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Opinion | Antonin Scalia was wrong about the meaning of ‘bear arms’

https:// www.washingtonpost.com /opinions/antonin-scalia-was-wrong-about-the-meaning-of-bear-arms/2018/05/21/9243ac66-5d11-11e8-b2b8-08a538d9dbd6_story.html
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23 comments

  • Opinion | Anton Scalia was a worthless stinking fat piece of shit who ignored reality to legislate his twisted vision from the bench. Glad he's fuckin dead.

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    • Look I hate the guy plenty, too, but this isn't exactly solid ground to start a discussion with. The article provides plenty of ground to talk about linguistics or at the very least not just hate on him. I think it's important to point out that he was not just a deplorable person, but that the very reasoning he used to argue in favor of his points was not based in reality.

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      • Agreed, sorry, it was just the format of the title made me want to format my personal opinion on him as well.

        That's just, like, your opinion, man.

        Also, just to point out:

        but that the very reasoning he used to argue in favor of his points was not based in reality.

        who ignored reality to legislate his twisted vision from the bench

        I feel like I covered that.

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  • Interesting article. I don't think the linguistic argument used in the OPED is going to sway anyone to support gun control.

    I think a lot of the efforts to implement gun control ignore the nature of the US. The country is large and in some areas people can not rely on quick police response or if the police can respond quickly, they can't be trusted to act in good faith.

    We certainly need some gun control to prevent those who are mentally ill or previously convicted of violent crimes from owning guns. Even processes for these, if put in place, must be appealable to ensure universal fair treatment. Additionally mandatory wait times would be great as well.

    I think bans of X gun because it's scary are non sensical because those bans are not going to win over any gun rights advocates to create a national consensus.

    The large majority of gun owners never commit a violent crime and should not be told to give them up because of the actions of a few.

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    • The gun control debate is the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since the election of Lincoln. It has singlehandedly ensured that the Democratic Party will never achieve practical dominance, funneling literally millions of single-issue voters into the GOP's arms. If American progressives were capable of seeing farther than the ends of their own noses, they would push to drop it from the Democratic platform. Two reasons for that:

      1. We'll rid our society of guns the same day we go back to the way things were before AI. In other words, when we find out how to put things back inside Pandora's box: it's never going to happen. Besides, the brief window in time where it was possible ended the very instant it became possible to manufacture guns at home on a prosumer-grade CNC machine and a 3D printer. You can't un-fuck that goat.

      2. People who have universal medical/vision/dental/mental health care, a social safety net, and a job that pays a fair wage generally don't care anywhere near as much about shooting people as desperate/poor/sick people do. It's idiotic to treat a sickness by ignoring the disease and treating the symptoms, it's like clearing your basement of black mold by putting a coat of paint over it. There's no way in hell I'll support disarming the working class, and certainly not when they're getting constantly fucked the way they are now.

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    • Banning guns with a high sustained rate of fire is not stupid. It's just politically convenient that some of them look scary.

      Many, but not most, Americans need guns. Almost none need guns that can accurately shoot dozens of rounds in a short span.

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      • The number of Americans that NEED guns is a vanishingly small percentage. Such a need should be easy to prove and easy to regulate.

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    • I don't think there's really any winning over those who are pro-gun honestly. Anyone capable of having an honest discussion about firearms access has kind of already agreed that things need serious reform, and those who see guns as an extension of their identity will never concede even the smallest point regardless of how nuanced an argument one makes.

      Consider; we've had multiple mass shootings of kindergartens in this country and all its done is make gun advocate types dig in their heels more. Instead of reconsidering their position they instead harass the parents of the victims. There's no changing those kinds of people, you have to work around them.

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  • Pack it up - This dude Barron laid out an opinion piece five years ago saying the Justice was wrong. Debate's over, laws go back on the books, Scalia will be impeached and removed.

    Seriously, the opinion page of WaPo is just Medium for connected people. I love reading the post for in-depth stories and to check on the local section for news of my home town, but I wouldn't even wrap fish with the Opinion section.

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  • Ultimately this feels weak. The prefatory clause is an explanation of why the right to bear arms is to be unrestricted. It isn’t a statement to say “the people should only have guns to serve in defense of the country”, it’s to support a militia should it be necessary. Everything else is just secondary to the “shall not be infringed” portion.

    The Heller decision did enumerate a right to self defense as part of the 2A, with the justification that is was common to own guns to defend one’s person and property. While it can be argued that we shouldn’t base law today on life in 1787(given issues we are seeing in LGBT rights erosion, namely), I don’t think that there’s any reason why right to self defense has diminished in importance since then.

    The Constitution is generally a statement of the limitations of the government, not the citizenry. I think that paints the tone of how the bill of rights should be taken.

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  • That Online Corpus of Founding Era American English seems like a pretty cool database. This is five years old (pre ChatGPT) and seems to have relied on manual search (which itself seems like a vast improvement). I wonder whether large language models are being built to assimilate the entire dataset to answer questions about "original meaning" nowadays and how close to useable they are. It would be even more compelling to have longitudinal versions that can identify when changes in meaning occurred. "Based on all existing written words, it didn't mean X at that time and that meaning first appeard 60 years later." Newspapers and legal rulings/documents seem like relatively convincing data sources that have been well curated and relevant to the task. Particularly since SCOTUS post-Scalia has become even more insistent about original meaning. I don't think it works well post-hoc but it will be interesting for these things to be interpreted when presented as arguments in new cases.

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  • 🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

    Click here to see the summary

    This is fairly clear from the text, which says: “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.”

    But in 2008, the Supreme Court found in District of Columbia v. Heller that the amendment instead supports an individual right to own a gun for any lawful purpose, a right that has nothing to do with military service.

    He explained in his opinion: “Although [‘bear arms’] implies that the carrying of the weapon is for the purpose of ‘offensive or defensive action,’ it in no way connotes participation in a structured military organization.

    A search of Brigham Young University’s new online Corpus of Founding Era American English, with more than 95,000 texts and 138 million words, yields 281 instances of the phrase “bear arms.” BYU’s Corpus of Early Modern English, with 40,000 texts and close to 1.3 billion words, shows 1,572 instances of the phrase.

    And in 1840, in an early right- ­to-bear-arms case, Tennessee Supreme Court Judge Nathan Green wrote: “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk and buffaloes, might carry his rifle every day, for forty years, and, yet, it would never be said of him, that he had borne arms, much less could it be said, that a private citizen bears arms, because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

    I mean, is that the way they talk?” Clement finally conceded that no, that was not the way they talked: “Well, I will grant you this, that ‘bear arms’ in its unmodified form is most naturally understood to have a military context.” Souter did not need to point out the obvious: “Bear arms” appears in its unmodified form in the Second Amendment.

    Saved 65% of original text.

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