The Two Key Words From the Second Amendment You Will Never Hear on Conservative Media

Alex GriffingMay 27th, 2022, 5:19 pm
 

As the gun control debate rages in the U.S. after the latest horrific massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, you can be all but certain that those advocating for gun rights, hardening soft targets, and upholding the Second Amendment are not going to actually read the text of the Second Amendment on-air or put it in print.

Why would Second Amendment absolutists skip over the actual language in the amendment? Because of the pesky second and third words in the text itself: “Well regulated.”

Here is the full text of the Second Amendment:

“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.”

A SnapStream search of cable news channels shows that since the murder of 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, the term “well regulated” has appeared when discussing the Second Amendment on both MSNBC and CNN, but not once on Fox News – not by an anchor, opinion host or guest.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell did a segment Wednesday night on the history of gun restrictions in the U.S. going back to the 1934 National Fire Arms Act, which outlawed the sub-machine guns that were popular with gangsters at the time.

O’Donnell played a clip from 1991 in which life-long Republican and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger called the “special interest groups’” interpretation of the Second Amendment one of the “greatest pieces of fraud” on the American public “that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

“If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there would not be any such thing as the Second Amendment,” Burger, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon told PBS’s News Hour in December 1991.

“Which says?” Asked the interviewer.

“That a well regulated militia being necessary for the defense of the state, it gives peoples rights to bear arms. This has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud — and I repeat the word fraud — on the American public, by special interest groups, that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” Burger said.

“Let’s look at those words,” he continued, actually reading the amendment on air. “There are only three lines of the amendment. A well regulated militia — if the militia which was going to be the state army, if it was going to be well regulated, why shouldn’t 16 or 17 or 18 year old and any other age persons not also be regulated in the use of arms? The way an automobile is regulated.”

“Fraud,” O’Donnell repeated. “The Republican Party has fully embraced a fraudulent interpretation of the Second Amendment to mean that the founders of this country intended for every 18 year old in Texas and everyone older than that to be able to buy a 21st-century version of a machine gun — an AR-15 — and nothing can be done to restrict that right in any way. None of the founders believed anything like that,” O’Donnell concluded.

Meanwhile, on Fox News, top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, said these words, “A person who is intent on committing violence is very hard to stop, under any circumstances. An act of Congress isn’t gonna do it, neither will gun control. There are more guns in this country than there are people, there are always have been.”

Carlson’s claim ignored the fact that after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004, mass shootings exploded in their frequency and the number of victims killed at any one time. The Financial Times created a graphic to illustrate this fact.

“However you feel about that fact, you can acknowledge we will never get rid of all those guns and the Constitution prohibits that and you would set off a Civil War if you tried to do it,” Carlson concluded.

Carlson’s all-or-nothing approach to gun rights clearly ignores those two keywords in the Second Amendment. In fact, of all the 27 amendments to the Constitution, the Second Amendment is the only one to include a call for regulation within its very wording. “Well regulated” appears nowhere else in the Bill of Rights or in the other 17 additional amendments.

The Supreme Court has also ruled and created precedent clearly stating the right to bear arms is not absolute.

NBC’s Cedric Alexander explained that “in 1939’s U.S. v. Miller, the Supreme Court decided that the ‘obvious purpose’ of the Second Amendment was to ‘assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of’ state militias and ‘must be interpreted and applied’ narrowly in that context.”

Alexander notes that U.S. v. Miller was all but nullified by 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, which ruled that every individual has the right to a firearm outside of militia service.

However, 2010’s McDonald v. Chicago “kept the door open to commonsense gun laws, including state and federal laws prohibiting felons and the mentally ill from possessing firearms and regulations prohibiting firearms inside public schools,” Alexander explains, adding:

In effect, the current Supreme Court position is that while the Second Amendment confers a foundational right, that right is not absolute.

So while leaders like Texas Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) will offer sound bites on conservative media, saying, “That’s the first thing the left has brought up obviously. Infringe on people’s Second Amendment rights,” remember the amendment itself both allows for and even calls for some infringements — also known as regulations.

Whether “well regulated” means an age limit, an assault weapons ban, background checks, licensing, magazine capacity limitations, a waiting period, or any other of the multitude of possible regulations out there, each is in fact part of the original intent of the founders – that our elected officials would regulate the weapons of war held by private citizens.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

Tags:
Alex Griffing - Senior Editor

Alex Griffing is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Send tips via email: alexanderg@mediaite.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alexgriffing