determined rulings. One can say that the courts, at least, spill a lot of ink to make this chicanery look legitimate to the unaware. Politicians and pundits rarely bother.

Often, they simply offer their worthless thoughts and prayers in lieu of legislative action. For example, just recently following a shooting in Maine that killed 18 and injured 13, newly-minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, “Prayer is appropriate in a time like this, that the evil can end and this senseless violence can stop.” Just days before the shooting he had posted a photo on his Twitter account of him posing with pro-gun lobbyists.

Johnson has a history of dumb views on gun control and callous reactions to gun massacres. He recently told Fox’s Sean Hannity that “The problem [all the mass murder happening in the USA] is the human heart, not guns.” Hannity did not follow up with any questions about why Johnson thinks only the USA has this heart problem given that no other comparable country on Earth has mass shootings anywhere near the same volume. (Hint: it’s the guns).

Just in case anyone missed out on hearing the yawning intellect of the currently second-in-line for the US Presidency, Johnson added “It’s not guns, not the weapons. At the end of the day, we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves and that’s the Second Amendment.” The implication is more guns, less protection, and thus more violence. Johnson is not the only imbecile/hypocrite on the Hill, but his vaulting to the leadership of the House majority after Jim Jordan’s and Kevin McCarthy’s spectacular failures means no real legislation will come any time soon.

To find intellectual bankruptcy among the various viewpoints on guns, one need only listen to any newscast following mass shootings or watch what happens shortly thereafter. For example, after the Uvalde massacre of 19 children and 2 adults in Texas in 2022, Governor Greg Abbott stated “What happened in Uvalde is a horrific tragedy that cannot be tolerated in the state of Texas.” Just a week or two later, Abbott and Texas Senator Ted Cruz attended as speakers an NRA convention in Houston where the two called for more guns on the streets and looser restrictions.

After two previous mass shootings in Texas, one at a school in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018, and another at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, lawmakers reacted by loosening gun regulations rather than further restricting access.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the scandal-ridden dope from Georgia said of the Uvalde massacre:

People know how to stop it [school shootings]… And that is the only thing that Congress should be working on this week, is how to stop people from being able to kill kids in school. Now let me tell you: that does not involve gun control. That involves protecting our kids with guns.

Steve Scalise, who himself was once shot, proudly declared that no one talked of “banning airplanes” after 9/11 when asked about restricting guns. Louie Gohmert, another genius from Texas, stated that “if we heard more prayers from leaders of this country instead of taking God’s name in vain” mass shootings wouldn’t happen.

In 2012, a gunman murdered 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary. Marjorie Taylor Greene on a social media post related to this tragedy said “that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.” Rand Paul, responding to the tragedy, said that “I think in some cases the president has used them [the victims] as props” (referring to the President calling for more serious legislation on guns). GOP consultant Ed Rogers took it a step much farther:

It was cruel of the president to involve the Sandy Hook families in a fight that was not their fight. For all the good they can do and all the deference and respect they deserve, it is a travesty that the families of the Sandy Hook victims were used as props and lobbyists and that the tragedy of Sandy Hook was contorted into a Washington legislative battle about expanding the federal paperwork required to make a gun purchase. The Sandy Hook families didn’t create this farce; it was the president’s idea.

For Rogers, the fight over gun control was “not” the Sandy Hook families fight. After all, how could families of children murdered by a gunman have any interest in restricting the possession of guns? In Rogers’ view, involving them in that very personal political debate constituted ‘cruelty.’ Marco Rubio’s spokesperson (Rubio is a Republican from Florida) repeated the nonsense about how criminals don’t follow the law, ignoring that restricting the flow of legal guns thereby reduces the number of illegal ones present on the streets. And stricter gun laws reduce gun-related crime, as discussed in detail above.

The prize for worst purveyor of bullshit related to Sandy Hook, however, goes to Alex Jones, an extreme right-wing political talk show host and conspiracy theory lunatic. A year after the Sandy Hook incident he said “It’s got inside job written all over it,” in support of his claim that the event was a “false flag” to bolster gun control supporters. A few months later, he added “I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying, and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.” And later that year, he capped off his deranged commentary with:

The whole thing is a giant hoax. The general public doesn’t know the school was actually closed the year before. They don’t know they’ve sealed it all, demolished the building. They don’t know that they had the kids going in circles in and out of the building as a photo-op. Blue screen, green screens, they got caught using.

He did not stop there. After vomiting this tripe over and again on his made-for-morons show InfoWars, the Sandy Hook families finally sued and several courts awarded them more than a billion dollars in damages. At the trials, Jones dug his heels into the defamation cases against him so much so that he made a fool out of himself and his attorneys repeatedly. He was caught doing a variety of ridiculous things, such as failing to turn over discovery evidence, for example. And then after he lost those cases, he appears to have attempted to hide his millions in assets to prevent paying the families he defamed. He came right out and said he would do it: “Do these people actually think they’re getting any of this money?”

Update 11/8/2023: A federal judge in Texas denied Jones’s attempt to dismiss his debts associated with his Sandy Hook defamation through bankruptcy. The amount could climb higher as “Another lawsuit is pending in Texas, brought by the parents of 6-year-old Noah Pozner, one of the children slain in the attack. A trial date has not yet been set.” For more details, see the following video.

Following the Parkland shooting in Florida in 2018, which killed 17 people and injured 17 others, Matt Walsh, an extremist, uncreative right-wing political hack stated:

I will get rid of my gun the moment my gun becomes self-aware and develops the ability to go off by itself and shoot people on its own initiative… I will get rid of my gun as soon as I begin to feel the insatiable urge to become a mass shooter… I will get rid of my gun if I ever lose half my brain cells and no longer possess the basic competency to store and handle it safely.

On the last point, it seems it is time, Matt. In an undated blog post, Walsh added to his fiercely intelligent commentary:

I’ll simply say this: ‘Gun control’ is a meaningless concept. In fact it’s difficult to even comment on because the whole idea exists in some realm far outside of reality… I think a conversation about violence in America is important. But it won’t go anywhere if we don’t all first pack up and move back to Reality, where solutions are only solutions when they actually make sense.

Of course, Walsh also finds the source of the problem in social and corporate media and the internet, writing: “The internet isn’t the only source of our cultural emptiness. 24-hour cable news gets us accustomed to watching human tragedies as entertainment.” But when it comes to guns, he relayed this slice of wisdom, “If this were simply a problem of crazy people with guns, or racists with guns, or ideological extremists with guns, we should observe a relatively consistent rate of mass shootings.” What he purposely does not grapple with (and in effect denies) is that the rise in mass shootings directly correlates with the defanging of gun laws. And high current ownership rates already presage an elevated level of gun violence in such places.

Donald Trump, the American President at the time of the Parkland shooting released a long statement that said not a single word about legislating gun restrictions. Instead, he offered this platitude:

Our administration is working closely with local authorities to investigate the shooting and learn everything we can. We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools, and tackle the difficult issue of mental health.

Emma Gonzalez, a former student of the Parkland school gave a speech encouraging legislators to enact stricter legislation on guns a few months after the shooting. Iowa Representative Steve King decided it wise to post the following about her on his Facebook page:

This is how you look when you claim Cuban heritage yet don’t speak Spanish and ignore the fact that your ancestors fled the island when the dictatorship turned Cuba into a prison camp, after removing all weapons from its citizens; hence their right to self defense.

When one of thousands of irritated members of the public commented on the post, “A United States Congressman, quite literally attacking a child in hopes of protecting guns,” the campaign responded with “Nah, just pointing out the irony of someone wearing a communist flag while advocating for gun control. — Team King.” Whatever miscreant from “Team King” that responded did so that way because Gonzales wore a Cuban flag patch as a nod to her ethnicity during her speech.

Of note, King once publicly questioned how much “nonwhites have contributed to civilization.” King and others persistently exhibiting this kind of callous, filthy behavior leads even less stable people (than these representatives) to take it a step further, like this guy in California: James Catalano, 62, was sent to federal prison for sending “hundreds of harrowing messages” to an activist against gun violence whose daughter was killed in the Parkland school shooting. Catalano told law enforcement that the parent of the deceased child was “using his dead daughter to advance his political agenda” so he was “trying to put (the parent) in check by sending him the messages.” Some of the vitriol Catalano sent included:

• We want [the parent] to be scared and not sleeping at night. Fuck off [parent]. Fuck Joe Biden.
• Celebrate [the child] being slaughtered, Decapitated. Silenced. Dancing no more. God Bless President Trump. Fuck Joe Biden. [parent and child names redacted by me]

Whether tethered to a specific mass shooting, or merely in the general discourse (if you can call it that) about gun control, these officials and pundits endeavor to say the most inflammatory or intellectually bereft things possible. Their rhetoric adds fuel to the fire of psychopaths like Catalano. But even for those who do attempt to sound “smart,” the arguments carry no greater weight.

Take for example the philosophical luminary, Ben Shapiro, who purportedly “dismantled” a supporter of tightening gun laws by saying “I’m not sure there’s any evidence that gun control would’ve done anything [to prevent a massacre like that which occurred in Las Vegas].” Pro-gun advocates love to resort to this tactic. They choose a specific incident in which the gunman legally acquired the weapon, or otherwise had access to it that a specific law maybe would not have prevented, then adopt that example to say that no gun restriction can prevent anything. Simultaneously, they ignore instances where a stricter gun law would almost certainly have prevented an incident.

This kind of argument sounds impressive to only two categories of people: those who want to believe it irrespective of any evidence, and those who are so consumed with their spokespeople of choice that they will embrace any drivel pouring from their mouths. Shapiro continued:

All this seems like is people shouting, ‘Do something!’ while they have no particular solutions and no expertise on guns or gun control. I mean, the suggestion that gun control is going to put an end to incidents like this, again, that is an evidence-less proposition based on nothing but emotional response.

This is patently false and has been debunked repeatedly in this article and in thousands of others. It also ignores the massive volume of proposals for dealing with the gun violence problem offered by plenty of people with “expertise on guns or gun control.” Finally, Shapiro characterizes anyone who thinks that restricting access to guns simply holds a “moral disapproval of people who own guns” because the other common trope of people like him is to turn objective reality into a morality contest where only one “side wins.” Like Walsh, Shapiro also seems desperate to elevate his masculinity through his tough-guy refusal to give up his alleged weapons, standing boldly in opposition to the alleged moralists.

Others make a habit of joining the brainless fray on the subject of guns, either as part or full-time contributors. Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said in 2013, “I think video games is [sic] a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.” Following a mass shooting in 2019, Kevin McCarthy, the disgraced former Speaker of the House, also tried to blame video games, a long-ago debunked idea. In 2022, Missouri Representative Billy Long made the astoundingly ridiculous connection between abortion and mass shootings, saying “When we decided it was OK to murder kids in their mother’s wombs, life has no value to a lot of these folks.”

After a shooting at a Nashville school in March 2023, law enforcement announced that the shooter may have been transgender. J.D. Vance, a Senator from Ohio, jumped on the rhetoric: “If early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school, there needs to be a lot of soul searching on the extreme left,” as if the identity of the shooter now somehow proved gun restriction advocates suddenly wrong. Vance continued, repeating a common trope about mental illness without addressing the ubiquity of guns by claiming, “How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?” John Kennedy, the Republican Senator from Louisiana described it best, and perhaps most accurately, when he said, “We do not need more gun control. We need more idiot control.” Congratulations Mr. Kennedy, the evidence definitely supports the latter part of your contention.

These are just a tiny sampling of the utter absurdity heaved by the pro-gun faction of commentators and politicians. One could easily write a book documenting them all. These people are driven by ideological or financial agendas and eschew commonsense because their bloviating furthers whatever their specific motivations might be. Most of them undoubtedly know what they preach is pure excrement, but their self-interest trumps any moral imperative they might have once had (if any of them ever had one in the first place).

Conclusion

America has devolved into a shooting gallery of criminals and sociopathic mass shooters. Children stand a better chance of dying by gunfire than any other cause. The body count of gun-related victims averages the size of a medium-large suburb every single year. No comparable country comes close to the severity of this acutely American problem. And yet, a major political party has convinced a substantially large portion of the population that somehow raining more guns down on this situation will at some point magically improve it. As John Stewart once asked Oklahoma State Senator and another NRA parrot Nathan Dahm: “When?”

The evidence demolishes this entire proposition, and every one of their supporting ‘arguments’. The “rugged individualism” of the “Wild West” behind them is a Hollywood and gun manufacturers’ fabrication, a modern-made historical mythology.

Even if one were to assume that all of these facts may never filter into those ensconced in their epistemic bubbles, trampled down as they are by their chosen purveyors of immoral rhetoric, the sheer volume of shooting incidents reported nearly daily in the news should give these people some pause. The casual observance of the ubiquity of shooting events in America, compared with virtually any other place on Earth should also instill at least some serious introspection.

Maybe for some, it finally is… if far too slowly. Nevertheless, whether the gun nuts eventually come around, the evidence is clear. The last two or so decades of the discussion on the Second Amendment has, for a very large sect of people, been nothing but a pervasive, stupid scam — enriching or empowering a tiny group at the expense of the blood of hundreds of thousands of others.

***

Numbers in Sum (Sadly, the number of school shootings is already outdated at the time of posting this article)

100 — Number of people killed by guns in the U.S., every day

12 — Number of children who die every day from gun violence in the U.S.

950 — School shootings since Sandy Hook, including 27 school shootings so far this year.

18 to 21 — Peak ages for violent offending with firearms

8,000,000 — Number of AR-15s and its variations in circulation

9 in 10 — Number of people who will die after attempting suicide with a gun

98% — Percentage of mass shooters who are men

89% — Percentage of gun owners who favor preventing the “mentally ill” from purchasing guns

77% — Percentage of gun owners who favor background checks at private sales and gun shows

54% — Percentage of gun deaths that are suicides; 43% are murders

79% — Percentage of murders that involved a firearm

<1% — Percentage of people who defended themselves with their guns in violent crimes

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Robert Vanwey was Senior Technical Analyst for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice, who specialized in investigating public corruption, technology and financial crime. He also has a Juris Doctor degree. You can follow his work here or visit the Evidence Files Substack for more on law and crime, technology, science, aviation, and the Himalayas where he often lives and works.