Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 61 Editor's Choice: 5
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Please no repeal
[Read the article: Repeal the Second Amendment]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Okay, I'm a pretty radical liberal. The necessity of a "well regulated militia" is often read by anti-gun interpreters as the source of their reasoning, that the framers considered guns necessary only inasmuch as they helped with a militia. However, I grew up in gun-using cultures. This ignorance of the utility of guns is shocking to people like me.
In farming, ranching and rural settings the utility of guns goes well beyond the dimensions of revolution or bodily defense, which are the usually understood legal purpose of guns in urban settings. Prohibitions against hunting or varmint-fixin' would be madness in thousands of places nationwide. Removing the second amendment would absolutely turn gun regulation over to the states and presumably state laws would be constructed around assorted pet concerns over crime (measures prohibiting guns proposed by urban legislators) and utility (measures allowing them proposed by small town/rural legislators). This difference in state situations is something that is anticipated by placing the second amendment (and several others) in the constitution, and for good old fashioned liberal reasons of striving to have the rights given in one state effective in the others.
I favor a pretty libertarian reading of the second amendment and since Walter Shapiro is talking about radical notions, let's get them all onto the table.
Suppose, for just a moment, that rights were meaningful insofar as they were realized in corresponding duties. You may remember hearing this kind of language and perhaps you have associations between it and the assorted rhetorical gyrations of conservatives. Well, please let us remember how variants on this also used to be proclaimed by the likes of Lesslie Newbigin and Martin Luther King, clearly men of troglodytic and neoconservative mien. Then what if the right to bear arms, most especially as described in the second amendment, came with a corresponding duty?
Contrary to other writers in this list, it seems to me the first clause of the second amendment is not vague at all. Where the rights to free speech, press and religion are lumped together under the somewhat generalized "super freedom" of the first amendment, the second receives considerable attention, anticipatory of some questions about nature and purpose: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State..." It would certainly appear the writers of the bill of rights took pains to clarify the duty that went with this right! They did so with such particular care that it actually seems to have a place of privilege not shared by the other amendments. Perhaps the hope so clearly expressed by this amendment is not that a select few will arm themselves and volunteer to defend their posses comitatus against threats, but that the whole citizenry would be prepared to volunteer for service against foreign threat or, indeed, a corrupt and well-funded government.
The rights of people are secured and protected by fulfilling the expectations of duty. Suppose the right of persons who want to use guns for self defense or as part of their food-supply picture is a right which depends on all Americans fulfilling the duties implied or expressed in other amendments, including things like free speech or participating in fair trials. It is surely just as true that free speech is protected by persons accepting their duty to take up their arms.
We'll back plans to spend money to destroy guns, and not a dime on gun education. Why do we talk as though the choice is between banning all guns or tacitly allowing those who want them to have them? This is a more free society? Remove the right to guns, or ban them outright, but not affirm any purposeful engagement on the question of arms and our duties once we hold those arms? What if the choice is more accurately conceived as one between urging you, the citizens, to learn how to use a gun or tacitly watching the rest of American's rights to get pissed away by money and power? What if a free society armed and educated its citizens, equally? Let us challenge our people to be adult, as we do by letting them say what they want and choose to go or not go to church. Universal arms ownership and the sense of universal duty to others might result in a better nation, not a worse one.
Which has been more properly the trajectory of American freedom, the addition or the removal of rights?
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Hollow man
[Read the article: The legislators of corn]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But the obdurateness with which he is pushing ahead with the proposed extension of the ethanol tariff is just one small sign
Obdurate? A senator from South Dakota? Do tell! Speaking as a native outer dakotan, I believe I wield some authority to say, "Well duh!" Thune is one of the Bushmen, a hollow good looking senator whose ascendency coincided with Dubya's; or men like Okie's James Inhofe, or Norm Coleman and the governor of my adopted home of Minnesota. Ugh. No surprises here.