Liberals and guns
Pro-Gun Progressive continues taking the pro-gun fight to the lefties:
Earlier this week I found out that Daily Kos favors the Second Amendment. The “big three” of liberal bloggers (DKos, Washington Monthly, and Talkingpointsmemo.com) haven’t really talked much about guns; I thought it’d be a good idea to see if Josh Marshall of TPM would go on record about self defense and the ever-important 2A. His site gets over 100K hits a day, and he’s quite the busy guy, so I was pretty flattered that he wrote back.
The response was mixed:
I don’t think the 2nd Amendment bars regulation of firearms. That’s for starters. I think it’s about state militias, etc. I also don’t think much of the NRA. However, I’d say I’m perfectly comfortable with what I guess you’d call a pro-gun stance. I think background checks are a good thing. Someone right out of a mental hospital shouldn’t be able to buy a gun. Felons shouldn’t be able to buy guns. Beside that, gun ownership is part of our culture. People can own as many as they want, as far as I’m concerned. I certainly don’t think gun control is an issue Democrats should be pushing.
The second amendment is not in any way about state militias. To think so is not really an inclination to support the right to bear arms. I also view it more as saying he has no issue with gun control but my party shouldn’t push it. I don’t find some of it particularly encouraging. All I see is that he is 1) wrong and 2) a hack about it by taking the politically expedient approach to it. Though the fact he takes no issue with people owning as many guns as they want is encouraging.
June 14th, 2006 at 12:22 am
I don’t think his stance is really as wishy-washy as you make it out to be. It’s basically the stance of someone who isn’t terribly passionate about the issue one way or the other. It may be hard for the SayUncles of the world to comprehend, but there are a whole lot of people that just don’t give much of a shit about guns. For a long time, I was one of them, and in many ways, I still am. It’s not in my top five issues for or against.
And while I get what you’re saying about 2A, if the framers didn’t want the amendment to be in any way about militias, they probably should have left out that bit about the “well-regulated militia.” I’m just saying. Gunnies tend to be strict constructionists, except when it comes to that first half of 2A, which they pretend doesn’t exist. 🙂 (And I contend this because, when pressed, most gunnies will argue that the meaning of the amendment would be utterly and completely unchanged if you deleted everything before the second comma — which begs the question of why the framers bothered to put it there, if it has no effective meaning.)