Scribbles by the Founders
Evan Schwartz is concerned that we do not live in the here and now with reference to the Second Amendment and Washington, DC:
The issue, of course, is scribbled on a piece of paper more than 200 years old. The Second Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed people the right to arm themselves in order to form state militias. Nowadays most Americans are too fat to even make it on the bus to basic military training, but that does not preclude them from owning multiple guns, in their minds.
The Second Amendment guaranteed people the right to arm themselves. The same amendment also speaks to the citizens participating in the militias. Those are two separate things–as the US Supreme court (the modern one, not the one from really long ago) reaffirmed in Heller. Of course, that position had already been clearly limned by an American named Tench Coxe, who was also, unfortunately, writing almost 200 years ago. Here’s a bit more from Mr. Schwartz:
The NRA and other interest groups have seemingly limitless funds to throw at things like the Firearms Regulations Act, but they need to understand reality. Reality is that little thing that exists despite a document that was written before the invention of child gunlocks, penicillin and “The Matrix.” It was written before presidential assassination attempts or Virginia Tech.
I sense a bit of document-ageism in the preceding statements. Are we to discount everything that was not written in the last generation? If so, are we not to find out, to our shame and pain that history does repeat itself and we should have studied more history and spent less time on, well, whatever one studies in place of history these days? Do we throw away everyone from Adam Smith to Abraham Lincoln because their ideas predate the iPod and Botox?
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