The 2nd Amendment and Killing Kids

From the Archive: The comedy team Key and Peele cut through the Rights Second Amendment madness best in a bit in which Peele travels back in time with Uzis to confront its authors over their careless wording. But there is nothing funny about piles of dead kids, victims of bad history, as Robert Parry wrote a year ago.

By Robert Parry (Originally published on Dec. 15, 2012, a day after the Newtown massacre)

The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of Americas Founders and intuiting what was their original intent in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendments right to bear arms. But, surely, James Madison and the others werent envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children ina movie theater or a shopping mall or now an elementary school.

Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the right to bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.

President James Madison, a principal author of the Bill of Rights..

The Second Amendment reads: 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. Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure security, not undermine it.

The massacre of20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of security. And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind.

However, over the past several decades, self-interested right-wing scholarship has sought to reinvent the Framers as free-market, government-hating ideologues, though the key authors of the U.S. Constitution people like James Madison and George Washington could best be described as pragmatic nationalists who favored effective governance.

In 1787, led by Madison and Washington, the Constitutional Convention scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which had enshrined the states as sovereign and had made the federal government a league of friendship with few powers.

What happened behind closed doors in Philadelphia was a reversal of thesystem that governed the United States from 1777 to 1787. The laws of the federal government were made supreme and its powers were dramatically strengthened, so much so that a movement of Anti-Federalists fought bitterly to block ratification.

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The 2nd Amendment and Killing Kids