GVPanorama - Second Amendment Scholars, There’s New Work to Be Done
Bringing the Second Amendment into debates about domestic deployment of federal troops
While on the search for gun violence prevention news for our weekly Friday Finds feature, we often come across editorials, personal stories, or wider-lens articles that don’t necessarily fit into a current events window. With GVPanorama we highlight some of these thought-provoking pieces.
Today’s GVPanorama, from the Duke Center for Firearms Law, is a thorough overview of the basic arguments about the Second Amendment. It contrasts the ways legal scholars and historians have defined the debate, and covers the grey area in between those two standard approaches. The article further looks into the notion of a “citizen militia” and the Trump administration’s empowerment of professional militarized forces like ICE — and that scholars should continue to sharpen their arguments against this worrisome development that the authors of the Bill of Rights hoped to avoid.
“To speak in the roughest terms, legal scholars tend to take the questions that people are asking today and look for how people in the past answered those questions. Historians, on the other hand, do what they can to find out what questions people were asking at that time. Taking that approach does not provide clear answers to today’s questions about gun policy.”
Check out the full article here.
Top photo by Atlantic Ambience; via Pexels.
The Preamble to the Constitution includes the phrase “insure domestic tranquility”. I doubt any of the Founders would describe what is happening in these United States today as domestic tranquility!