One More Thought on our Second Amendment

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The thought coalesced, finally, on reading a post over at Grim’s Hall, a blog I strongly recommend on GPs.

A problem I’ve had with Bruen from the start, hanging its hat on historical tradition as it does, is that the opinion, thereby, accepts as constitutionally legitimate any weapon regulation, so long as it’s been historically long-standing.

The Second Amendment carries no such caveat or exception, though. Its bar on the government is universal and unequivocal: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The first attempt to regulate that right should have been ruled unconstitutional. It’s not too late today.

…7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.”

This seems to me a patently erroneous argument by the Sages of the Seventh Circuit. The Founders, along with, especially, those members of the first Congress who wrote the Second Amendment, along with the People who ratified it, were no strangers to innovation and to technological advancement. Yet no one in any of the courts that I’ve seen have addressed the premise that with that broad awareness, and against the backdrop of so many of the Continental Army’s and Navy’s large weapons systems employed in the just-concluded Revolutionary War were privately owned, the Amendment was written to be technologically agnostic.

That backdrop, those large weapon systems being privately owned, strikes me as the only valid historical tradition.

That’s the Point

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A couple of letter writers in Thursday’s WSJ are spot on.

One writes,

[The] vital principle of representation was brought into our Senate, which wasn’t simply a more select gathering than the House of Representatives, but also a gathering of the representatives of organized places (states), many far from each other, and no less divergent in culture and livelihood.
…
The Democratic Socialists of America’s proposals to abolish the Senate and concentrate power in the hands of the urban dole-masters amount to a formula for the dissolution of our country.

That is, indeed, the goal of the DSA. In addition to abolishing the Senate, they want to abolish our borders, defund—abolish—our local police forces, and tear down our prisons. That would most certainly destroy our nation.

Another writes,

Can DSA members take the Congressional Oath of Office honestly? They must “solemnly swear” that “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” It’s hard to see how an adherent to the DSA’s written platform could swear that earnestly, even believably.

In essence, the very first act of a DSA Congressman or Senator on his ascendancy to office would be to commit perjury during his swearing in.

The DSA’s platform can be read here. Understand, too, that the DSA’s platform is rapidly becoming the platform of the Progressive-Democratic Party, as the two continue to merge into each other.

Markets and Refs

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Greg Ip has a problem with Kevin Warsh’s so-far performance as the new Fed Chair.

Warsh’s analogy of the Fed simply calling balls and strikes, borrowed from future Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, doesn’t work. The Fed isn’t a neutral umpire, it is the most important player in the game.

I have a problem with Ip’s problem. He went on.

Markets respond not just to data but how they think the Fed will respond to data. Investors plug each new bit of information into the Fed’s assumed “reaction function,” which then spits out the appropriate interest rate.

That’s part of what needs to change: “markets”—which is to say investors and business management teams—need to respond to the actual economy, not what one or another arm of government (however independent or not that arm might be) is doing. They need to stop playing the ref so much and work from the economy a whole lot more. It’ll take a bit for them to learn that and then how to do that.

The Fed doesn’t have a role refereeing the markets, in any event. The Fed’s job is to maintain price stability and employment stability, which it does by setting its benchmarks at levels consistent with its long term inflation goal. Its role does not include manipulating the market’s response to those benchmark rate moves.

Still Just Love Taps

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In response to Iran’s “surprise” attacks on US forces in Jordan, the US answered with a powerful response.

US forces carried out a “heavy wave” of strikes, attacking dozens of targets, including military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities, said US Central Command after the strikes were completed. “The strikes aimed to further diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces, commercial shipping, and neighboring Gulf countries,” the command said.

And President Donald Trump (R):

We are going to be hitting them very hard because it’s our turn.

This is nothing but a few wholly inadequate love taps, though, to use Trump’s on phrase. His dislike for the killing and destruction war causes is well known, but here he’s letting it cloud his judgment.

The only way to diminish threats posed by Iran and its proxies to American forces is to destroy those threats’ physical capability to act on their enmity. If we know where those targets, those command centers, missile and drone facilities,… are, we need to hit and destroy all of them, in rapid sequence if not simultaneously, not just bang some of them in onesies and twosies strikes. The terrorists must be completely disarmed, as many of their—now IRGC—leadership killed as we can reach, and the surviving leadership blinded by eliminating their command centers, surveillance facilities, military radar systems.

Worse from Trump’s perspective (were he to get better advice from his civilian advisors), the tit-for-tat that is this turn-taking foolishness only runs up, for the mid- and long-term, the casualty count and the physical destruction.

It’s time to be serious. Hit Iran with continuous waves of strikes strong enough actually to be worthy of being called “heavy.” Diplomacy can easily and straightforwardly be carried out while these strikes are ongoing rather than during pauses, which are strongly beneficial to the terrorists: safe passage to a meeting site can easily be granted and enforced for Iranian decision makers’ travel.

This is a Mistake

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The Trump administration, in the person of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, has decided to ban American gain-of-function research on the rationale that the risks to public safety or national security are too great for the gains.

This is a mistake, especially on national security grounds and public safety.

Our enemies are enthusiastically conducting gain-of-function research, as demonstrated by the PRC’s work on the Wuhan Virus. We need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand our enemies’ products and how to counter them in the event they loose their bioweapons deliberately.

We also need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand the mechanisms by which viruses, and bacteria, that are currently unique to animals or plants might cross species lines and infect humans, and were they to cross over, what effects they would have on us. That’s how we’ll be able to deal rapidly with a pandemic from such a virus or bacterium. We did nothing about the influenza pandemic of a century ago and got away with it. We don’t know if we were lucky, and we don’t know whether we might have mitigated its effects had we known more. It’ll be the same with any future global—or national—epidemic if we’re deliberately responding in the blind.