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In America, we once thought of political courage as being willing to do something at ones own expense.

At the pointy end of that consideration are instances when people risk their lives or freedom to do the right thing. The men and women rotting in Vladimir Putins jails or dead by his order are proof that history will never exhaust its demand for political courage.

Here, thankfully, we have in recent decades mostly thought of political courage in terms of electoral risks: Gerald Ford taking the hit for pardoning Richard Nixon to bring the Watergate fiasco to a close, Barack Obama refusing the demands of Democrats to prosecute members of the Bush administration, or any politician who crosses the aisle to vote for a measure unpopular with his or her own party for the sake of an idea or policy they believe in.

Thats why we revere courageous leadership. A politician who will sacrifice his or her ambition or grasp on power in order to serve the people is a rarity, and also essential. We name states and cities for them and build monuments to their service. Had George Washington or Abraham Lincoln wanted to be despots, they could have been. Instead, they preserved government of, for, and by the people. In Lincolns case, even unto death.

I dont know if the share of politicians capable of actual courage really is lower today than when I first started covering them full-time two dozen years ago. Some of what I see as declining character in our leaders may be a byproduct of nostalgia, but holy croakano, people

We surely are living in a political age of desperate, shallow ambition and the cowardice it inevitably produces. No longer is it sufficient to help yourself; you must also hurt the other side.

Which brings us to the investigation into then-President Donald Trumps effort to steal a second term, the efforts of some Republicans in Congress to vandalize the Constitution to help him, and the sacking of the Capitol by a mob summoned to serve the ambitions of the coup plotters. Forget Lincoln and Washington. This was behavior unworthy of Nixon, who refused to contest some clearly dubious results after the 1960 presidential election and, when president himself, resigned the office rather than subject the country to a protracted impeachment fight.

What Trump and his gang did in the 2020 election and its aftermath is a big historical moment for our country, far bigger than the Watergate scandal we still discuss 50 years later. The coup effort and Capitol attack will long endure in the story of this century, along with the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars, the panic of 2008 and the ensuing recession, and the coronavirus pandemic during which the 2020 election took place. Trump was the first president ever to pose a credible threat to the peaceful transfer of presidential power that has been our inheritance for 226 years.

Acts of such monstrous self interest and the craven lust for power evinced by the behavior of many in the Republican Party demanded a response of real statesmanship and courage; first from Republicans who had not succumbed to the scheme and then from Democrats. But as you know, both parties failed that test.

What should have happened was that, acting in mutual defense of the legislative branch and the constitutional order, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should have put an impeachment and trial on the fast track. A single, short article against Trump for trying to disrupt the transfer of power, including by sending an angry mob to the Capitol, would have been very hard to vote against for Republicans who hadnt been part of the power grab. If such an article had been passed by the House that week, I believe Trump would have been convicted and removed from office by the Senate.

Instead, Pelosi put three cable news stalwarts and sharp-elbowed partisans in charge of drafting the articles: Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, David Cicilline, of Rhode Island, and Ted Lieu, of California. What the House voted on a week after the attack was not designed to make it easy for Republicans to get to yea.

McConnell seemed content to let Democrats do it on their own. According to a book from two New York Times reporters, six days after the attack, McConnell told aides If this isn't impeachable, I don't know what is," but that Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, though, made McConnell look like captain courageous. After saying in private in the aftermath of the attack that he would tell Trump to resign, McCarthy had shifted by Jan. 11 to saying he believed Trump was sorry for what he had done, to, by the end of the month, going to Mar-a-Lago to ask Trumps blessing and cheese for photos. Having voted with the coup plotters against election certification, McCarthy probably rightly determined his lot was already cast.

Once the impeachment doomed by partisan self-interest was out of the way, the question was how Congress should investigate what happened. The first and most logical answer was for leaders of the two parties in both houses to pick an outside commission with subpoena powers, as Congress did after the 9/11 attacks. It made sense because it took the responsibility out of the hands of people running for re-election. But in May of 2021, Senate Republicans blocked the creation of such a commission, citing expressly partisan reasons for doing so.

In reply, Pelosi formed a select committee to investigate the attempted coup and riot. Senate Republicans and others in the GOP assumed that House Republicans would use their minority seats on the panel to defend Trump, leak information beneficial to Republicans, and push the schedule (and narrative) in ways helpful to their own team. But McCarthy fumbled.

Two of the five members McCarthy picked for the committee had been part of the effort to steal the election. Pelosi said she wouldnt seat them, but that she would let the other three serve, and asked for McCarthy to pick two replacements. Instead, McCarthy pulled out completely in an attempt to block the committee. It was a botch. Pelosi named two cooperative Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, and plowed on without any interference from McCarthy.

Almost a year later, after lots of leaks and speculation, the committee was finally ready to start its main hearings. Rather than adopting a somber, non-partisan tone, Democrats like Raskin and the head of the partys House campaign arm were out in advance boasting about how the hearings would hurt Republicans in Novembers midterm elections and blow the roof off the House. Like with Trumps second impeachment, a laudable goal was being mired in negative partisanship. At a time when Congress needed desperately to show that there were principles beyond partisan ambition, it sent the opposite message.

But the hearings that we saw last week were not that. They were sober and dignified and seemed mostly to resist gratuitous partisanship. And I hope they stay that way, because Im the next entre on the menu.

By the time you read this I may already have finished testifying, and my part is a small one, but Im not going to write here about what I have to say. Im still not entirely sure what I will say or what may happen, and dont want to close any doors or create any expectations. I had a pretty good perch for the 2020 election and was part of the best decision desk in the news business on election night. Im still so proud of the work we didwe beat the competition and stuck the landing. All I can do is tell the truth about my work and hope for the best.

But I do want to tell you why I agreed to testify before this committee, despite the straitened circumstances of its creation and the mistakes that were made along the way: because it is a duly empaneled committee of the United States Congress, and its chairman asked me to come forward and answer questions. I have no First Amendment grounds on which to refuse since I am not being asked to reveal a source or something like that. If I was in that spot, I would dig in my heels and fight until they either locked me up or let me go. But I have no such grounds.

I spend a lot of time talking about the need for stronger institutions and how Congress must reclaim its status as the first among equal branches. How could I then resist when Congress made a request of me that falls well within its powers? I would rather not have to face the same anger I did after we called Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020. I have no interest in starring in the sequel to that one. But neither could I find an acceptable reason as a citizen to refuse, so I will go. It is not a courageous thing for me to do, only unavoidable.

As a journalist, I feel very uncomfortable even playing this small role in these events. The first rule for my vocation is to tell the truth as best as you can, and the second is to stay the hell out of the story. I will fail in the latter today, but aim for the former.

Members of Congress in both parties failed us after Jan. 6, 2021, and in nearly every case, it was because of a lack of political courage. Once, that meant being willing to hurt your own ambitions or those of your party to do what you thought was right. Now, we cant even find a sufficient number of women and men who will pass up an opportunity to hurt the other side to do the right thing. The new standard in Washington is that any action must be both helpful to ones own career and harmful to the hated opposition. We saw that all too clearly as Republicans repeatedly shirked their duty surrounding this bizarre episode, but just as clearly as Democrats egged them on. Keeping the republic will require real courage from our leaders, even when it means passing on the cheap shots.

See the rest here:
The January 6 Committee and Me - by Chris Stirewalt - The Dispatch

Last month, Justice Samuel Alitos draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked into public view. This month a man tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Police arrested the suspect outside Kavanaughs home (he was able to find Kavanaughs address online), and he was carrying a handgun, a knife, pepper spray, zip ties, and tools useful for breaking into the Kavanaugh home.

As the disturbing news reports filtered out, I had two immediate responses. First, because Id just debated the topic on the New York Times Argument podcast, I thought: This is why you dont dox public figures. By exposing a persons home address to the public, you expose it not just to those who want to peacefully protest, but also to those who wish to do you harm.

But my second thought was more important, and its what I want to address today. I thought no one should be surprised at the attempt or the target. After all, in some quarters, Justice Kavanaugh has become the right person to hate, and if enough people hate a person, then threats and ultimately violence are the inevitable result.

Id like to introduce you to a term you may not have heard before. Its called stochastic terrorism, and its deeply challengingboth as a concept and as a realityto both sides of our partisan divide. You can find a good short definition of the term in a recent piece by Todd Morley in the Small Wars Journal. He described it as a quantifiable relationship between seemingly random acts of terrorism and the perpetuation of hateful rhetoric in public discourse, accompanied by catastrophising and fear generation in media sources.

Another, shorter definition is the incitement of a violent act by the public demonization of a group or individual, and it refers to a pattern that cannot be predicted precisely but can be analyzed statistically. In other words, a specific act against the demonized person or group cannot be forecast, but the probability of an act occurring has increased due to the rhetoric of a public figure.

The concept is both common-sense and controversial. The common-sense element is easy to explain. If youre a normal person and five people hate you, what are the odds youll face targeted violence? Unless youre engaged in criminal activity yourself (and the five people who hate you are other criminals), then the odds are almost impossibly low.

But what if 50,000 people hate you? Or five million? Then the odds change considerably, until they reach a virtual certainty that youll face a threat of some kind.

Ive explained the concept as working like a funnel. At each new step from rhetoric to action, engagement narrows and intensifies. Lots of people might just talk. Fewer people actually act. But the more people who talk, the more people who act. We can easily recognize this reality in extremist movements. They rarely spring from healthy communities.

For example, weve long recognized that the Middle East is awash in anti-Semitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League, a horrifying 74 percent of citizens of the Middle East harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. No other region comes close. The next-most anti-Semitic region is Eastern Europe, where 34 percent of citizens hold anti-Semitic ideas.

The vast majority of anti-Semites will never be violent. But amongst such a vast pool of people, there will be some who will believe words are simply not enough. A small number will raise money for violent causes. A smaller number will join extremist organizations. A smaller number still will take up arms. Is it any wonder that Israel faces persistent threats of terrorist violence?

Thus one of the challenges of containing extremism lies not just in addressing the most intense individuals at the bottom of the funnel but also the prevalence of the terrible ideas at the top.

When I was researching my book, which argues that America might face a secession crisis, I talked to a number of people who were experts in civil conflict in developing nations who are increasingly alarmed by the dynamics that exist here at home. There is nothing unique or special about Americans that makes us immune from the same tidal forces that have torn other nations or regions to pieces.

Here, as elsewhere, hatred is leading to a terrifying atmosphere of menace and threat. On Friday, Andrew Sullivan reposted an October essay arguing that personalizing politics was dangerous. Threats were migrating from online spaces to public figures' homes. Read these incidents and ask, How many do I remember? How many did I ever hear about?

Not content with marching in the streets to air complaints, demands, and grievances as a public spectacle, demonstrators of all kinds increasingly seek out the private homes of public figures to hound them intimately and personally. In the past year or so, the examples have mounted quickly. The mayor of Portland had to move house because activists besieged his condo building, breaking windows of other peoples offices and throwing burning debris into them. The mayors of St. Louis and Buffalo were also driven from their homes, and Chicagos mayor was under constant threat: [Lori] Lightfoot already receives 24/7 protection from cops including officers stationed at the residence.

Andrew then talks about additional incidents in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Oak Park, Oakland, Sacramento, and Seattle before he turns his attention to the right:

Although not as persistent or as widespread as the far lefts invasion of the privacy of public figures, the far right is not innocent either. LA Mayor Garcettis residence was targeted by anti-lockdown activists; LA Countys public health director was also targeted at home; some folks brought menacing tiki-torches to the Boise mayors home; in Duluth, Trump supporters organized 20 trucks to circle the mayors home. Over the new year, Nancy Pelosis private home was vandalized, graffiti written on her garage door, and a bloody pigs head was thrown into the mix for good measure.

Of course the ultimate recent example of hatred and fury spawning violence is the attack on the Capitol on January 6. It was perhaps the most predictable spasm of violence in recent American history. One cannot tell tens of millions of Americans that an election is stolen and that the very fate of the country hangs in the balance without some of those people actually acting like the election was stolen and the nation is at stake.

But if the concept of stochastic terrorism is so obviously connected to human experience, why is it controversial? In part because it aims responsibility upward, and it places at least some degree of moral responsibility for violent acts on passionate nonviolent people. While criminal responsibility may rest exclusively with the person who carries the gun (or his close conspirators), moral responsibility is not so easy to escape.

That brings us back to Justice Kavanaugh. Its hard to think of a single public figure whos been subject to more sustained and furious attacks on his character than Kavanaugh, and I say this as someone who took Christine Blasey Fords allegations against him quite seriously. My position was simpleif there was a preponderance of evidence that her claims were true, then he shouldnt be a Supreme Court justice, even if she was talking about an incident that occurred decades ago.

(If you want to read my evaluation of the evidence against him, I recommend this long piece I wrote in October 2018 in National Review.)

But what should have been a sober look at a serious claim turned into a media frenzy the likes of which Ive rarely seen. It culminated in a transparently unserious gang rape allegation brought forward by lawyer Michael Avenattinow disgraced and imprisoned, but then championed as a Resistance hero by many on the left. The allegation started to fall apart almost immediately, but that didnt stop people with immense followings from both believing it and ridiculing and attacking those who expressed skepticism.

The result was that millions of Americans didnt just dislike Kavanaugh, they hated him. They believed the worst about him. When he was hated at that scale, threats were inevitable, and an attempt on his life was likely. The terrible math of stochastic terrorism worked again.

One of the things that makes me concerned for the fate of our country is the reality that Americas partisans are both quite eager to assign blame for intimidation and violence to their political opponents and indignant when told that their own rhetoric contributes to our cultural decline. And so we live in a world where both Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford faced an avalanche of threats. And not just themvirtually any person who possesses a public voice on matters of public concern can tell stories of times when they felt afraid.

Our nation cannot withstand this level of vitriol. It will lead to more violence, and when it does, our most vicious partisans will disclaim any responsibility. How dare you blame me, theyll say. Everyone knows the man who pulls the trigger is responsible for his own crime. Yes, legally, he bears the blame. But words still matter. They inspire action, and when angry partisans see people they publicly hate face danger and death, they should feel shame for the culture they helped create.

One more thing

Earlier this month, I filed a Supreme Court amicus brief on behalf of fifteen family policy organizations in a case called 303 Creative v. Elenis. Its going to be argued next Supreme Court term, and the issue at stake is whether the state of Colorado can compel a web designer to design a website celebrating a same-sex wedding. I say no. Here are my opening paragraphs:

This case comes to the court at a critical moment. There is an increasing collision between generations-long consistent protection of the First Amendment in this Court and a culture that increasingly yields to the impulse to dominate political opponents, censor their expression, and even compel them to host speech or engage in speech with which they disagree.

It is one thing if the pressure to conform remains cultural rather than legal. While online attacks are difficult to endure, one can persevere and still speak. While peer shame can sting, only a small amount of courage is required to preserve ones public voice.

State censorship and compulsions, however, are different matters altogether. It is the state that wields the power of the sword. It is the state that can bar entrance into the marketplace of ideas. It is the state that can dictate whether a citizen can open a business or earn a living. Thus, it is the state that is the eternal threat to liberty. Only the state can truly suppress the American idea.

The First Amendment thus erects a high wall around private speech and individual conscience. It does not ask if speech is wise, good, popular, or fashionable before it grants its protection. Popular speech does not need a constitutional shield. It is the dissenter who truly values the First Amendment, and it is for the dissenter that the First Amendment exists.

Read the whole thing and review my work in the comments. Persuaded? If not, why not?

Another thing

Youre not going to want to miss this weeks Good Faith podcast. Curtis and I hosted Christianity Todays Russell Moore, and we talked about the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California, the SBC sex abuse report, the crisis in American pastors, and the Christian call to be strange (but not crazy). It was a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

One last thing

Lets do something a bit different and end with an inspiring moment rather than an inspiring song. You may not know this, but Im a longtime fan of professional wrestling. I went to my first sold-out show in Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, when I was 10 years old. In college I spent a ridiculous sum of money to go see Hulk Hogan wrestle Andre the Giant. The WWE gave us the greatest living American celebrity, Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

I dont keep up as much as I used to (its hard to simultaneously keep up with the NBA, college football, the NFL, superhero movies, the Star Wars franchise, Game of Thrones, every Tolkien property under the sun, British crime dramas, and the WWE), but did you know that nobody has granted more Make-a-Wish wishes than John Cena? And did you know that he did this?

Its one of the most touching things Ive seen in a long time. There is still much good in this world.

View post:
There Is No Right Person to Hate - by David French - The Dispatch

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, weighs in on the one-sided January 6th committee investigation on Sunday Morning Futures.

Rep. Jim Jordan believes that a "big change" will come in this years midterm elections because Americans think "the country is on the wrong track.

"I think the American people are fixing to make a change come November," Jordan, R-Ohio, told "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo. "You can just feel that happen."

Jordan laid into the Biden administration and current cabinet, saying each secretary has overseen a "terrible" policy change since the last administration.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) speaks during the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee hearing on "Online Platforms and Market Power" in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on July 29, 2020. | Reuters Photos

He lambasted Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for "chaos" at the border and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for saying that she was "surprised at inflation."

INFLATION TIMELINE: MAPPING THE BIDEN ADMIN'S RESPONSE TO RAPID PRICE GROWTH

"How can you be surprised at inflation when you spend like crazy, pay people not to work, and drive up the cost of energy?" he asked. "It makes no sense."

"We went from a secure border to chaos," Jordan said. "We went from energy independence to the president begging Iran, OPEC and Venezuela to increase production. We went from safe streets to record levels of crime in every major urban area."

BIDEN RESPONDS TO $5 GAS: OUTRAGEOUS WHAT THE WAR IN UKRAINE IS CAUSING

"And we went from stable price to a 41-year-high inflation rate, and I havent even gotten into foreign policy, or the attacks on our First Amendment, and of course last week the attacks on our Second Amendment rights," he added.

The Labor Department said Friday that the consumer price index, a broad measure of the price for everyday goods, including gasoline, groceries and rents, rose 8.6% in May from a year ago. Prices jumped 1% in the one-month period from April. Those figures were both higher than the 8.3% headline figure and 0.7% monthly gain forecast by Refinitiv economists.

LARRY KUDLOW: A DIFFERENT PLAN TO CRUSH INFLATION

It marks the fastest pace of Inflation since December 1981.

Price increases were widespread: Energy prices rose 3.9% in May from the previous month, and are up 34.6% from last year. Gasoline, on average, costs 48.7% more than it did one year ago and 7.8% more than it did in April. In all, fuel prices jumped 16.9% in May on a monthly basis, pushing the one-year increase to a stunning 106.7%.

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Food prices have also climbed 10.1% higher over the year and 1.2% over the month, with the largest increases in dairy and related products (up 2.9%, the biggest monthly increase since July 2007), non-alcoholic beverages (1.7%), cereals and bakery products (1.5%), and meats, poultry, fish and eggs rose (1.1%).

Fox Business' Megan Henney contributed to this report.

Read the original:
Rep. Jordan: 'Big change' coming in midterms after 41-year-high inflation rate - Fox Business

I miss the old ACLU.

You know the one I'm talking about: The American Civil Liberties Union that defended the First Amendment right of Nazis to march at Skokie, Illinois. The one that sided with homophobic pastor Fred Phelps and his church when it protested the funerals of dead American servicemen.

The ACLU's cases have sometimes involved terrible people with terrible causes saying terrible things. Nobody with good taste or decent morals and certainly no one on the left side of America's political spectrum would ordinarily choose to associate themselves with the infamous scoundrels and bigots the organization has occasionally aided over the years. Even so, it has usually been comforting to know that the ACLU is on the case. If Fred Phelps is protected by the Constitution, after all, then the rest of us are, too.

It's not always like that, anymore.

Oh, the ACLU still takes on free speech cases and unpopular clients: Last month it argued an appeals case on behalf of a high school student who made a Holocaust joke. "In doing so, we were only doing what we have always donedefending speech rights for all, even those with whom we disagree," David Cole, the group's national legal director, wrote recently in The Nation.

But reporting in recent years suggests the ACLU has drifted away from its moorings as the nation's premiere defender of the First Amendment, struggling instead to balance its commitment to free expression with progressive stances on behalf of racial and sexual minorities. That would reflect a growing notion on the left that perhaps the Trumpist Age of Disinformation has revealed the limits of unfettered expression as a democratic virtue.

The ACLU's old guard worries something is being lost. Take David Goldberger, the attorney who argued on behalf of the Skokie Nazis. "Liberals," he warned last year, "are leaving the First Amendment behind."

So it's interesting and maybe even encouraging to see another group step forward to claim the mantle. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group that's waged free speech battles on university campuses around the country, announced this week that it is rebranding itself. FIRE is now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a name change that brings with it a broader mandate and a plan to spend $75 million over the next three years on free speech education and litigation.

"Once the ACLU backs off its traditional role, who else is there?" said Ira Glasser, who ran the organization for more than two decades and now sits on FIRE's advisory board. (Former ACLU president Nadine Strossen is also on FIRE's board.)

Let's backtrack a bit, and acknowledge that the progressive reconsideration of free speech is nothing if not understandable. The ACLU's own evolution was sparked by its 2017 efforts on behalf of neo-Nazis whose angry "Unite the Right" protests at Charlottesville culminated in the death of Heather Heyer and gave us then-President Donald Trump's ugly "very fine people on both sides" equivocation between the racist and anti-racist demonstrators. Maybe there's something to the idea that "First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege," as one former ACLU staffer put it. And maybe there's something to the idea that the Internet-fueled explosion of lies and conspiracy theories means we're no longer competing in a "marketplace of ideas," but instead collectively being forced to slog through an exhausting swamp of falsehood. Even for its most committed adherents, there can be days when the First Amendment doesn't look so wonderful.

That's not the whole story, though.

Yes, the First Amendment protected the marchers at Skokie in 1978 but it was also a "crucial tool" for protesters during the Civil Rights Era. Maybe Westboro Baptist Church was protected in shouting its vile anti-gay slurs in public, but so were gay and lesbian demonstrations and newspapers that were the targets of would-be censors. In America, marginalized groups have been able to advance their cause because of our country's legal commitment to free speech.

"Especially for groups that are minorities, whether political dissidents or racial or other demographic minorities, (they) absolutely depend on robust free speech and are smothered by censorship," Strossen told me last year.

Indeed, the latest government-sponsored efforts to stifle speech the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida, any number of state bills intended to limit young people's access to books about racism and sexual identity are aimed directly at the the ability of those minority groups to tell their story. If those laws are defeated in court, it probably will happen because the First Amendment doesn't just protect people of power and privilege.

That makes free expression an idea worth continued defense by the progressives, even in these confusing and dangerous times. David Goldberger worries the left is leaving the First Amendment behind. It's not too late to come back.

Joel Mathis is a writer based in Lawrence, Kansas. His work has appeared in The Week, Philadelphia Magazine, the Kansas City Star, Vice and other publications. His honors include awards for best online commentary from the Online News Association and (twice) from the City and Regional Magazine Association.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Continued here:
Is It Time to Set the First Amendment on FIRE? | Opinion - Newsweek

To listen to the gun lobby, the Second Amendment provides an absolute constitutional right for an individual to own an array of armaments and ammunition free from regulation by the state. These advocates select from the amendments text only what supports their individual-freedom view, but they ignore entirely the imperative that precedes, the framing device of the whole thingto protect the security of a free State. Read in full, the text of the amendment is not a prohibition on gun regulations but, rather, a requirement of certain regulations necessary for protecting that security and freedom.

Gun-rights activists point to the 2008 Supreme Court decision in Heller v. District of Columbia as finally establishing, some 219 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, an individual right to possess a gun in the home, which they proclaim extends to assault rifles and sundry other weapons enabling individual bearers to inflict mass destruction of human life. In their view, the ordinary citizen is bound by a constitutional covenant to suffer the risk that others might use their military-style weapons to murder childrenor churchgoers, or grocery shoppers, or concertgoers, but especially childrenbecause it is the person, not the gun, who does the killing in the Second Amendments name. We the people must endure this risk, we are told, because otherwise the rights of some to keep and bear Armseven against childrenoutweigh our collective need for safety and security. The constitutional protection of some to keep the weapons that they sometimes bear against us collectively is too important a right necessary for individual freedom to contemplate regulations that would, or even might, reduce our risk. We are told that the right to individual ownership of armaments like AR-15 platform assault weapons, with minimal or no real restraints on purchasing, is necessary for an armed populace to keep the threat of a tyrannical government at bay.

James C. Phillips and Josh Blackman: The mysterious meaning of the Second Amendment

Such a popularized version of our Constitutions meaning was in part vindicated by a conservative Supreme Court majority, whose opinion in Heller focused principally on the second half of the Second Amendment, which reads, The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Assuming that the term of art keep and bear means the same in modern English as possess and carry, and that the people refers to particular individuals rather than a political collective, as in We the People, which established the Constitution in the preamble, the right would seem to be fairly clear. (Or at least as clear as the First Amendment, which provides that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, under which the Supreme Court has nonetheless repeatedly found all manner of regulations permissiblesuch as those prohibiting incitement to violence, true threats, and advocacy for violent overthrow of the government, and those putting reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech, among many others.)

But this version of the Second Amendment ignores the first half, which reads, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State. The Supreme Court barely contemplated the texts meaning in Heller, asking no more than whether it could be given a logical link or a purpose consistent with what it dubbed the operative clausewherein the amendment, in the Courts view, protects an individual right to possess a weapon. The first half of the Second Amendment is at times also anachronistically associated with the question of whether the right to possess a weapon is tied to service in a well regulated Militiaa view the Heller majority rejected. Missing from this reading, however, is any consideration of the constitutional significance of what is necessary to maintain the security of a free State. What does this security entail? Are Americans secure in a free state when they live in fear of the next violent act that might be perpetrated by the bearer of semiautomatic weapons? Are Americans secure in a free state when they are told that more resources should be spent on arming teachers, or training students to duck and cover and keep silent, as if in a new cold war, only this time the enemy is ourselves?

Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick: The Second Amendment has become a threat to the First

The gun lobby argues that the political, psychological, and emotional attachment to the ready availability of weapons for some is a value too precious to contemplate rethinking our collective approach to gun regulation. Any regulation that might lead to imposing far more restrictive licensing and background checks, or to limiting the availability of particular kinds of weapons, would be too costly to their selective understanding of constitutional freedoms. According to the gun lobby, individuals engaged in their own fantasy of the heroic citizen equipped to do battle against tyrannical government agents would suffer incalculable collective costs were Americans to restrict their access to weapons. If the choice were the lives of children or the political imagination of a vocal group of armament activists, whose costs should matter more? The inconvenience of some or the lives of others?

The Second Amendment provides an answer. The security of a free State matters. Our security is a constitutional value, one that outweighs absolutist gun-rights claims by NRA lobbyists, or Oath Keepers and other insurrectionist groups who hold their access to weapons dear for use in an imagined anti-tyranny quest. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer the costs of the actual tyranny that living in a state of fear of mass gun violence creates.

Franklin D. Roosevelts 1941 Four Freedoms speech placed freedom from fear as one of four essential human freedoms. Translated to our modern gun crisis, this freedom can be realized only when individuals no longer have easy legal access to armaments that put them in a position to commit an act of [mass] physical aggression against any neighbor. Children today do not have this freedom from fear. Just to live in society and go to school, they must endure regular active-shooter drills, because the gun lobby has opposed any regulation that would keep weapons out of the hands of those whose activities remain legal up until the exact moment when they start shooting children and teachers. Proposals to make schools more like fortresses only add to the costs children bear rather than addressing the root constitutional problemthat insufficient regulation of guns impairs the liberties of all.

Protecting our freedom from fear does not mean that the government has complete authority to ban guns. To emphasize the amendments protections for security is not to abandon liberty. Rather, it is to recognize how excessive emphasis on the liberties of gun advocates undermines the many liberties of everyone else who seeks to live securely in a free state. The Second Amendment preserves a free state, not simply a security state.

When we Americans next hear that the Second Amendment protects a right against more effective regulation of weapons capable of imposing death on our neighbors, we should insist in response that the Second Amendment requires the opposite. It empowers a free people to regulate weapons as necessary to maintain their security and to protect their freedoms from fear and violence. We can be free, but only if we regulate gunsjust as the Second Amendment tells us.

Excerpt from:
Don't Forget the First Half of the Second Amendment - The Atlantic