Surprising, coming from a member of the Claremont Institute. Sorry Mark, I ain't buying it.
Bits and past pieces picked up from various boards -
"Webster’s Dictionary describes a nominative absolute as a grammatically independent construction consisting of a noun or nominative pronoun and a predicate without a finite verb, used to modify the rest of the sentence.
Example: The key being lost, the box could not be opened.
Meaning: The box could not be opened because the key was lost.
Example: 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.
Meaning: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state." by A44MAGNUT at Free Republic, and . . . " The National Guard, funded by the federal government, occupying property leased to the federal government, using weapons owned by the federal government, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a state militia."
What part of this don't you get, sir?
Written on Water
A Compromise on Guns
A Compromise on Guns
Second Amendment absolutists are wrong. So are those who would ignore the right to bear arms.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Tuesday, September 5, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
Gun is a strange word. What is after all a piece of precision machinery would seem to deserve more a Latinate and less a Teutonic name. As it is, it sounds like part of a medieval prosthesis or a wooden device used by thatchers or cheese makers. Nor does it make contemporary or Freudian sense, in that the word is derived from a woman's name, the Icelandic Gunnhildr, meaning, appropriately, "war," but that is apparently the case, a primitive cannon in the Windsor Castle inventory of 1330 having been listed as "Mistress Gunilda."
Like many powerful things, guns can elicit the kind of immediate, thoughtless, and reflexive opinions that easily overwhelm fact. Though in hysteria rather than sin, Sen. Dianne Feinstein almost singlehandedly redefined "assault weapon" (until that time an automatic rifle or submachine gun with short barrel and folding stock, primarily for the use of paratroopers) as any military-looking rifle or submachine gun, regardless of its characteristics. She was comfortable with some rifles of far more power than others that she found unacceptable because they looked scary. Thus the debate is clouded. Thoughtlessness in regard to guns is all the stronger because guns transcend arguments merely about themselves and are a demarcation point between two competing political tendencies. As such, they repel sensible assessments and make it impossible for either side to compromise.
Although abortion goes unmentioned in the Constitution, as does privacy, and the preservation of privacy cannot be sanely advanced as an argument to justify the taking of a life, liberals quite readily extract from "penumbras" that "emanate" from said document a constitutional right to abortion. Presumably, because Barbra Streisand sounds to me like a distant fire truck, I could find a right to bar her from singing on grounds of "taste" that emanate from within penumbras of the Constitution. If a constitutional test requires merely the emanation of penumbras, anyone can find anything in the Constitution, and such liberal findings have become, more or less, the cardinal principles of modern liberalism.
If you can hallucinate something into being, you can also hallucinate something away. To wit, the Second Amendment, which reads, "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." Little matter that the states still maintain militias. Apparently because arms are now kept in armories (they were often kept in armories then), the dependent clause, though neither struck nor superseded, is deemed by some to be invalid because the clause that precedes it is deemed conditional, although it is not conditional but descriptive. The Constitution is littered with conditionals--if, when, unless, only. Had its authors intended to make the right to bear arms conditional, they would have been explicit.
Several states had declarations or bills of rights that were each many times as long as the federal Bill of Rights that arose from them. Because the authors of the federal Bill of Rights could not gracefully have made their 10 amendments to the Constitution longer than the Constitution itself, they compressed mightily, and the question of the militia vs. the standing army was, within a single sentence, joined to the question of the right to bear arms.
In the precursor documents from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, both separation and intent are clear. The Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights: "XII. That the people have the right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up." The Massachusetts Constitution, Declaration of Rights: "XVII.- The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defense. And as in time of peace armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature." Virginia's Proposed Amendments to the Constitution: "17th. That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state." And so on and so forth.
That the right to bear arms precedes and exists independently of the question of militias and standing armies, and that it exists unconditionally, is clear. But the right itself is not by its nature comprehensive, the first limitation upon it being that such arms must be those that can be borne: that is--according to the possibilities of the times--not cannon or siege engines or mines, but rifles, pistols, and swords. Whereas the right itself cannot be constitutionally infringed or denied as a whole, nothing in the Constitution suggests that it cannot be regulated and shaped. The picture of the right will vary according to the action of the legislatures, including Congress itself, in an uneasy compromise that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction according to the views and politics of the moment. In some places, such as the City of New York, Republican mayor or not, the amendment has not been upheld. In others, perhaps it is upheld too extravagantly, with the result that criminals find access to firearms more readily than anyone except criminals would want.
When stripped of its pathways to other issues, the debate is about preserving the equilibrium the Founders left for their successors to sustain. We cannot constitutionally dispense with the right to bear arms, and yet, as with other constitutional provisions, we are obliged to shape it. Such a typically fine 18th-century balance naturally favors a compromise, which might be forthcoming were it not for disingenuous and fanatical absolutists.
An obvious compromise is to trade the increased regulation of the right for its expansion and guarantee. That is, closer scrutiny and thorough training, so as to keep firearms from the hands of criminals and incompetents, in return for the assured and expanded access of law-abiding citizens to these means required for self-protection and to effect the not inconsequential balance between the powers of the citizenry and the powers of the state. A people "trained to arms," as the Virginia amendments put it, is not to be feared but, rather, relied upon. Professional vetting and training would create the kind of militia familiar to the Founders and cited so often by liberals as, believe it or not, something that would make them feel comfortable with the Second Amendment. In this case, why should they be deprived of comfort?
They would chafe, however, because they believe without distinction that guns are not only evil but magic. Guns are immensely potent, deadly, fatal, and terrible, but, magically, only when criminals use them. Somehow, when honest people pick them up, they turn upon their handlers. That is, guns should be banned because in the hands of criminals they are so destructive of the criminal's victims, and in the hands of the criminal's victims they are also destructive of the criminal's victims. How is this? It is the same magical principle that decrees ballistic missile defense pointless because, whereas an enemy's countermeasures will always defeat it, it will never defeat an enemy's countermeasures. It is the same magical principle that put the Soviet Union and its allies on the right side of history as free societies bumbled along on the wrong side, and as such it is not to be trusted.
The inherent power of a weapon is neutral and can be directed to good or ill. To believe that Americans will use it mainly unjustly or incompetently is not only to brush past existing empirical evidence but also fundamentally to mistrust the assumptions of the Declaration and the Constitution. The destiny of the American people is not to be a powerless medium ready to take the many and officious impressions of an inspired and benevolent government. Who justifiably believes that the people are a danger to their government, and that the government, therefore, should be empowered with weapons, while the people are deprived of them? Who justifiably believes that the people are not to be trusted in their own defense?
Certainly not conservatives, but conservatives have their own brand of absolutists, who are convinced that measures necessary to confine the possession of firearms to honest and competent citizens will be used to compile a registry that will, in a coup de main, facilitate a wholesale capture of weapons. If half or more of all households have firearms, how valuable is a registry? And if the government is or will be the kind of government that would mount a coup de main against its own citizens, would it not be better that the maximum possible number of citizens be "trained to arms," in the kind of compromise suggested above? Trust is not just something that liberals owe conservatives and the government owes the people. The government of the United States, though naturally imperfect, is not the enemy of the United States, and is comprised, in its millions, of the people of the United States.
If the Left cannot amend the Constitution to rid itself of the Second Amendment and guns, it must compromise to live with the Second Amendment and guns rather than ignoring or subverting the Constitution. And if the Right cannot bring itself to the kind of compromise that the very wording of the Second Amendment suggests in limiting the right as it presents it, the Second Amendment will be amended out and its supporters will have bartered away a fundamental liberty merely for the dubious privilege of not being agile enough to preserve it.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. His column appears Tuesdays.
[This message has been edited by Oatka (edited September 07, 2000).]
Bits and past pieces picked up from various boards -
"Webster’s Dictionary describes a nominative absolute as a grammatically independent construction consisting of a noun or nominative pronoun and a predicate without a finite verb, used to modify the rest of the sentence.
Example: The key being lost, the box could not be opened.
Meaning: The box could not be opened because the key was lost.
Example: 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.
Meaning: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state." by A44MAGNUT at Free Republic, and . . . " The National Guard, funded by the federal government, occupying property leased to the federal government, using weapons owned by the federal government, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a state militia."
What part of this don't you get, sir?
Written on Water
A Compromise on Guns
A Compromise on Guns
Second Amendment absolutists are wrong. So are those who would ignore the right to bear arms.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Tuesday, September 5, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
Gun is a strange word. What is after all a piece of precision machinery would seem to deserve more a Latinate and less a Teutonic name. As it is, it sounds like part of a medieval prosthesis or a wooden device used by thatchers or cheese makers. Nor does it make contemporary or Freudian sense, in that the word is derived from a woman's name, the Icelandic Gunnhildr, meaning, appropriately, "war," but that is apparently the case, a primitive cannon in the Windsor Castle inventory of 1330 having been listed as "Mistress Gunilda."
Like many powerful things, guns can elicit the kind of immediate, thoughtless, and reflexive opinions that easily overwhelm fact. Though in hysteria rather than sin, Sen. Dianne Feinstein almost singlehandedly redefined "assault weapon" (until that time an automatic rifle or submachine gun with short barrel and folding stock, primarily for the use of paratroopers) as any military-looking rifle or submachine gun, regardless of its characteristics. She was comfortable with some rifles of far more power than others that she found unacceptable because they looked scary. Thus the debate is clouded. Thoughtlessness in regard to guns is all the stronger because guns transcend arguments merely about themselves and are a demarcation point between two competing political tendencies. As such, they repel sensible assessments and make it impossible for either side to compromise.
Although abortion goes unmentioned in the Constitution, as does privacy, and the preservation of privacy cannot be sanely advanced as an argument to justify the taking of a life, liberals quite readily extract from "penumbras" that "emanate" from said document a constitutional right to abortion. Presumably, because Barbra Streisand sounds to me like a distant fire truck, I could find a right to bar her from singing on grounds of "taste" that emanate from within penumbras of the Constitution. If a constitutional test requires merely the emanation of penumbras, anyone can find anything in the Constitution, and such liberal findings have become, more or less, the cardinal principles of modern liberalism.
If you can hallucinate something into being, you can also hallucinate something away. To wit, the Second Amendment, which reads, "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." Little matter that the states still maintain militias. Apparently because arms are now kept in armories (they were often kept in armories then), the dependent clause, though neither struck nor superseded, is deemed by some to be invalid because the clause that precedes it is deemed conditional, although it is not conditional but descriptive. The Constitution is littered with conditionals--if, when, unless, only. Had its authors intended to make the right to bear arms conditional, they would have been explicit.
Several states had declarations or bills of rights that were each many times as long as the federal Bill of Rights that arose from them. Because the authors of the federal Bill of Rights could not gracefully have made their 10 amendments to the Constitution longer than the Constitution itself, they compressed mightily, and the question of the militia vs. the standing army was, within a single sentence, joined to the question of the right to bear arms.
In the precursor documents from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, both separation and intent are clear. The Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights: "XII. That the people have the right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up." The Massachusetts Constitution, Declaration of Rights: "XVII.- The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defense. And as in time of peace armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature." Virginia's Proposed Amendments to the Constitution: "17th. That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state." And so on and so forth.
That the right to bear arms precedes and exists independently of the question of militias and standing armies, and that it exists unconditionally, is clear. But the right itself is not by its nature comprehensive, the first limitation upon it being that such arms must be those that can be borne: that is--according to the possibilities of the times--not cannon or siege engines or mines, but rifles, pistols, and swords. Whereas the right itself cannot be constitutionally infringed or denied as a whole, nothing in the Constitution suggests that it cannot be regulated and shaped. The picture of the right will vary according to the action of the legislatures, including Congress itself, in an uneasy compromise that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction according to the views and politics of the moment. In some places, such as the City of New York, Republican mayor or not, the amendment has not been upheld. In others, perhaps it is upheld too extravagantly, with the result that criminals find access to firearms more readily than anyone except criminals would want.
When stripped of its pathways to other issues, the debate is about preserving the equilibrium the Founders left for their successors to sustain. We cannot constitutionally dispense with the right to bear arms, and yet, as with other constitutional provisions, we are obliged to shape it. Such a typically fine 18th-century balance naturally favors a compromise, which might be forthcoming were it not for disingenuous and fanatical absolutists.
An obvious compromise is to trade the increased regulation of the right for its expansion and guarantee. That is, closer scrutiny and thorough training, so as to keep firearms from the hands of criminals and incompetents, in return for the assured and expanded access of law-abiding citizens to these means required for self-protection and to effect the not inconsequential balance between the powers of the citizenry and the powers of the state. A people "trained to arms," as the Virginia amendments put it, is not to be feared but, rather, relied upon. Professional vetting and training would create the kind of militia familiar to the Founders and cited so often by liberals as, believe it or not, something that would make them feel comfortable with the Second Amendment. In this case, why should they be deprived of comfort?
They would chafe, however, because they believe without distinction that guns are not only evil but magic. Guns are immensely potent, deadly, fatal, and terrible, but, magically, only when criminals use them. Somehow, when honest people pick them up, they turn upon their handlers. That is, guns should be banned because in the hands of criminals they are so destructive of the criminal's victims, and in the hands of the criminal's victims they are also destructive of the criminal's victims. How is this? It is the same magical principle that decrees ballistic missile defense pointless because, whereas an enemy's countermeasures will always defeat it, it will never defeat an enemy's countermeasures. It is the same magical principle that put the Soviet Union and its allies on the right side of history as free societies bumbled along on the wrong side, and as such it is not to be trusted.
The inherent power of a weapon is neutral and can be directed to good or ill. To believe that Americans will use it mainly unjustly or incompetently is not only to brush past existing empirical evidence but also fundamentally to mistrust the assumptions of the Declaration and the Constitution. The destiny of the American people is not to be a powerless medium ready to take the many and officious impressions of an inspired and benevolent government. Who justifiably believes that the people are a danger to their government, and that the government, therefore, should be empowered with weapons, while the people are deprived of them? Who justifiably believes that the people are not to be trusted in their own defense?
Certainly not conservatives, but conservatives have their own brand of absolutists, who are convinced that measures necessary to confine the possession of firearms to honest and competent citizens will be used to compile a registry that will, in a coup de main, facilitate a wholesale capture of weapons. If half or more of all households have firearms, how valuable is a registry? And if the government is or will be the kind of government that would mount a coup de main against its own citizens, would it not be better that the maximum possible number of citizens be "trained to arms," in the kind of compromise suggested above? Trust is not just something that liberals owe conservatives and the government owes the people. The government of the United States, though naturally imperfect, is not the enemy of the United States, and is comprised, in its millions, of the people of the United States.
If the Left cannot amend the Constitution to rid itself of the Second Amendment and guns, it must compromise to live with the Second Amendment and guns rather than ignoring or subverting the Constitution. And if the Right cannot bring itself to the kind of compromise that the very wording of the Second Amendment suggests in limiting the right as it presents it, the Second Amendment will be amended out and its supporters will have bartered away a fundamental liberty merely for the dubious privilege of not being agile enough to preserve it.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. His column appears Tuesdays.
[This message has been edited by Oatka (edited September 07, 2000).]