A lot of Second Amendment advocacy is predicated on the idea that gun owners will, at least in time, become gun voters. Most of us believe that and I’ve not really seen a whole lot that suggests that’s untrue.
However, we can’t help but remember that just because most become Second Amendment supporters, not all will. Further, there will be people who decide for whatever reason that they no longer support our right to keep and bear arms.
While I believe these people are wrong, they have every right to be wrong.
They also have a right to publish their wrong opinions at one of the most leftist, anti-gun websites out there in some apparent hope they’ll sway gun folks to become gun control fans, which is what just happened.
As a resident of Florida, I have carried a concealed firearm almost everywhere for years, everywhere, except where it’s specifically prohibited by law or by the policies of a specific business.
Hanging in my office is a 100% American-made Gadsden flag. For quite a while I voted exclusively for Republicans, including twice for former Donald Trump, and once for Ron DeSantis, in 2018. I was formerly a lifetime member of the NRA — until I renounced my membership. I used to own an AR-15.
The author is giving off his credentials knowing that there’s no way to really verify any of this unless you know him personally. Even then, we don’t actually know who he voted for or whether he was, in fact, a life member of the NRA, much less if he owned an AR-15.
If you’re getting “Hello, fellow kids” vibes off of this, just wait.
And I’m here to tell you that Second Amendment mythologies and revisionist history continue to result in needless firearm-related deaths, suffering and trauma. If law-abiding gun owners do not start publicly speaking up, we cannot expect to find solutions to our nation’s unacceptable levels of gun-related violence.
See, this is where any hopes of reaching me end.
Anytime someone is pushing gun control and talks about “Second Amendment mythologies and revisionist history,” you know they’re either full of it or drank the Kool-Aid.
What they’re pushing is the idea that the Second Amendment does not, in fact, protect an individual right but instead the right of the government to have guns. See, a lot of people look at the opening clause of the Second Amendment and argue that it means “the people” in this one instance in all of the Constitution actually means the militia which answers to state governors.
You know, part of the government.
It’s funny that they call opposition to this revisionist history because, well, that’s precisely what they’re doing.
They tend to argue that the idea that the Second Amendment protects an individual right is a newly created idea concocted relatively recently in American history.
Yet I don’t have to just tell you that this is a longstanding belief. Attorney Kostas Moros has a pretty long, ongoing thread on X (formerly Twitter) where he keeps posting examples showing just how longstanding this belief is. I won’t post all of them because it’s a long thread, but let’s start here and you can click and enjoy at your own convenience.
It's so amusing reading old history/law texts that clearly talk about the right to bear arms as an individual right, considering the antigun side pretends the 2A is a "militia right" and Scalia made up the individual right in Heller. This is from William Rawle. pic.twitter.com/clzWCwyAE4
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) May 9, 2022
So who is guilty of revisionist history here?
Honestly, when the author starts on such heavily flawed ground, there’s really little reason to dig deeper into their arguments from there.
He bought what the anti-gunners are selling. That’s his right. If he wants to be disarmed, he’s welcome to.
But he may want to take down that Gadsden Flag, because now he’s all about treading on people and no amount of spin is going to change that.
