November 10, 2007
Debating the Second Amendment
Clayton Cramer flew to Houston for a gun-control debate at a local college, taking on a professor who says that changing technology makes the Second Amendment obsolete at best, a dangerous and ill-advised "right" for 21st Century Americans.
Cramer disagrees.
During the debate at Houston Community College, Professor Rakove a couple of times made the claim that the Second Amendment is obsolete because it is "about the militia" which is pretty well gone, and also claimed that firearms technology has advanced so much that what might have made sense then didn't make sense now. In particular, he claimed that one person with an assault weapon has as much firepower as a company of soldiers in the 18th century.
This didn't sound quite right, but I settled for pointing out that "assault printing presses" are capable of printing hundreds of thousands of pages an hour today--perhaps freedom of the press is obsolete. The Internet and modern telecommunications, perhaps, make traditional warrant requirements obsolete, too, by the same reasoning.
If I had been feeling really cheeky, I might have suggested that in the era of suicide bombers, that "cruel and unusual punishment" provision might not make sense anymore--that perhaps we need the ability to inflict suffering on convicted terrorists that keeps them alive, and in excruciating pain, for many years as a discouragement to terrorist acts.
I like that last paragraph; perhaps nothing is more disingenuous than judges finding that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishments now includes criminal penalties that were sanctioned, widely known and commonly used in the thirteen colonies at the time the Bill of Rights were drafted and adopted.
Cramer expands on this point, using "The Constitution is a living, breathing document" argument to great advantage, in a way sure to make ACLU-types get the vapors.
3. The most destructive individual weapon system of the 18th century was a warship, which could, conceivably, cause hundreds of deaths if it attacked a major port like New York City. The most destructive individual weapon system of today against which we have to defend ourselves as a society would be a nuclear weapon, which would likely cause at least a hundred thousand deaths from direct effects, and radiation aftereffects. This is at least three, and perhaps four orders of magnitude more severe of a threat to American society. By the same reasoning, if the technological advancements of firearms justify calling the Second Amendment obsolete, the protections against unreasonable search and seizure are far more obsolete. Oh, and for the same reason--to find out if such a weapon has been smuggled in--the 24 nightmare--not just waterboarding, but techniques that everyone recognizes as torture could be justified by Rakove's logic.
Makes sense to me.
He uses the same order-of-magnitude argument to question the current applicability of the First Amendment to freedom of the press, given technological innovations, and, interestingly, uses the same argument to undercut the perception that firearms are unimaginably more dangerous that those used in the eighteenth century.
It's an interesting read, and it would have been nice to see and hear the debate.
Too bad the gun control advocate was opposed to the debate being recorded.
So much for the public's right to be informed, eh?
Posted by Mike Lief at November 10, 2007 07:30 AM
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