How the NRA Rewrote the 2nd Amendment -- The Founders never intended to create unregulated guns

[sharedvalues]

This is a story from 2014 but bears reposting.

How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment
The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun. Today, millions believe they did. Here’s how it happened.
By MICHAEL WALDMAN May 19, 2014

Michael Waldman is president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. He is the author of The Second Amendment: A Biography.


“A fraud on the American public.” That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856

(Please, unless you have several eminent constitutional scholars (not mediocre conservative judges) to quote, please do not post your amateur or NRA or GOP arguments disagreeing with Burger and Waldman. No, this is not an argument from authority, this is relying on a synthesis of opinions by experts. And no, the Brennan Center is on our side and you will not smear them or Waldman.)

——-

If you believe the second amendment prevents gun bans, you’ve been lied to by gun CEOs that want to make money and don’t care if they get Americans kids killed.
No American should be a useful idiot for the gun lobby.

And remember that gun GOP money has bought Republican judges too. Scalia died on a rightwing billionaire gun junket, that if he were a regular federal employee would have been an illegal bribe.

Republicans love guns because gun identity politics gets people to vote for tax cuts for billionaires. That’s why billionaires fund the NRA.