If principles of First Amendment still apply, principles of Second do, too

By David McElroy · January 29, 2013

The Second Amendment wasn’t written to protect hunters. It also wasn’t written just to protect the rights of people to defend their own property from thieves. It was written to make it clear that individuals had the right to own weapons to defend themselves against tyrannical governments.

For too many years, supporters of gun rights allowed the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association to define the arguments of the pro-gun side. As a result, many people are fixated on the historically inaccurate view that the Second Amendment is all about hunters and individual protection. Instead, that amendment is far more radical than the NRA was willing to state.

The Second Amendment was written by people who were very serious about the notion that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [individual liberty], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it….” The Second Amendment was written by people who had just finished fighting a revolution. It was intended as a guarantee that future Americans would have the ability to fight against a future government that had grown too powerful.

People on the Progressive left tell us that the Second Amendment wasn’t written for today. They say the amendment was written for a day in which weapons were far less powerful. For instance, CNN’s Piers Morgan recently tweeted, “The 2nd amendment was devised with muskets in mind, not high-powered handguns & assault rifles. Fact.” Let’s look briefly at his claim and its implications.

At the time the Second Amendment was written, muskets were the weapons used by individuals and by the government. There wasn’t any difference in the weapons the two could deploy. There wasn’t some high-powered musket technology that the government retained for its exclusive use. The people were on equal footing if it came time to revolt.

Today, government has exotic weaponry that individuals aren’t allowed to own, even if they could afford it. Try to buy a functioning tank or fighter jet if you don’t believe me. We’re supposed to trust them, not the other way around. Starting in the 1930s, it became almost impossible for individuals to own automatic weapons — commonly called machine guns — although governments can deploy them in any way they choose. Overall, it’s made it more and more difficult for individuals to compete with tyrannical government if they need to revolt.

The other issue that many people are overlooking is that they’re being inconsistent. Those who hate right guns and are eager to find a narrow reading of the Second Amendment love to take the most broad interpretation possible for the First Amendment. They tell us that the Second Amendment wasn’t written with modern technology in mind, but have they stopped to consider that the First Amendment wasn’t written with modern technology in mind, either?

The First Amendment refers to freedom of speech and of the press, among other things. Through various court decisions, that has been expanded far beyond the narrow text. Nobody says that government can stop television and Internet journalists from telling the truth simply because their technology is far more powerful than any press that was dreamed of when the words were written. We understand “speech” to be pretty much any personal expression. For instance, most of the porn that’s available today is covered by freedom of speech, even when there are no words involved.

The First Amendment wasn’t written with modern technology in mind, but we understand that the principles are what matter. We look to the intent of the people who wrote it and we understand that they intended to recognize the rights of individuals to have the maximum freedom to express themselves. We need to bring the same principles to bear on the reading of the Second Amendment.

You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to pretend that a constitution can limit a government, then you have to stick to what the text says and what it was understood to mean. Be consistent. Be intellectually honest. The First Amendment recognizes the freedom of individuals to express themselves in pretty much any way they want. The Second Amendment recognizes the freedom of individuals to have weapons that would allow them to revolt against their government.

If you’re still trying to live in the framework of the U.S. Constitution — because you believe that “limited government” is possible — be consistent in how you look at the freedoms of individuals. At least try. Or at least pretend to try.

And then when you finally figure out that there’s no such thing as limited government, let’s talk about how to go beyond the “one size fits all” system of today and set up something so that we can all pick our own rules. Those who’d like to live where nobody owns weapons are welcome to do so. Those who’d like to live where everyone is armed to the teeth is also welcome to do so. We need a system that recognizes the rights of people to do their own thing instead of being forced to obey rules handed down from above.

Nobody has the right to make up one set of rules and force them on all of us. Until enough people finally reach that conclusion — and quit trying to force everyone to agree with them — we’re going to be stuck with people who are selective in which freedoms they like and how intellectually honest they’re willing to be.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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