I will add that, as I think about it, the 2nd Amendment really means: we the Federal Government grant that you the States have the right to defend yourselves any you want, so we are not going to regulate anything.
An interesting corollary to this is that I think one could argue that the Constitution does NOT prevent STATES from making laws against guns. All it says is that the Federal Government can’t.
I have not made this case, but I think one could plausibly argue that the exact nature of gun laws was intended to reside in the same moral domain as laws about slavery, drugs, euthanasia, gay marriage, prostitution, gambling, alcohol and the like.
What this line of thought would lead to is the cessation of ALL Federal gun laws, and the elimination of the F from the ATF. It would allow Illinois to ban all guns, and Kentucky to make fully automatic machine guns available without a license.
2 replies on “Gun control, another framing”
Yes. As a states' rights advocate *and* a guns-rights advocate, it pains me to say that although I hate the gun laws that NY, CO and CA are passing, I fully support their right to do so.
As I think about it, I would eliminate the A and T as well, on my way to ending the DEA, and a number of other agencies, notably the DHS.
Clearly, regional drug problems exist, and there is no reason individual States could not form de facto law enforcement cooperatives to deal with drugs or guns, or whatever.
But the Federal Government should play no role in such enterprises. 30 years in to the drug war, it is difficult to see how things could be much worse.
Flipping this, using the same logic as regulating Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, could the Federal Government not ban all prostitution, and create a task force to make it happen? Could they not declare Nevada bordellos illegal, and send their "jack booted thugs" in to pull out women dressed in lingerie?
It's hard to see how any good person, seeing the logic of the thing, could fail to value States Rights, even after admitting slavery was indeed an evil thing.
The historically minded will wonder whether it was such a bad thing that it warranted 600,000 dead, and the destruction of a regional economy (hurting blacks the most) for a generations, and full emancipation only 100 years later.
Slavery was an inefficient economic institution. Jefferson and Washington barely scraped by. The cotton farmers of the South did well, but eventually would have needed machinery to process their crops anyway.
That's enough on that.