"A well-educated electorate being necessary to the preservation of a free society, the right of the people to read and compose books shall not be infringed."
Posted on 03/12/2002 4:43:03 PM PST by Korth
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.
The above is the entire text of the second amendment to the US Constitution. Using today’s language, this amendment is difficult to decipher. Removing the first comma helps, making the amendment read as: "Since a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state…." A militia, of course, is you and your neighbors banding together with rifles and whatever else you have, for the purpose of making your locality such a thorn bush for invaders that nobody wants in except through peaceful exchange.
What does "regulated" mean? Today, colloquially, it means something to the effect of "governed by law." Another definition has it as "adjusted for accurate and proper functioning," hence the word "Regulator" on pocket watches worn by railroad conductors 100 years ago. As to which definition the founders meant, the etymology isn’t helpful – it’s from the Latin for "rod" or "rule." Fortunately, the preponderance of the definitions is in the direction of "adjusted" rather than "governed," and in the late 1780’s, the notion of government regulation we all have in mind today hadn’t yet been developed. Hence, the most reasonable reading of the second amendment, as worded, would seem to be "Since residents well trained in arms and in cooperation in defense, are necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to own and use arms will not be infringed." The emphasis is mine because the translation is mine.
"Will not be infringed" deserves a second look. Though this phrase is simpler to decipher than "regulated" was, its impact is substantial. Notice that "Congress shall make no law" is omitted from this amendment – in the first amendment, by contrast, "Congress shall make no law" meant the states could make laws: Early on, Virginia taxed its residents to support that state’s chosen denomination, and some northeastern states required membership in a particular denomination for eligibility for public office. The ninth and tenth amendments more explicitly addressed the states and the people. The second through seventh, by contrast, were absolute in their wording; and since the Constitution was meant to override state government authority, the second through seventh amendments meant these rights wouldn’t be infringed at any level of government. Regardless what one thinks of the Constitution overall, this amendment is pure libertarian doctrine. The inalienable right to self-defense was not to be interfered with in any way.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms…." A "right" is a thing which it would be absolutely morally wrong to prevent you from doing. You have a natural right to dispose of your own property and person as you wish. As to property, you have a right to own anything you can acquire – houses, cars, guns – through your own labor or through peaceful exchange. And aside from it being illegal already to hurt someone else with your hands, your teeth, a rock, or a stick, etc., it is analogously illegal to hurt someone with a gun. As long as the government is in charge of laws, let’s leave it at this: It should be illegal to hurt someone who isn’t presenting a direct threat. And it should not be illegal to not hurt someone, whatever you’re doing with, carrying on, or dragging behind, your person.
The founders had the right idea: No one ought to infringe the natural right of individuals to own, carry, and practice with weapons. In spite of their vision and intent, our rights have been infringed, tremendously. Many effective defensive weapons are illegal; you have to prove all sorts of things about yourself, meaning your privacy is invaded by government, whenever you buy a gun; and you are subjected to severe restrictions on carrying a defensive weapon in cities across the US.
My informed lay reading of the second amendment imputes a natural-rights libertarian position to the founders’ thinking about gun rights. We long ago lost sight of the founders’ intentions, and since the 1930’s we have made significant strides in the direction of becoming a disarmed, helpless populace. What we need now is not more support for toothless lobbying organizations that do nothing more than resist the passing of new laws. We need you to get on the phone, write letters, and send emails to your elected officials – local, state, and national. Tell them it’s time to obey the second amendment and erase gun laws until the second amendment is the only gun law we have.
A well regulated family planning system, being necessary to the national welfare, the right of the people to have and perform abortions, shall not be infringed.
Do any of us wonder how the left would interpret this? There would be no confusion or misunderstanding about commas would there?
We can point out logic, history, constitutional theory all we want, the left will continue to treat the Constitution as so much tissue paper. It is in their way.
All the more reason to stay armed.
The above, is the entire, text of the second, amendment to the US, Constitution."
No it isn't. The actual Second Amendment contains only a single comma.
--Boris
End of quote.
What a great example! Thanks!
"A well-educated electorate being necessary to the preservation of a free society, the right of the people to read and compose books shall not be infringed."
It is nonsensical to think that the government would right a law giving itself permission to provide it's army with weapons -- armed men are the base definition of an army. Governments don't have "rights" in any case -- "rights" are the domain of individuals only. Governments have "powers".
The Bill of Rights is, by it's very definition, a list of individual human rights -- structurally and textually, it is inconsistent to assume a collective right would be placed in such a list. Review the judgements by Texas federal district court judge Sam Cummins in the recent U.S. vs. Emerson case, as well as the following judgement by the Texas appeals court which supports Cummins' original decision. The term of art "The People" in the 2nd Amendment means exactly what "The People" means in the 1st, 4th, 9th and 10th amendments -- each individual U.S. citizen.
Statistical Malpractice – 'Firearm Availability' and Violence
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D.
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Part I: Politics or Science?
"There is a worrying trend in academic medicine which equates statistics with science, and sophistication in quantitative procedure with research excellence. The corollary of this trend is a tendency to look for answers to medical problems from people with expertise in mathematical manipulation and information technology, rather than from people with an understanding of disease and its causes.
"Epidemiology [is a] main culprit, because statistical malpractice typically occurs when complex analytical techniques are combined with large data sets. The mystique of mathematics blended with the bewildering intricacies of big numbers makes a potent cocktail. ..." – Bruce G. Charlton, M.D. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996
Once again, Americans for Gun Safety (AGS) and the Violence Policy Center (VPC), two strident gun control organizations, have entered the gun and violence debate with renewed vigor.
You already know about AGS using the 9-11 tragedy to push its gun control agenda using the disingenuous cliché of "closing the gun show loophole." (1)
Needless to say, AGS continues to neglect the fact that the government's National Institute of Justice 1997 study "Homicide in Eight U.S. Cities" has shown that less than 2 percent of criminals obtain their illegally-possessed firearms from gun shows. (2,3)
Moreover, AGS has claimed it has found a link between terrorism and gun shows. The link has been shown to be fully immersed in deception, used, once again, to exploit the 9-11 tragedy to further push its gun control agenda.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has correctly tagged AGS "an anti-gun lobbying group with no members, no gun safety programs, and now, no credibility." (4)
Enter the VPC, citing a Harvard School of Public Health study published in the February 2002 issue of the Journal of Trauma. (5) According to the VPC's interpretation of that study, "The elevated rate of violent death among children in high gun ownership states cannot be explained by differences in state levels of poverty, education, or urbanization." (6) [Emphasis added.]
The authors of the study did not put it quite so bluntly; they knew better. Yet, according to the abstract of the study, they assert:
"A statistically significant association exists between gun availability and the rates of unintentional firearm deaths, homicides, and suicides. The elevated rates of suicide and homicide among children living in states with more guns is not entirely explained by a state's poverty, education, or urbanization and is driven by lethal firearm violence, not by lethal nonfirearm violence." (5) [Emphasis added.]
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton once rhetorically explained that no one could prove that he had ever established administration policy based "solely" on the basis of campaign contributions, although in the case of Red China, the communist Chinese got their share of high-tech, strategic, missile-launching technology to pose a new threat to the U.S.
In the authors' abstract, the words "not entirely" become the key to understanding the pre-ordained drift of their gun control agenda and the expected, result-oriented conclusions. The published study, indeed, is the typical, hackneyed public health, result-oriented gun research repeatedly published in the medical literature claiming that "gun availability is responsible for firearm violence."
Thus, perhaps, we should analyze further the meaning of the words "not entirely." What follows is a preliminary critique of the study while the primary, raw data is requested from the authors for further analysis.
According to the study, the five states with the highest gun ownership – Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia – were more likely to have children dying from unintentional firearm injury (gun accidents), suicide (with or without firearms) and homicide than children in the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership – Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Delaware.
Why more western states like North and South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Utah, Nebraska, Alaska, etc., that have relatively "easy availability" have low firearm death rates for children is left unexplained.
In fact, the whole study revolves around using the phraseology "not entirely" to exclude the much more important reasons for violence with or without firearms: the levels of poverty and education, not to mention the related cultural factors and the utter breakdown of the family in those states by welfare and other government policies. (7)
I will explain, but before I do so, allow me to expound on two themes revolving around the subject of this study and make a couple of observations – observations that were overlooked by the public health researchers and their consorts at the VPC.
Mass Shooting Incidents
Three of the most notable mass shootings of the last several years occurred in the aforementioned states. Two of them, although they were adult, workplace shootings, occurred in Hawaii and Massachusetts, two of the states with draconian gun control laws and less "availability of firearms."
Likewise, several mass shootings, adult workplace and children school incidents, have taken place in California, despite the stringent gun control laws and the supposedly less "availability of firearms" in that state.
The Xerox workplace incident in Honolulu, Hawaii (Nov. 2, 1999), the San Diego, Calif., Santana School shooting (March 5, 2001) and the Wakefield, Mass., incident of Dec. 26, 2000, all took place in states with very restrictive gun control laws, where guns should have been less "available."
School shootings, of course, can take place in states where firearms are more available to law-abiding citizens. And when they do, armed, law-abiding Americans can respond and stop the shooting before more innocent victims are robbed of their lives.
This was the case in 1998 in Pearl, Miss., a state cited in the study, when a schoolteacher used his firearm to stop a school shooting by a student. Lives were thus saved. More recently, in Virginia, two law school students overpowered and subdued a gunman using their own weapons.
The point is that, as usual, the public health researchers ignored the beneficial aspects of gun ownership and concentrated only in obtaining supporting evidence for their long-known thesis that firearm availability is responsible for violence in our society.
The fact is that only the law-abiding obey the law, criminals do not. When the government passes restrictive gun laws, those laws interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens. Yet they do not stop criminals (or the mentally deranged) bent on breaking them.
While neither state waiting periods nor the federal Brady Law has been associated with a reduction in crime rates, adopting concealed carry gun laws cut death rates from public, multiple shootings (e.g., those that took place in schools in San Diego, Pearl, Miss., and Littleton, Colo.) by an amazing 69 percent, according to Prof. John Lott, formerly of Yale University.
Television and Media Violence and Juvenile Delinquency
Another observation virtually ignored by the authors of the study, as well as their promoters at the VPC, is the effect of television and media violence on juvenile delinquency.
It should be of interest to the reader to learn that some of the most important, breakthrough research papers on this topic first appeared in the 1970s and '80s. The pioneering research was conducted and the paper written by Dr. Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Dr. Centerwall's studies found that homicide rates in Canada were not related to easy gun availability by ordinary citizens, as he had expected, but to criminal behavior associated with watching television.
He found that homicide rates, not only in Canada but also in the U.S. and South Africa, soared 10 to 15 years after the introduction of television in those countries. In the U.S., there was an actual doubling of homicide rates after the introduction of television.
Moreover, Dr. Centerwall noted that up to half of all homicides, rapes and violent assaults in the U.S. were directly attributed to violence on television. And that was when violence on TV was nothing compared to the rampant and graphic violence depicted today in the movies and on TV.
Moreover, Dr. Centerwall showed with elegant data that reducing gun availability did not reduce Canadian homicides. Homicide rates in Vancouver, for example, were lower before the gun control laws were passed in Canada, and in fact rose after the laws were passed. The Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after the institution of the 1977 Canadian gun laws.
This valuable research, though, was not made widely available and was virtually consigned to the "memory hole" of the public health establishment. Fortunately, Dr. Centerwall 's research pointing to the effects of television violence affecting homicide rates has been made available. (8)
In the summer of 2000, the media, including medical journalists, focused their attention on the associations of violence in television, music, video games and movies to violent behavior in children and adolescents.
To this end, a consensus statement of experts released on July 26 and sponsored by the AMA and other medical groups proclaimed, "At this time, well over 1,000 studies – including reports from the surgeon general's office, the National Institute of Mental Health and numerous studies conducted by leading figures within our medical and public health organizations – point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children."
Moreover, the report continued, "Its effects are measurable and long-lasting ... prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life." (8)
Why is all this background information being discussed about television violence and crime – virtually, life imitating art? Because, interestingly enough, the authors of the Journal of Trauma study ignored relevant and important data impacting directly on their research.
Let us look at Table 1. As clearly shown in this table compiled from government statistics (1994), it turns out that, among other factors, students in the "high levels of juvenile violence" states not only watch more television (24.2 percent) than those in the "low levels of juvenile violence" states (19.8 percent) but also do "less reading on their own time almost every day (39.6 percent vs. 44.2 percent)." (9)
We will be looking at the factors that Miller et al. claim were "not entirely" responsible for the high rates of unintentional firearm injury, homicide, suicide and overall violence in the mostly southern states. Incidentally, rather than using the biased, VPC shibboleths "highest" or "lowest gun ownership states," I have used the more objective terminology, "high" and "low levels of juvenile violence" states, for the purpose of this critique.
On Feb. 28, 2002, I wrote Dr. Matthew Miller, the lead author of the study published in the Journal of Trauma, and requested that he kindly supply me with the primary, raw data which he and his associates used in reaching their conclusions. (10)
As of the time of this submission, March 11, 2002, I had not received an answer to my request. Hopefully, I will conclude with Part II of this critical essay when I have had a chance to fully analyze that data. Stay tuned!
Statistical Malpractice – 'Firearm Availability' and Violence
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D.
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Part I: Politics or Science?
"There is a worrying trend in academic medicine which equates statistics with science, and sophistication in quantitative procedure with research excellence. The corollary of this trend is a tendency to look for answers to medical problems from people with expertise in mathematical manipulation and information technology, rather than from people with an understanding of disease and its causes.
"Epidemiology [is a] main culprit, because statistical malpractice typically occurs when complex analytical techniques are combined with large data sets. The mystique of mathematics blended with the bewildering intricacies of big numbers makes a potent cocktail. ..." – Bruce G. Charlton, M.D. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996
Once again, Americans for Gun Safety (AGS) and the Violence Policy Center (VPC), two strident gun control organizations, have entered the gun and violence debate with renewed vigor.
You already know about AGS using the 9-11 tragedy to push its gun control agenda using the disingenuous cliché of "closing the gun show loophole." (1)
Needless to say, AGS continues to neglect the fact that the government's National Institute of Justice 1997 study "Homicide in Eight U.S. Cities" has shown that less than 2 percent of criminals obtain their illegally-possessed firearms from gun shows. (2,3)
Moreover, AGS has claimed it has found a link between terrorism and gun shows. The link has been shown to be fully immersed in deception, used, once again, to exploit the 9-11 tragedy to further push its gun control agenda.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has correctly tagged AGS "an anti-gun lobbying group with no members, no gun safety programs, and now, no credibility." (4)
Enter the VPC, citing a Harvard School of Public Health study published in the February 2002 issue of the Journal of Trauma. (5) According to the VPC's interpretation of that study, "The elevated rate of violent death among children in high gun ownership states cannot be explained by differences in state levels of poverty, education, or urbanization." (6) [Emphasis added.]
The authors of the study did not put it quite so bluntly; they knew better. Yet, according to the abstract of the study, they assert:
"A statistically significant association exists between gun availability and the rates of unintentional firearm deaths, homicides, and suicides. The elevated rates of suicide and homicide among children living in states with more guns is not entirely explained by a state's poverty, education, or urbanization and is driven by lethal firearm violence, not by lethal nonfirearm violence." (5) [Emphasis added.]
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton once rhetorically explained that no one could prove that he had ever established administration policy based "solely" on the basis of campaign contributions, although in the case of Red China, the communist Chinese got their share of high-tech, strategic, missile-launching technology to pose a new threat to the U.S.
In the authors' abstract, the words "not entirely" become the key to understanding the pre-ordained drift of their gun control agenda and the expected, result-oriented conclusions. The published study, indeed, is the typical, hackneyed public health, result-oriented gun research repeatedly published in the medical literature claiming that "gun availability is responsible for firearm violence."
Thus, perhaps, we should analyze further the meaning of the words "not entirely." What follows is a preliminary critique of the study while the primary, raw data is requested from the authors for further analysis.
According to the study, the five states with the highest gun ownership – Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and West Virginia – were more likely to have children dying from unintentional firearm injury (gun accidents), suicide (with or without firearms) and homicide than children in the five states with the lowest levels of gun ownership – Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Delaware.
Why more western states like North and South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Utah, Nebraska, Alaska, etc., that have relatively "easy availability" have low firearm death rates for children is left unexplained.
In fact, the whole study revolves around using the phraseology "not entirely" to exclude the much more important reasons for violence with or without firearms: the levels of poverty and education, not to mention the related cultural factors and the utter breakdown of the family in those states by welfare and other government policies. (7)
I will explain, but before I do so, allow me to expound on two themes revolving around the subject of this study and make a couple of observations – observations that were overlooked by the public health researchers and their consorts at the VPC.
Mass Shooting Incidents
Three of the most notable mass shootings of the last several years occurred in the aforementioned states. Two of them, although they were adult, workplace shootings, occurred in Hawaii and Massachusetts, two of the states with draconian gun control laws and less "availability of firearms."
Likewise, several mass shootings, adult workplace and children school incidents, have taken place in California, despite the stringent gun control laws and the supposedly less "availability of firearms" in that state.
The Xerox workplace incident in Honolulu, Hawaii (Nov. 2, 1999), the San Diego, Calif., Santana School shooting (March 5, 2001) and the Wakefield, Mass., incident of Dec. 26, 2000, all took place in states with very restrictive gun control laws, where guns should have been less "available."
School shootings, of course, can take place in states where firearms are more available to law-abiding citizens. And when they do, armed, law-abiding Americans can respond and stop the shooting before more innocent victims are robbed of their lives.
This was the case in 1998 in Pearl, Miss., a state cited in the study, when a schoolteacher used his firearm to stop a school shooting by a student. Lives were thus saved. More recently, in Virginia, two law school students overpowered and subdued a gunman using their own weapons.
The point is that, as usual, the public health researchers ignored the beneficial aspects of gun ownership and concentrated only in obtaining supporting evidence for their long-known thesis that firearm availability is responsible for violence in our society.
The fact is that only the law-abiding obey the law, criminals do not. When the government passes restrictive gun laws, those laws interfere in the lives of law-abiding citizens. Yet they do not stop criminals (or the mentally deranged) bent on breaking them.
While neither state waiting periods nor the federal Brady Law has been associated with a reduction in crime rates, adopting concealed carry gun laws cut death rates from public, multiple shootings (e.g., those that took place in schools in San Diego, Pearl, Miss., and Littleton, Colo.) by an amazing 69 percent, according to Prof. John Lott, formerly of Yale University.
Television and Media Violence and Juvenile Delinquency
Another observation virtually ignored by the authors of the study, as well as their promoters at the VPC, is the effect of television and media violence on juvenile delinquency.
It should be of interest to the reader to learn that some of the most important, breakthrough research papers on this topic first appeared in the 1970s and '80s. The pioneering research was conducted and the paper written by Dr. Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Dr. Centerwall's studies found that homicide rates in Canada were not related to easy gun availability by ordinary citizens, as he had expected, but to criminal behavior associated with watching television.
He found that homicide rates, not only in Canada but also in the U.S. and South Africa, soared 10 to 15 years after the introduction of television in those countries. In the U.S., there was an actual doubling of homicide rates after the introduction of television.
Moreover, Dr. Centerwall noted that up to half of all homicides, rapes and violent assaults in the U.S. were directly attributed to violence on television. And that was when violence on TV was nothing compared to the rampant and graphic violence depicted today in the movies and on TV.
Moreover, Dr. Centerwall showed with elegant data that reducing gun availability did not reduce Canadian homicides. Homicide rates in Vancouver, for example, were lower before the gun control laws were passed in Canada, and in fact rose after the laws were passed. The Vancouver homicide rate increased 25 percent after the institution of the 1977 Canadian gun laws.
This valuable research, though, was not made widely available and was virtually consigned to the "memory hole" of the public health establishment. Fortunately, Dr. Centerwall 's research pointing to the effects of television violence affecting homicide rates has been made available. (8)
In the summer of 2000, the media, including medical journalists, focused their attention on the associations of violence in television, music, video games and movies to violent behavior in children and adolescents.
To this end, a consensus statement of experts released on July 26 and sponsored by the AMA and other medical groups proclaimed, "At this time, well over 1,000 studies – including reports from the surgeon general's office, the National Institute of Mental Health and numerous studies conducted by leading figures within our medical and public health organizations – point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children."
Moreover, the report continued, "Its effects are measurable and long-lasting ... prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life." (8)
Why is all this background information being discussed about television violence and crime – virtually, life imitating art? Because, interestingly enough, the authors of the Journal of Trauma study ignored relevant and important data impacting directly on their research.
Let us look at Table 1. As clearly shown in this table compiled from government statistics (1994), it turns out that, among other factors, students in the "high levels of juvenile violence" states not only watch more television (24.2 percent) than those in the "low levels of juvenile violence" states (19.8 percent) but also do "less reading on their own time almost every day (39.6 percent vs. 44.2 percent)." (9)
We will be looking at the factors that Miller et al. claim were "not entirely" responsible for the high rates of unintentional firearm injury, homicide, suicide and overall violence in the mostly southern states. Incidentally, rather than using the biased, VPC shibboleths "highest" or "lowest gun ownership states," I have used the more objective terminology, "high" and "low levels of juvenile violence" states, for the purpose of this critique.
On Feb. 28, 2002, I wrote Dr. Matthew Miller, the lead author of the study published in the Journal of Trauma, and requested that he kindly supply me with the primary, raw data which he and his associates used in reaching their conclusions. (10)
As of the time of this submission, March 11, 2002, I had not received an answer to my request. Hopefully, I will conclude with Part II of this critical essay when I have had a chance to fully analyze that data. Stay tuned!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.