Thread by @SeanCasten

It appears that my tweets yesterday "triggered the cons" who, even after yesterday's events seem committed to maintaining this deadly status quo. Since you're obviously listening, let's talk about 2A, shall we? Thread:

1/ First, there is no honest debate about why we have so many gun deaths in the US. It's because we have too many guns. Any policy solution that doesn't address that root cause is nothing more than a "baffling half measure."

2/ Source for the last two figures, and this relevant quote: "If guns are more available, people will use them more often. If you replaced “guns” in that sentence with another noun, it would be so obvious as to be banal."
nytimes.com/2022/05/26/bri…

3/ But let's move onto 2A. There is so much hackery masquerading as intelligence around our founders intent. It comes from people with Ivy league law degrees and Federalist Society bona fides. But it isn't scholarship. It's cherry picked facts used to justify amoral opinions.

4/ Proof? Imagine if you wanted to know what our founders meant by "President and Vice President" in the 12th amendment. You would reasonably look to the body of the pre-amended text for guidance. Let's do the same for the word "militia" in the 2nd.

5/ The word "militia" shows up 6 times in the Constitution. 4 times in the base text, once in the 2nd amendment and once in the 5th. A reasonable inquiry of our founders intent should assume that they used that word with the same meaning throughout. Let's review them.

6/ Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have the power to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions"

7/ Same section, next paragraph: "[and] 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..."

8/ "...and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress"

9/ Section 2, first sentence: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States"

10/ Those are the entirety of the Militia references in the text. So... it isn't much of a leap to assume that when they referred to a "well regulated militia" in 2A, they meant...

11/ ...A body called forth, organized and armed by the Congress subject to a narrow set of circumstances, commanded by the President with officers appointed, trained and disciplined by the states.

That ain't the Proud Boys.

12/ Also as an aside worth noting that the only other amendment that mentions militias is the 5th, where certain legal protections are exempted for "in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger"

13/ Which is to say that "well-regulated" had a complete meaning, consistent with the entirety of the Constitution, in plain view. Only the hackiest, most partisan jurists would need to rely on "intellectual jiggery pokery" to conclude that the first 13 words in 2A don't matter.

14/ And yet that is exactly what the Scalia court (yes, Scalia was the guy who coined the IJ-P term) did in Heller when they said that there is a private right to gun ownership that supercedes the collective right to safety. That court is responsible for untold American deaths.

15/ Moreover, even if you ignore those first 13 words, you have to ask what our founders meant by "keep and bear arms". Justice Stevens did a beautiful job of explaining that in his Heller dissent but it's worth calling out a few specific passages. law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-…

16/ First, note that lots of state constitutions that pre-dated the US Constitution took much more expansive views. It is reasonable to assume they only meant this to apply to military service.

17/ Second, note that the VA text (which is very close to the final 2A text) provided an explicit religious exception to those who would bear arms. That is because our founders used the term "bear" arms to imply a military compulsion. It directly links to the first 13 words!

18/ Before moving on, note that when our Constitution was drafted we didn't have a standing army, nor an income tax to fund same. We needed militias who were trained and armed because without them we had no way to defend ourselves. The world has changed since then.

19/ So let's reframe 2A in current American english:

20/ "We can't defend our borders or enforce our laws without a standing Army that we don't have. So Congress, under certain circumstances can summon one. For that to work, folks have to have access to safely-stored, well maintained weapons which we can compel them to use."

21/ Not for hunting, nor self-defense. Not so you can cosplay as Tony Montana, John Rambo or some other fictional character you saw in a movie that made your testosterone surge. Those justifications were all added by emotionally stunted SCOTUS judges. They are not in the text.

22/ To be sure, this all sounds very partisan. How can we come together as a country if we are just recycling one party's theory of the case and dismissing all of the @GOP's arguments as partisan hackery? Well, because of this:

23/ The NRA owns the @GOP. There is no way to win an election as a member of their party without bowing down in obedience to the interests of gun manufacturers. To meet them half way is to assume that some avoidable murder is acceptable.

24/ This is how we've gotten to this point. That jiggery-pokery has infected not just members of Congress, not just the Supreme Court, but every partisan @GOP "think" tank and media outlet. It is Orwellian, deadly, and deeply, deeply wrong.

25/ But at the end of the day, we are not going to be judged by how many elections we win, how well we parroted the talking points, or our political party. We will be judged by whether we made a difference during the short time we were fortunate enough to walk among the living.

26/ And when it comes to gun regulation in the US, we are, on any measure, failing that test of character. It's time to start doing a lot better. /fin