Gun Control, the NRA and the Second Amendment
This great piece by Jeff Cohen from seven years ago has lost little of its pertinence, what with the Supreme Kangaroo Court agreeing to hear a Second Amendment challenge to D.C.’s gun control laws. In particular, as Cohen says:
Media bias in favor of the NRA’s view of the Second Amendment (as protecting individual gun ownership) is so pervasive that even many gun-control supporters seem unaware that the federal high courts have never found a gun law to have violated the Second Amendment.
The Amendment is only 27 words: “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.” While the NRA emphasizes only the last 14 words, the U.S. Supreme Court and appeals courts have focused on “well-regulated militia” and “security of a free State” to rule that Second Amendment rights are reserved to states and their militias – nowadays, the National Guards.
The truth is — and one would hardly know it from the mass media — that since the Supreme Court’s unanimous Miller decision in 1939, all federal appeals courts, whether dominated by liberals or conservatives, have agreed that the Second Amendment does not confer gun rights on individuals. The NRA view, opposed even by such right-wing judges as Robert Bork, has been consistently rejected.
I know Cohen’s right that the pervasive belief in the NRA interpretation must come from the media — where else? As I recall — yes, I am old enough to remember this — as recently as the 1980′s, only gun nuts talked about the “Constitutional right to own a gun.” Now, even liberals seem to think it’s an established, if regrettable, fact. It isn’t. It’s nonsense. And like all manner of other prevailing nonsense, it’s about time it got exposed as such.
Stuff like this spreads from television and other media into the popular discourse and is then passed on through endless repetition. Why do people repeat what they hear on TV as if it is fact? Television is one of the worst sources of information. But this is what allows USTV (the U.S. T.V. culture zone) to perpetuate itself in its colossal ignorance, deliberately maintained through a one-way communication medium.