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2008: A Beginning, and Not an End, to the 2nd Amendment Discussion among Democrats in the 21st Century
I am proud that we Americans have elected Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. I believe that his presidency is historic not only because he is the first African American president, but also due to the unique skills and background that he brings to bear on our numerous economic and political crises of the day. His stated positions on many concerns will clearly move us forward: from tax policy to healthcare to stewarding the environment, from race relations to foreign policy and jobs creation at home, Barack Obama earned my vote and enthusiasm and dollars and volunteerism by calmly presenting hopeful and clear-headed solutions for our nation.
Once I decided that Obama was the one for this election and this time in history, I did my darndest to see that he won at least my small corner of a very purplish (and safely red at the presidential level for the past few decades) state (North Carolina). I posted at DU in his favor, sent a small cash donation to the campaign, and spent a Saturday knocking on doors on behalf of Obama and regional Democrats. I know that one day of canvassing is small potatoes compared to what many DU’ers gave to this year's campaign, but it is what I could manage while keeping up both a small farm and full-time day job, and I am proud of my bit-part in this historic victory. The other small effort that I made for Barack Obama was a bumper sticker on my car: fortunately I was able to express exactly my own (hopeful, yet slightly ironic) sentiment thanks to a fellow DU’er: tmfun sent me a sticker on his dime that said “Bitter White Blue-Collar Gun Owner for Obama.” And that’s pretty much right. For while I try not to be constantly bitter (about the recent direction of this country, prospects for the future, etc), and it is perhaps arguable that I am truly blue collar (there are calluses on my hands from the farm work, but the farm is only possible thanks to my more cerebral day job), I am most definitely a gun owner, and a supporter of the whole Bill of Rights.
Obama’s election makes me hopeful about the prospects for we Americans reinvigorating our rights in general. The man has not only studied, but taught Constitutional Law, and he clung to many core American libertarian principles throughout the campaign at times when it might have been easier to go along with the Bush/Rumsfeld/Yoo consensus. His statements lead me to believe that we will curb the practices of torture, warrantless search, and suppression of speech that had flourished under the B*sh administration, beginning January 20, 2009 and onward. I look forward to this.
However, some DU’ers, and apparently also www.change.gov have said that Obama will be pursuing and supporting a past-failed and still-unconstitutional Democratic policy: further restrictions on the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans. For make no mistake, a renewed ‘assault weapons ban’ (hereafter AWB) and/or a closing of the ‘gun show loophole’ at the Federal level (both phrases in quotes as they are in themselves politically loaded and biased terms) are abrogations of our Constitutional rights. All-gun policy discussions and crime statistics aside, the fact of the matter is that most Americans (excepting Californians, New Yorkers, Illinoisans, Marylanders, and a few others) presently have the ability to easily purchase military-grade and high-capacity rifles, and under a new AWB, we would not.
I am opening this thread to state emphatically that my vote for Obama (and, I would wager, the votes of thousands of my neighbors and freedom-loving American compatriots across the country) was not a vote for Obama’s (nor the Democratic Party’s) past policy on firearms. Before the election, many of us here at DU expressed a historically-grounded and logically complete argument as to why the AWB is a failed policy, and why there is really no such thing a as gun show ‘loophole,’ but even the most ardent of us Democratic 2nd Amendment Supporters agreed that other issues trumped guns at this time in history. After eight years of B*sh assaults on Constitutional liberties (including ironically a horrendously unconstitutional confiscation of private firearms during the Federalized ‘response’ to Katrina in 2005), we agreed to get Obama elected, THEN revisit the 2nd Amendment stance within our party. For me, part of this willingness to briefly subordinate the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and vote the way I did was due to Obama’s geographic roots: as a Chicago politician it would have been political suicide for him to take any other stance on arms than he did. But now Obama is about to be inaugurated president of the whole United States, and what worked as campaign pander in Chicago is not at all what the Constitution calls for. Obama must subsume his past statements under his soon-to-be-taken oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Our Constitution was written by brave and visionary men as one of the best-enduring and truly comprehensive frameworks for liberty. Among the rights outlined by our Founding Fathers, the keeping an bearing of weapons suitable for militia use was one of the earliest and most emphatically outlined. Exactly how this right should be applied to the modern day is certainly a topic worthy of debate within the Democratic Party. I am willing to listen to arguments from Obama and any others who may want to narrow the interpretation of the Second Amendment,. Similarly, I will keep an open ear to such libertarian Democrats as might argue that the Constitutional definition of ‘arms’ as should include fully-automatic light machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, and other shoulder-deployed armaments. But my baseline stance is that the present reality of the hundreds of gun-control laws on the books already, coupled with a general right to bear arms as has been most recently upheld in the Heller Supreme Court decision, is a reasonable compromise, and that we should only depart from this middle ground with caution, and when supported by good historical evidence that the change does not violate our national principles, and empirical evidence that the change will also produce a greater public welfare than the costs it imposes upon our liberties.
In short, I am a southern, pro-Constitution Democrat, and I believe in expanding and defending my rights during the upcoming years. I share such views with prominent and successful nearby Senators as Jim Webb, and also with many more anonymous Democrats even closer to home. Just yesterday, I was talking with my town’s (Dem) Mayor about the wonderful electoral success we have had this November 4, and how hopeful we both are about the changes that are to come. She joked that one almost had to be accustomed to losing over the past fifteen years or so. In fact, she told me, she had been county Democratic chair back in the early ‘90’s, and of course therefore witnessed one of the worst recent setbacks to the Party in 1994. She expressed the hope that progress on jobs, the environment, healthcare, and transportation could really pick up steam now, and that the 2010 election would be more successful than the analogous 1994 election (i.e.- the first Congressional election after a Dem presidential victory), and I agreed. When I posited that Democrats had hopefully learned from the mistake of the past Assault Weapons Ban, and would no longer attempt to further restrict the Second Amendment, thus preserving the coalition that we had built here in the south, she heartily agreed. And I felt glad that I could rationally discuss such issues with someone as intelligent, cosmopolitan, and thoroughly Democratic as she, and that we shared some common ground. I assert that my views on the Second Amendment are both mainstream and thoroughly Democratic.
For all these reasons and more, I am hopeful for the Democratic Party. To any DU’ers who wish to argue for the reduction of our Second Amendment rights in the coming years, I say that our Party’s recent electoral victory is in no way a vindication of your perspective. Rather, we Democrats chose to collectively put forward our hopes for better relations among the races, more enlightened justice policies, fairer economic principles, and a more intelligent and peaceable foreign policy at the forefront, and elected Barack Obama our president for these reasons.
If anyone wishes to argue here at DU that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms needs to be narrowed, feel free to do so. However, in order to achieve any measure of success, you will need to counter the cogent and historically-grounded rationales of a majority of DU, especially those views expressed by gorfle, guntard, Fire_Medic_Dave, benEzra, beevul, Nabeshin, viginia mountainman, tmfun, jody, derby378, aikoaiko, krispos42 (to name a few cogent Constitutionalists) and many others (perhaps including, to a small extent, myself). There is something of a Second-Amendment-think-tank here in DU’s Gungeon, and the results of the debate that has raged here during recent years clearly highlights a pro-RKBA future for the Democratic Party, I believe.
-app
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