Instructor at Portland State Wants to Repeal the ‘Stupid’ 2nd Amendment
Sadly, there are probably many other people in academia who agree.
Dave Huber of the College Fix reports.
Portland State instructor: repeal ‘stupid’ 2nd Amendment
Tom H. Hastings teaches in the Conflict Resolution program at Portland State University. He also is the director of PeaceVoice, the website of which is probably what you’d expect: a massive conglomeration of race/class/gender articles.
Mr. Hastings has had it with gun violence, and, as such, wants the United States to ditch the Second Amendment.
Wisconsin Gazette.com reports:
This morning of Dec. 25, 2014, of the nine top stories from US Reuters, six were about shootings — four new ones and two about the national movement against shootings of citizens by police. This pandemic of sick violence, punctuated by mass killings of children, has gone on far, far too long. It is long past time to repeal the stupid Second Amendment.
The fate of the Second Amendment should have been sealed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that past rulings by their predecessors were wrong, that in fact the amendment that provided for a “well regulated militia” really guaranteed every individual the right to own a gun. Wow. That is an interesting reading of the English language. What the Supremes have done is to not only warp the meaning and make it into twisted law, but to further prohibit states and local governments from declaring their places free of legal guns. The conservative court once again rules against the power of states, a principle that used to be associated with darn liberals who wanted to make sure everyone had the right to vote, for example, even though they weren’t properly white enough. Now when a city or state wants to outlaw firearms, too bad. The conservatives took away their powers and rights in favor of Big Brother.
To say that Hastings’ knowledge of history (United States and legal) is wanting would be an understatement. For instance, the “principle” which imposes the Bill of Rights on the states, the Fourteenth Amendment — which Hastings lauds — is the very basis by which the Supreme Court held that an individual is constitutionally permitted to own a gun.
Portland State instructor: repeal ‘stupid’ 2nd Amendment (The College Fix)
Comments
Force Professor Hastings to live in a high-crime area, infested with drug addicts, gangsters, and racist practitioners of the “knockout game”.
Most people (on both side of the argument) don’t seem to understand the the right to arms does not exist because of the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment exists because of the right to arms. Eliminate the amendment, and you alter the right not one whit. They also do not understand the the Preamble to the BOR plainly states that the actual bar to government action in the case of citizens’ rights is not their enumeration in the BOR, but the lack of enumerated authority in the organic Constitution to infringe upon them by legislative fiat. In principle, the only way to infringe upon a citizen’s rights is as punishment for conviction of a crime – a judicial, not a legislative, process.
Additionally, the right to arms is defensible with other arguments and under other provisions of the Bill of Rights. For instance, the Declaration of Independence states as a founding principle a “right to life.” A right to life requires the right and means to defend one’s life, otherwise the right is meaningless.
What gets me most about people like this idiot professor is that they’re the first to condemn police violence, yet they advocate for civilian disarmament which would grant the government and its police forces a monopoly on lethal force. Brilliant. Just Brilliant.