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Dont let the politicians or the NRA scare you about taking your guns away. The Second Amendment to the Constitution would have to be repealed. Heres how the process works:

A proposed amendment to the Constitution must first be passed by Congress with two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Then three-fourths of the states must ratify the amendment. Thats done either through getting the state legislatures to approve of it or by ratifying conventions. Three-fourths is a high bar if as few as 13 states refuse to approve the change, the amendment stalls. Considering how many states are considered gun-friendly, its unlikely that the amendment would survive.

The other option for repealing the Second Amendment is more radical: Calling for a constitutional convention under Article V of the Constitution (AKA an Article V convention). If two-thirds of the state legislatures call for a new convention, they could convene delegations and start drafting new amendments. Its understandably a controversial idea, but arguably could be a way to repeal the Second Amendment.

LARRY L. DUBEY,

Alpena

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Repealing the Second Amendment is not easy | News, Sports, Jobs - Alpena News

On March 21, 2018, newly elected U.S. Senator Doug Jones gave his first-floor speech. The topic of his speech most certainly was one that is rarely heard from members of the Alabama delegation in either chamber his support of gun control and restrictions on the nations Second Amendment rights.

According to an NPR story, Jones said he was supportive of efforts that were discussed and later implemented after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, including, moving to ban bump stocks that can convert guns into automatic-style weapons, efforts to strengthen the background check system. He went on to say those restrictions werent enough. Jones proposed making background checks universal, including on internet sales, at gun shows and even private sales, as well as implementing three-day waiting periods.

Jones has since tried to reframe his speech and its purpose. AYellow Hammer news story cross-referenced his senate speech with an interview with Al.Com. In his speech, Jones said, So while I know that guns and gun control are difficult issues for this country, I can tell you theyre complicated for me, too. In his interview with Al.com, he backtracked, saying, I didnt make a speech about gun control. I made a speech about gun safety.

Doug Jones attracted the attention of NRA-ILA and its members when the national organization called upon him to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jones voted against Kavanaughs confirmation.

A recent Ammolandeditorialby Harold Hutchinson laid out additional arguments for electing Republican Tommy Tuberville over Jones. Electing Tuberville would help give Republicans an advantage in the Senate. He goes on to explain,Jones did sign on to a version of the For The People Act, which for all intents and purposes he says is intended tosilence grassroots opposition to left-wing politicians and causes, like gun control.

Hutchinson also noted in his piece that Along with control of the Senate, the need for a Republican advantage lies in the ability to fill judicial vacancies. The next elected president will possibly fill the vacancies of judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, orClarence Thomas. Donald Trump will certainly continue to nominate pro-Second Amendment judges, and if the Senate majority narrows, the nomination and confirmation of these judges could be stopped.

In contrast, Tuberville has openly stated his support for the Second Amendment. On his campaign website, Tuberville states, While we are fighting out-of-touch liberals to protect life and liberty, we must also stand up for the time-honored traditions we hold dear in Alabama. Being a sportsman has always been a part of my life. That is why I will always vote to protect and preserve our Second Amendment rights.

In an interview with the Daily Mountain Eagle, Tuberville said, A mental health plan is needed to address the mass shootings in the nation. He added it once had one. Now he says the plan is to release prisoners to the streets.

There is not a gun problem. It is a people problem, he said. Theres been guns here forever. Im not for any form or fashion of gun control. Theyre are not taking my guns, because what happens is they are not looking to take guns because you want to hunt and do some casual shooting or target practice. They want to take your guns away so they can control you. In this country, we cannot do that. The Second Amendment says we are allowed to bear arms.

The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) endorsed Tuberville over Jones. Dudley Brown, a NAGR-PAC chairman, made a statement to Yellowhammer News.Tommy Tuberville scored a perfect 100% on the NAGR survey and has pledged to support the Second Amendment and fight back against illegal gun grabs as a member of the U.S. Senate.

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Second amendment rights on the line with Doug Jones US Senate reelection bid - Alabama Today

This is the second in a two-part series on the origin of the United States Constitutions 2nd Amendment. For the first part, click here.

Every mass shooting in the United States sparks a conflagration of debates over gun rights and the Second Amendment. Each time, Second Amendment fundamentalists crusade against anti-gun violence activists, marching against regulations that they perceive as unjust limitations on their constitutional right to bear arms. Yet if Second Amendment fundamentalists understood that slavery and the white supremacy used to justify it were the root impulses behind their aversion to regulation, perhaps they would be compelled to recognize their flawed legal logic.

The institution of slavery likely determined the language of the amendment, passed in 1791. At that time, state militias were the primary agent of slave suppression. Because the original Constitution undermined states control of their militias, it potentially jeopardized the slave system. With the introduction of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment balanced state and federal control of state militias, securing slavery. However, far from ceasing to influence gun rights legislation, slaverys legacy has distorted modern interpretations of the amendment: the historical context produced the wording itself, but the imprints that slavery left on the American cultural fabric gave rise to modern fundamentalist interpretations.

One of the most important of these interpretations was canonized by the Supreme Court in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. In Justice Scalias majority opinion, he reasoned that the Second Amendment could be divided into one non-operative clause followed by three operative clauses. In short, he said that the first clause relating to a well regulated militia should have no bearing on the scope of the right to bear arms, ignoring the historical context.

Dismissing the significance of the militia clause opened the door for broader legal interpretations. Scalias opinion was also the first to give official credence to the notion that the amendment was included as a ward against tyranny. This has impeded regulation efforts, because it has become an asset to conservative legal arguments, allowing conservatives to disdain as a heretic anyone who suggests repealing the amendment.

It seems Scalia, an avowed originalist, decided to throw reverence for the Founders original intent, along with basic grammar rules, into the dustbin of irrelevance. By modern grammatical logic, the first clause would be an absolute clause, modifying the whole sentence. Of course, in 1788, commas were not always used to enforce grammatical rules but rather to indicate pauses for speaking. Still, even without the commas, the logic is the same: the Founders were educated in the classical tradition, and they would have recognized the first clause as an absolute ablative rhetorical device a grammatical structure in which the first few words dictate the meaning of the whole sentence. An honest consideration of grammar, then and now, renders Scalias conclusion bogus.

Even more damning is the fact that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was appalled by the misleading punctuation in the Second Amendment, and tried to rewrite it with one comma:

But Jefferson was too late: drafts of the Bill of Rights had already been sent to all of the state conventions, and sending a revision could have led to disastrous political drama. So the flawed version was adopted, obfuscating its meaning, and allowing lawmakers to make the seemingly reasonable argument that the clauses are independently significant.

Where does slavery come in? Scalias specious grammatical assumptions were born of political bias: the conservative fetishism for guns and unabridged Second Amendment rights formed the ideological wind that precipitated Scalias decision and those of other conservative judges.

That wind originally hails from the Antebellum South. Violence against slaves was the buttress of the slave system. Not only was this economically necessary, it was psychologically imperative to sustain the system. Moreover, the ever present threat of slave insurrection left slave owners in a perpetual state of insecurity, compelling them to resort to violence for the slightest infractions. Through violence, slave owners realized their white supremacist assumptions and justified the slave system, fortifying cultural biases that persist today, passed along through generations of prejudice and stifled progress.

Violence upheld the Southern system, not just the slave system. Indeed, the pseudo-feudalistic honour code that bound Southern aristocrats kindled a fetishization of weaponry, along with a permissive view of white slave owners right to bear arms in public.

One way in which this culture manifested was in duelling: white Southerners resorted to duelling to resolve controversy far more often than their Northern contemporaries; in fact, the practice had beenbanned in many Northern states. This enthusiastic embrace of violence also infested Southern legal culture. Modern open carry laws find their precedent in Antebellum Southern court rulings, which held that possessing a concealed weapon was dishonorable [sic] and led to unmanly assassinations.

These were the seeds of modern American gun culture. Of course, Northerners also bore arms to hunt and for other purposes, but the plantation system birthed a unique romanticization of violence in the South. Naturally, the western frontier spirit also romanticized gun culture; however, the rapid settlement of the west was stimulated by the expansion of slavery, as plantation agriculture quickly depleted soil, and slave owners required more territory to establish plantations. Moreover, the slave state coalition recognized that they could only maintain their political monopoly in Congress by establishing more slave states, leading them to encourage western settlement.

No wonder, then, that many pre-Civil War crises were a result of slave owners resisting efforts to abolish slavery in western territories. After the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction during the 1880s, many black codes and Jim Crow laws prevented African Americans from invoking their Second Amendment rights. Meanwhile, white people, with their constitutional right to bear arms, enthusiastically joined the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and reigned terror on Black communities.

As often in American history, hypocrisy and racism muddy the waters. During the 1960s, the Black Panthers movement would invoke the Second Amendment and open carry laws to defend their right to carry weapons to protect themselves against racists. In response, many states overturned open-carry laws and referred back to the militia clause supported by the NRA and other organizations that are today at the helm of the open carry movement. If their reversal wasnt hypocritical, perhaps it was out of respect for the Founders original intent: the amendment was originally a product of white supremacy, and it had always existed as a tool of oppression.

In time, the Black Panthers dissolved, and conservatives readopted the Second Amendment as a monument to libertarianism. Instead of an agent of the states right to oppress Black people, it became every Americans inalienable, nearly unlimited right to resist the overtures of big government. But the racist underpinnings did not disappear. Rather, they morphed into the spectre of big government, born from a reactionary backlash against government programs and social safety nets that were a direct result of the 1960s Civil Rights movements and which were predominantly intended to uplift marginalized communities.

This phantom likely influenced Scalias decision in 2008. His disregard for grammar and historical context was not a mischaracterization of the Second Amendment, it was a reaffirmation of its original purpose: to oppress Black Americans. The big government tyranny he referred to is a euphemism for a government that protects the rights of minorities. Likewise, the idea that every American has an inalienable, unlimited right to bear arms originates in part from a cultural allergy to armed Black people, developed in the Antebellum South and left untreated throughout American history. Even the superficiality of Americans affection for firearms can trace its origins to the Southern slave system and the culture of violence that kept it in place. The NRA, and other gun lobbyists who promote an unrestricted interpretation of the Second Amendment are not only impeding recognition of the amendments racist history: they are perpetuating racial injustice.

Scalia, and other conservative lawmakers who have gone even further than he did to advance an unlimited interpretation of the amendment, are either blind to the racism that influences their ideology, or content with venerating an artifact of slavery. From its racist political origins at the nations founding to racist legal interpretations throughout the 20th century, it remains to this day a haunting reminder of Americas dark past. Although the principle of gun rights may not be racist in itself, those who swear by the Second Amendment and denounce gun reform efforts must recognize that they are effectively defending its racist history. It is difficult to arrive at any other explanation: the laws of grammar and historical context render fundamentalist interpretations indefensible. Presented with these facts, lauding it as a token of American virtue must stem from willful ignorance or racist malfeasance.

Recent months have turned inches into yards as Americans have rushed to the streets, crying out for America to reckon with its racist original sin. Amid these convulsions, monuments have been toppled and false historical narratives have been dismantled. For too long, Second Amendment fundamentalists have succeeded in coating the amendment with a thick sheen of revolutionary tradition. Yet it is like any other monument, and it will prove as hollow as the empty sockets of bygone Confederate statues a reminder of the US misbegotten history and a landmark on the road to its overdue reckoning.

Featured Image:Holster Gun Flag by Alien Gear Holsters is licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

Edited by Chris Ciafro

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Opinion | Slavery Distorts Conservative Interpretations of the Second Amendment - The McGill International Review

by Charles C.W. Cooke - Saturday, August 29, 2020

Defenders of the right to keep and bear arms might be forgiven for wondering whether the U.S. Supreme Courts copy of the United States Constitution is missing a few pages.

It has been twelve years since the Court affirmed in D.C. v. Heller that the right of the people to keep and bear arms actually means the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and ten years since the court affirmed in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment applies to the states as well as to the federal governmentand yet, as valuable as those decisions are, the last decade has made it clear that the U.S. Supreme Court is not especially interested in ensuring that they are enforced. In June, the justices continued this unfortunate trend by denying certiorari on no fewer than ten Second Amendment cases. For now, then, the right will remain a mere abstraction to the nations network of courts.

This matters, as it is difficult to think of another right that has been so willfully ignored and abused by our lower-court judges. In case after case, panels at the state and circuit levels have elected either to pretend that Heller and McDonald never happened at all, or, alternatively, to parse their language so carefully as to render those cases meaningless. Despite this insubordinationand it is just that: insubordinationthe Court has done nothing.

This abdication of responsibility has not sat well with all of the justices. Teaming up first with Justices Scalia and Alito, and then with Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, Justice Clarence Thomas has taken to dissenting when the Court declines to take an important gun case. The Second Amendment, Thomas has complained, is a disfavored right in this Court, and its steadfast refusal to consider gun-related appeals stands in marked contrast to the Courts willingness to summarily reverse courts that disregard our other constitutional decisions. Ultimately, Thomas has concluded, the Courts unwillingness to step in has had the effect of relegating the Second Amendment to a second-class right.

In and of itself, the Courts refusal to do its job is a big problem: A right delayed, we are told, is a right denied. But, as time rolls on, it is hard not to agree with Justice Thomas when he suggests that the continued refusal to hear Second Amendment cases only enables this kind of defiance. In law, as elsewhere, human beings respond to incentives, and at present, the incentives all line up in the wrong direction. Why did the Fourth and Seventh Circuits ignore the plain language of Heller in upholding bans on the most commonly owned rifles in America? Why has the Ninth Circuit allowed California to turn the right to carry into a privilege for the well-connected? Why do New Jerseys flagrantly illegal gun laws still exist? Because the judges who heard those cases knew that the chance of their work being reviewed and overturned by the Supreme Court was vanishingly small, and they acted accordingly.

For those of us who believe that the U.S. Constitution should be read and upheld as it is written, it has proven extremely frustrating that the U.S. Supreme Court seems willing to involve itself in all sorts of areas that are not mentioned anywhere in the document, but seems unwilling to protect a right that is explicitly mentioned in the text. That most of Americas progress in restoring the Second Amendment has come from the people themselves is a blessing indeed; the story of the last three decades has been the story of legislatures, at the behest of voters, changing their laws to minimize restrictions on law-abiding gun owners. But we have a Constitution so that the people who are left behind have somewhere to appeal. For now, at least, the Court seems to have shut its doors on them.

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Parting Shot: The U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Give Us Our Freedom - America's 1st Freedom

August 30, 2020 1:08 PM

CNN

Posted: August 30, 2020 1:08 PM

Kevin Mathewson founded his militia, the Kenosha Guard, in June, as massive demonstrations against police brutality grew across the country, bringing with them spurts of violence.

A former alderman whos raising two children in the lakeside Wisconsin city, Mathewson said in an interview that he wanted to start a spark that let people know there are others out here that want to defend ourselves, our lives, our neighborhoods.

For weeks, the groups charge to defend the community reached only a few dozen followers online and mustered no real-world activity. Then on Sunday, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, seven times in the back and the epicenter of the summers reckoning over racial injustice shifted to Mathewsons backyard.

Over two nights of protest and unrest, with chants of Black Lives Matter and buildings burned to the ground, the Kenosha Guards online membership ballooned. On Tuesday, a renewed call to arms on Facebook from the group drew thousands of responses. Just before midnight, amid a jumble of protesters, law enforcement, armed citizens and citizen journalists out past a mandated curfew, a 17-year-old whod been standing guard outside a car dealership shot and killed two men, seriously injuring a third. Kyle Rittenhouse, the alleged teenage gunman, now faces multiple counts of homicide. His attorney says it was in self-defense.

While there is no indication that Rittenhouse was a member of the Kenosha Guard (Facebook has said that it has no evidence he was connected to the group online), the bloody escalation follows a striking emergence of gun-toting amateur groups at protests nationwide.

Driven by a patchwork of ideologies and enflamed by the Trump administrations often misleading messaging on far-left agitators, analysts say, the groups are fueling concern among law enforcement and hate group watchers that they could be the cause of more violence. Legal experts are also warning that the militias, with their embrace of high-powered weapons and lack of police training, are on shaky constitutional ground.

Law enforcement officers go through months of training in the use of force, de-escalation of force, defensive tactics, and the use of a firearm to defend themselves and the citizens they are sworn to protect, said Thomas OConnor, a retired FBI special agent who spent much of his career investigating domestic terrorism. A civilian with a firearm on the street during a volatile situation may have the legal right to have that weapon, but that does not always mean it is the wise decision.

Sometimes armed citizens at protests are welcomed by law enforcement, like at early protests in Kenosha where police were seen giving apparent militia members water and thanking them, but Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth has also said that the groups raise tensions.

Part of the problem with this group is they create confrontation, Beth said at a news conference Wednesday after Rittenhouses arrest. If I put out my wife with an AR-15 or my brother with a shotgun or whatever it would be walking through the streets, you guys would wonder what the heck is going on. That doesnt help us.

Many established militias, or civilian forces, have long aligned with anti-government causes in pockets of the US and groups like the Oath Keepers first became an antagonizing presence at protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Since April, according to researchers who track hate groups, more decentralized and organic outgrowths of the movement have increased in visibility, first at reopen rallies that challenged coronavirus shutdowns, and later at the site of racial justice demonstrations, where they say their patrols meant to deter criminal behavior have led to varying degrees of confrontation.

One survey, by social justice think tanks Political Research Associates and the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, documented 187 appearances of paramilitary and other far-right actors at rallies nationwide from late May to early July.

Armed citizens have squared off with Black Lives Matter protesters in Salt Lake City and stood outside of looted stores in Minneapolis. Hundreds of militia members and far-right group members gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, propelled by a threat of flag burning that was likely a hoax.

In Albuquerque, violence erupted and one person was shot when protesters calling for the removal of a statue of a controversial conquistador squared off with members of the New Mexico Civil Guard, a militia. The militia group denied the gunman was a member of the organization, but local leaders roundly criticized the armed group for inflaming tensions that led to the shooting.

Its the logical end of a years long path that weve been on of normalizing the idea that vigilante justice is not just justifiable but is necessary, said Howard Graves, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies hate groups. Its not an accident that this resulted in death that is whats going to happen based on what these groups envision themselves doing.

Shared among the variety of groups, which are mainly comprised of White men, is often a disdain for the Black Lives Matter movement and a misplaced emphasis on its ties to radical left-wing violence, though some have more explicit, extreme and at times racist ideologies, said Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism who monitors the groups activity online.

Many are also inspired by disinformation they read online about violence and organized looting campaigns tied into the Black Lives Matter movement. President Donald Trump and the leaders of the Justice Department have regularly aggrandized the role of the anarchist group Antifa in the summers unrest without providing much evidence.

Theres this disconnect between what is real on the ground and what people are reading on the internet, where everyone is sharing messages about George Soros paying for buses to go out into the towns and all these types of things that are totally not true, Friedfeld said, referring to the billionaire philanthropist at the center of many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

The Oath Keepers, which draws its members from the ranks of the military and law enforcement, and adherents to the Three Percenter militia movement organize to confront conspiracies about an overreaching federal government.

Members of the Boogaloo movement range in ideology from anarchists to White supremacists, but have proved to be some of the most violent extremists this summer. The FBI has arrested several this summer, including a pair charged in connection to the murder of a federal security guard at an Oakland, California, courthouse in May amid protests in the city. They have pleaded not guilty.

Mathewson, of the Kenosha guard, denied any ties to an ideological movement and said hes in favor of elements of police reform, like the installation of body cameras, which he advocated for in his time in city office. He said that a teenager like Rittenhouse who may not have been legally able to openly carry a rifle should not have come to Kenosha. Rittenhouse has been charged with illegal possession of a dangerous weapon while under the age of 18. He has not entered a plea to any charge against him.

To me, I guess I hoped it would be common sense that Im not looking for children to come out, Mathewson said.

Facebook later took down the Kenosha Guards pages on the website and admitted that it should have been removed earlier under the companys policy on dangerous groups. Mathewson told CNN he was disappointed in that decision.

While gun laws in 44 states make it legal to openly carry a long gun in public, armed citizens would generally not have a right to use deadly force while protecting someone elses business.

Their ability to band together as a militia and advocate for the use of force is also legally dubious, said Mary McCord, a former senior Justice Department official who is now the legal director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Despite language about a well-regulated Militia in the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has long said that the right to bear arms belongs to individuals alone, and does not prevent states from writing laws that bar the creation of citizen militias.

All 50 states now have similar laws or constitutional provisions that prohibit private military activity, according to McCord, and after the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, her Georgetown group won court orders that barred 23 individuals and organizations from returning to the city in groups of two or more with anything that could be used as a weapon at a rally.

In a letter sent Wednesday to law enforcement and political leaders in Kenosha, McCord pointed to provisions in Wisconsin law that prohibit private paramilitary and unauthorized law enforcement activity and offered to consult with them about how to protect public safety while preserving constitutional rights during public protests and demonstrations.

The Kenosha Guard were falsely assuming this function to protect property that they dont have, McCord said.

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Vigilante group activity on the rise, worrying law enforcement and watchdog groups - Channel3000.com - WISC-TV3