Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Bageant Joe
Author:Bageant, Joe [Bageant, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2008-06-23T16:00:00+00:00
Recalling Ed and Charlie in their funky old guys’ lair by the creek, it occurs to me that not once did we mention the Second Amendment. But then not many ordinary citizen gun owners discuss the Second Amendment much, except for the online crowd. They either take the right for granted, as most Americans, gun owning and non–gun owning, have done throughout history, or they share the general sentiment of people in places like Fort Shenandoah: “Try and stop me.” Whatever one’s opinion of the folks at Fort Shenandoah, they are exercising their Second Amendment rights. And they will retain those rights.
Politicians understand this, even if the antigun portion of the public does not. Nearly twice as many people own guns as vote in this country—41 million voters versus 70 million gun owners. According to GAO fact sheets and other research, approximately half of American households have one or more guns. Some are for sport but more are for personal protection.
Every new attempt at gun control kickstarts thousands of additional purchases. You might think our Second Amendment right to bear arms would be one of the most commonly defended rights, given its popularity. Yet the Second Amendment remains the orphan of constitutional rights. The civil rights and civil liberties groups best suited and equipped to defend it would rather drink lye than publicly stand up for the Second Amendment. And that’s a shame because conservative defense of the Second Amendment has been mostly a series of political stunts that make a mockery of a right older than the Republic itself, with deep roots in English political thought. American political historians too have consistently written off as unimportant the Second Amendment, whose rights are deeply grounded in the English Bill of Rights—progenitor of our own right to bear arms and written during a period of great civil unrest in England. Many have interpreted the Second Amendment as being about hunting rights. The Supreme Court, fond as it is of citing Blackstone’s Commentaries, interprets Blackstone to suit its own prevailing mix of judges and the times when it comes to the Second Amendment. What the hell do the tea-slurping Brits know about guns?
Constitutional scholars and historians who have actually bothered to study the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, among them Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, conclude that they were created to protect the citizen’s right to arms. The three-volume Gun Control and the Constitution, edited by Robert J. Cottrol, assembles historical documents that are hard for gun control advocates to challenge. So they avoid them.
From the beginning there has been a racial aspect to the nation’s gun laws, often masked by pieties about gun safety. Much has been written about this, but the subject has been avoided by liberals, seized on by Libertarians, and misused by the crazier right-wing gun advocates. (For objective writing on this subject, the papers of Malcolm and Cottrol are a good place to start.) The fact is
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