Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bret Stephens Column Against the 2nd Amendment

I am posting this New York Times column in its entirety so we can see what are enemies are up to.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/guns-second-amendment-nra.html

I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.

From a law-and-order standpoint, more guns means more murder. “States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides,” noted one exhaustive 2013 study in the American Journal of Public Health.

From a personal-safety standpoint, more guns means less safety. The F.B.I. counted a total of 268 “justifiable homicides” by private citizens involving firearms in 2015; that is, felons killed in the course of committing a felony. Yet that same year, there were 489 “unintentional firearms deaths” in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Between 77 and 141 of those killed were children.

From a national-security standpoint, the Amendment’s suggestion that a “well-regulated militia” is “necessary to the security of a free State,” is quaint. The Minutemen that will deter Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are based in missile silos in Minot, N.D., not farmhouses in Lexington, Mass.

From a personal liberty standpoint, the idea that an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachments of government power is curious. The Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the New York draft riots of 1863, the coal miners’ rebellion of 1921, the Brink’s robbery of 1981 — does any serious conservative think of these as great moments in Second Amendment activism?

And now we have the relatively new and now ubiquitous “active shooter” phenomenon, something that remains extremely rare in the rest of the world. Conservatives often say that the right response to these horrors is to do more on the mental-health front. Yet by all accounts Stephen Paddock would not have raised an eyebrow with a mental-health professional before he murdered 58 people in Las Vegas last week.

What might have raised a red flag? I’m not the first pundit to point out that if a “Mohammad Paddock” had purchased dozens of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition and then checked himself into a suite at the Mandalay Bay with direct views to a nearby music festival, somebody at the local F.B.I. field office would have noticed.
Given all of this, why do liberals keep losing the gun control debate?

Maybe it’s because they argue their case badly and — let’s face it — in bad faith. Democratic politicians routinely profess their fidelity to the Second Amendment — or rather, “a nuanced reading” of it — with all the conviction of Barack Obama’s support for traditional marriage, circa 2008. People recognize lip service for what it is.

Then there are the endless liberal errors of fact. There is no “gun-show loophole” per se; it’s a private-sale loophole, in other words the right to sell your own stuff. The civilian AR-15 is not a true “assault rifle,” and banning such rifles would have little effect on the overall murder rate, since most homicides are committed with handguns. It’s not true that 40 percent of gun owners buy without a background check; the real number is closer to one-fifth.

The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.

Nor will it do to follow the “Australian model” of a gun buyback program, which has shown poor results in the United States and makes little sense in a country awash with hundreds of millions of weapons. Keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people is a sensible goal, but due process is still owed to the potentially insane. Background checks for private gun sales are another fine idea, though its effects on homicides will be negligible: guns recovered by police are rarely in the hands of their legal owners, a 2016 study found.
In fact, the more closely one looks at what passes for “common sense” gun laws, the more feckless they appear. Americans who claim to be outraged by gun crimes should want to do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts. They should want to change it fundamentally and permanently.
There is only one way to do this: Repeal the Second Amendment.

Repealing the Amendment may seem like political Mission Impossible today, but in the era of same-sex marriage it’s worth recalling that most great causes begin as improbable ones. Gun ownership should never be outlawed, just as it isn’t outlawed in Britain or Australia. But it doesn’t need a blanket Constitutional protection, either. The 46,445 murder victims killed by gunfire in the United States between 2012 and 2016 didn’t need to perish so that gun enthusiasts can go on fantasizing that “Red Dawn” is the fate that soon awaits us.

Donald Trump will likely get one more Supreme Court nomination, or two or three, before he leaves office, guaranteeing a pro-gun court for another generation. Expansive interpretations of the right to bear arms will be the law of the land — until the “right” itself ceases to be.

Some conservatives will insist that the Second Amendment is fundamental to the structure of American liberty. They will cite James Madison, who noted in the Federalist Papers that in Europe “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” America was supposed to be different, and better.

I wonder what Madison would have to say about that today, when more than twice as many Americans perished last year at the hands of their fellows as died in battle during the entire Revolutionary War. My guess: Take the guns—or at least the presumptive right to them—away. The true foundation of American exceptionalism should be our capacity for moral and constitutional renewal, not our instinct for self-destruction.

Without the 2nd Amendment , it's just the Bill of Suggestions.

Madison would be outraged by the sheer size and overreach of government, the number of laws and regulations limiting individual liberties, and the perpetual decay of freedom.

He’d be even more outraged that Americans have accepted the denial of their constitutional rights and allowed it to go on almost without challenge.

Not only wrong, wrong minded.

The guy is just wrong about the statistics. And the whole article is full of fallacies in the form of ad hominems and strawmen. And his conclusions are non sequiturs. He is either a schitty propagandist, or his audience are morons (written for lefties), or he was really drunk or high when he wrote this. I think more Americans have become more sophisticated in the past ten years, and this inane drivel doesn't work anymore, except in preaching to the unholy quire.

You would think that this writer would check facts before going to press. There are too many outright lies in the article to list. However, one I am totally familiar with is his last paragraph were he says more than twice the number of Americans were killed last year than in the Revolutionary War. Fact: No accurate numbers are known about how many were killed in the war. However, it is widely agreed that number is around 25,000. On average, 12,000 American are killed every year by firearms. That is all causes of firearms death, including accidents and self inflected death. According to Politifact and several other publications, in 2016, there were 11,876 deaths from all sources of firearms in America. Hardly the twice as many as during the total Revolutionary War as claimed.

I had to Google the name to see who he was. He remains a non entity to me, and his words are
irrelevant.

Anti gunners are the "end justifies the means", "win at all cost" crowd, they don`t care about facts, never have. They use the "gun deaths" argument, not because they care about the dead, but because they it will move the uninformed in their direction to further their agenda which is to get rid of guns. It is frustrating for me to see my fellow 2A supporters still talking about gun control as if it were actually about saving lives (not pointing at you ro, just generally speaking) saying we should compromise, there is no compromise, we give, they take. The anti`s aren`t the stupid fools many believe them to be, they are wise in the way of manipulation. As far as I`m concerned, not one more inch, but sadly, the 2A will die the death of 1000 cuts.....

I like the bill whittle speech give on the 2nd amendment. It was in a post on this site. I think the speech is from 2012.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn_WedT0pWk

Who is Bret Stephens?

Just another woman trapped in a man's body

Using one god given right to undermine another = commie

Its people like this who need to GTFO; its not a Bill of Picking and Choosing

Go to a country where you "feel" more secure....

Interestingly, in that same time frame, 2012-2016, the CDC claims there were 51,100 alcohol related car crash deaths. I've yet to see a liberal column, or any column, calling for banning of cars and alcohol. Guns kill people no more than alcohol and cars kill people.

He's just another misguided leftist malcontented liberal plying his trade in the NYT. His views are a prerequisite for being a national propagandist for the liberal MSM.

Stephens was born in New York City,[3] the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico.[4][5] His parents were both secular Jews. His paternal grandfather had changed the family surname from Ehrlich to Stephens (after poet James Stephens).[6] He was raised in Mexico City, where his father was born and worked. In his adolescence, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Massachusetts. Stephens received an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from the University of Chicago before earning a master's degree in comparative politics[7] at the London School of Economics

Wonder how much influence Bill Ayres had on him at the University of Chicago.

The usual suspect.

Stephens was born in New York City,[3] the son of Xenia and Charles J. Stephens, a former vice president of General Products, a chemical company in Mexico.[4][5] His parents were both secular Jews. His paternal grandfather had changed the family surname from Ehrlich to Stephens (after poet James Stephens).[6] He was raised in Mexico City, where his father was born and worked. In his adolescence, he attended boarding school at Middlesex School in Massachusetts. Stephens received an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from the University of Chicago before earning a master's degree in comparative politics[7] at the London School of Economics.

Let's give the guy credit where due. His assessment of the shortcomings of the liberal approach to gun control is right on:


And while I disagree strongly with his proposed solution of repealing the Second Amendment, at least it has the virtue of being honest and legal, rather than the Democrat's approach of infringing the amendment to death without the necessary political support required to repeal it.

What Bret Stephens and his fellow traveling comrades are really saying, and intend, is "Repeal the Second Amendment," and then have Congress pass a law banning all firearms. "Turn in your guns to us, you dirty, evil gun owners, or we will send our GESTAPO to kill you."

GESTAPO - Gun Elimination Service To Assure Perpetual Order.

(Acronym created by Leanwolf.)

Anyone who does not believe this knows nothing about "progressive" Democrats and their Marxist masters, nor about Human Nature. Irresistible power and complete control are their ultimate goals.

L.W.

At best, the writer is good with words, but poor with reason, logic and data - so his article amounts to very little and is to be ignored. And, if he is not poor with reason, logic and data - his article is an ideological propaganda piece of deciet and is to be derided.

Bret Stevens used to be a columnist for the Wall Street journal and many of his columns followed conservative themes. In 2016 he became a Never-Trumper and this year moved to the New York Times. No doubt the NYT wanted someone they could claim was a conservative who would bash Trump. Now Stevens appears to be really moving to the left. I'm sure his employer loves it.

BTW, the statistics he quotes are either incorrect or misleading.

Very true.