Lauren Boebert- The Founding Fathers LOVED Assault Weapons
The ADD version, in which I kinda get off track
Conservatives and Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes have long believed that the Second Amendment is necessary in case it becomes necessary for citizens to rise up against a tyrannical government. Never mind that citizens wouldn’t stand a chance against a government that has, among other things, nuclear weapons. Then again, logic and rational thinking have never been the strong suit of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes.
Before we get too far along, I thought it would be helpful to post the text of the Second Amendment, just so we all have a baseline to proceed from:
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.
Please note for the record that nowhere in the text is there any mention of tyrannical government, nuclear weapons, or flame throwers.
Besides being the most willfully misinterpreted 27 words in the English language, Proudly closed-minded Gun Control Foes have also conferred almost magical powers upon the Second Amendment. Of course, these powers don’t exist, except in the minds of those who are strict constructionists regarding the Constitution.
And by “strict constructionist,” I mean, “If it doesn’t say it in the text of the Constitution, the right doesn’t exist…unless we’re talking about the Second Amendment, which we can twist in whatever way we choose.”
Don’tcha just LOVE AmeriKKKa??
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) took on the argument made by January 6th insurrectionists that they were rebelling against a government that had stolen a Presidential election. Unfortunately for them, that was not the case, no matter what their fevered and overheated lizard brains were telling them.
Many Republicans in Congress agree with Representative Matt Gaetz that the Second Amendment “is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.”
This purported right to overthrow the government means that the people must enjoy access to weapons that are wholly unnecessary for hunting or self-defense, such as military-style assault weapons. As Representative Chip Roy, a Republican, argues, the Second Amendment was “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.”
Some champions of this insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment seem to glorify violence against public officials. Two weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection overran the U.S. Capitol, Representative Lauren Boebert declared that the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.”
Nothing in the Second Amendment either confers or implies “maintaining with the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.”
Nor was the Second Amendment “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.”
Ferchrissakes, y’all, the Second Amendment is only 27 poorly written words. You can only do so much with it, and what you trying to do is WAY out of bounds.
Finally, Rep. Boebert was correct (sort of) when she asserted that the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.”
Nowhere in the 27 words of the Second Amendment will you find the arguments of Reps. Gaetz, Roy, or Boebert. Their opinions aren’t spelled out or implied. Yesh, THEY’RE MAKING $#!% UP OUT OF THIN AIR. Transparently. And not very intelligently. I wouldn’t want any of these folks representing me if I was being tried on jaywalking charges. I’d probably end up getting the electric chair.
Statements such as these were irresponsible enough before Jan. 6. Today, such talk courts disaster. It valorizes the brutality of the worst insurrectionary domestic attack at the Capitol in U.S. history, freezes our ability to pass reasonable gun safety legislation and justifies even more deadly political violence. It is essential to reject the myth that frustrated citizens have a Second Amendment right to raise arms against the government — an outrageous betrayal of our Constitution.
A sitting Congressperson may pretend they know what they’re talking about, but in this case, none of the three quoted above appear to have a working knowledge of the Second Amendment. No wonder it’s the most willfully misinterpreted 27 words in the English Language.
Honestly, I’m surprised they can read, much tried to interpret the Second Amendment. That seems as if it would be WAY beyond their meager capabilities.
The sad part is that it only seems to be misinterpreted by Republicans, who appear to value gun rights over the rights of innocent people not to be massacred by a madman with an AR-15.
Let’s start with this basic reality check. Of the more than 900 people charged with crimes tied to Jan. 6 — including smashing windows, assaulting Capitol officers and conspiring to overthrow or interfere with the government — not a single charge has been dismissed by any federal (or state) court on the grounds that the Second Amendment or any other part of the Constitution gives them the right to engage in violent insurrection against the government.
The more than 900 charged with crimes can’t use the Second Amendment in their defense because no part of the Second Amendment is usable in their defense. Nothing in those 27 words provides for or even implies the defense of a violent insurrection against the federal government.
The 900 were part of a group of thousands who attempted to stage a violent coup and overthrow the government on January 6th, 2021. The Second Amendment provides for that in no shape, manner, or form.
Despite all this abundant repudiation of insurrection and rebellion in the body of the Constitution, some House Republicans still parrot National Rifle Association talking points and insist that the Second Amendment — in invisible ink — protects the right of private citizens to overthrow the government by force.
But nowhere did the framers of the Second Amendment profess that idea, much less embody it in the constitutional text, something that might give pause to self-proclaimed originalists and textualists spouting the theory. Nor did the Supreme Court ever hold during the Civil War that the Confederates had a right to overthrow the Union to defeat what they clearly saw as President Abraham Lincoln’s tyranny. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has emphasized the federal government’s power to enforce the law and quell insurrection.
Other parts of the Constitution deal with insurrections, and I’ll leave the discussion of that to lawyers and Constitutional scholars like Rep. Raskin, who’s far more qualified and intellectually nimble than I am on the topic.
What I do know is that too many denizens of the Far Right (what Jon Stewart used to call the residents of Bullshit Mountain) have attempted to make their name by attributing all sorts of magical powers to the Second Amendment. Truthfully, those powers are pretty limited. After all, you can only do so much with 27 poorly-written and ambiguous words.
Still, the icons of the Far Right know what they know, and they’ve somehow managed to convince the drooling, knuckle-dragging masses on their side that they have both Might AND Right and their side. Sorry, y’all, but repeating falsehoods repeatedly with passion and fervor doesn’t make those lies true. But, if you hear them often enough, they’ll eventually come to be accepted as the true.
It’s what for Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels called the “Big Lie.” And it still works today. As much as I hate to run the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, the Far Right is employing that time-proven strategy.
That’s how we got to January 6th.
The Supreme Court has criminalized private paramilitary groups (like the Oath Keepers and other militia groups), and all 50 states have laws forbidding private paramilitary groups. And yet, those same groups are the ones who masterminded the January 6th insurrection. Moreover, as Rep. Raskin points out, raising arms and levying war against the U.S. at some point can become treason under Article III of the Constitution. You can’t claim Second Amendment rights for that, silly wabbit.
That’s something called “sedition,” a word you may be hearing a lot of in the future.
If the American government were to engage in true tyranny — like slaughtering and oppressing the population — we the people would undoubtedly have a right to recite our grievances, proclaim our cause to the world, cut the ties that bind and engage in the kind of revolutionary struggle that the American colonists did. But it would be meaningless and silly to argue that it is the Constitution that granted us the right to do all that.
As the historian Garry Wills long ago explained: “A people can overthrow a government it considers unjust. But it is absurd to think that it does so by virtue of that unjust government’s own authority. The appeal to heaven is an appeal away from the earthly authority of the moment, not to that authority.”
The romantic but entirely fraudulent insurrectionary theory of our Constitution allows Mr. Trump’s followers to suggest that the mass destructive violence of Jan. 6 was something other than criminal and should be established as a model for right-wing politics in this century.
But the way we pursue real grievances about electoral disputes in America is through the law and the courts. Mr. Trump and his followers brought more than 50 lawsuits that were rejected by federal and state judges all across the land. Their team should have taken these losses as America’s debunking of their big lie and gone home.
Rep. Raskin is right, of course. Americans do have a mechanism for pursuing genuine grievances about elections and electoral disputes- and it’s not through spreading lies, propaganda, or inciting violent insurrection. There is the rule of lawas personified by the courts. And there’s the ballot box. But, as the Trump campaign found out, no matter how many spurious and fraudulent claims you file in court, the truth will win out.
Lawsuit after lawsuit was quashed, and in the end, something like 60+ lawsuits all reached the same conclusion. There was no fraud, and Joe Biden won the Presidency fair and square. Donald Trump lost, and that should’ve been the end of it.
You don’t get to stage a violent coup in America when you lose. That’s not how things work. Instead, you can raise grievances and even go to court with them. There they’ll be adjudicated, and a decision made, one with which all sides will have to live.
In the end, there’s a winner, and there’s a loser. That’s the way elections work. Losing an election is not evidence of a “tyrannical government.” It just means your guy received fewer votes than the other guy.
In American politics, there are winners and losers. That’s the unfortunate reality. If you can’t handle the possibility of losing, you shouldn’t be running. And if you lose, you don’t get to incite a violent insurrection. What’s more, you don’t get to use the Second Amendment as a defense because the most willfully misinterpreted 27 words in the English language say nothing about insurrection.
Sometimes when the counting ends, you receive fewer votes than the other guy. So you do what generations of politicians have done- grab a bottle of Scotch and drink yourself into a stupor. It won’t change the results, not will it make you feel better, but at least for a few hours you won’t give a damn.
Just watch out for that hangover when you meet the press the morning after.
Oh, and to those of you who thought I was going to use this opportunity to savage Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO)…well, sometimes it’s just a little to easy, knowhutimean? This time around, there wasn’t any challenge in it. Despair not, though. The time will come when her greatest hits will demand a retelling.
Stay tuned….