Second Amendment backward; NYT attempts to horrify on supposed 'Right to Kill'

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About halfway into a chilling New York Times feature detailing how the "right to kill is growing" in the United States, investigative reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike McIntire drops a popular myth. The Constitution's text, he contends, "says nothing explicitly about an individual right to have a gun for everyday self-defense. Locating that right in the Constitution became the grand project of the modern gun lobby."

This claim is completely backward.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State," is the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, it announces a purpose but does not limit the individual right which can be found in the operative clause of amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The Second Amendment explicitly mentions individuals by using the words "the right of the people." You know how we know? It uses the same words in the First and Fourth Amendments, which have been found to protect individual rights, as well. "People" are individuals.

But McIntire also has the contemporary debate completely backward.

Injecting the "collective right" of gun ownership into the Constitution is the grand project of the modern gun-grabber. It is unsupported by history. The Minutemen were not asked to hand over their muskets by the Continental Congress after chasing the British back to Boston or by George Washington after the enemy surrendered at Yorktown. Individual ownership of firearms was omnipresent in colonial days — and beyond. Americans never even debated guns. Not in the 18th century. Not in the 19th century. And not for most of the 20th.

On the other hand, there's overwhelming evidence from nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation that self-defense and the individual right to bear arms were important to them.

Even before the revolution, John Adams, in his famous 1770 defense of Capt. Thomas Preston, one of the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre, argued that all men had the inherent right to defend themselves.

"Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority," Adams said in his opening statement, "I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defense, not for offence."

Adams, pointing to British common law, argued that self-defense was "the primary canon in the law of nature." This sentiment litters the founding generation's writing and speeches.

James Madison was initially skeptical of the Bill of Rights because he believed freedoms were self-evident. The only question was whether writing them down would needlessly narrow their scope, as McIntire is attempting.

Yes, the founders also wanted militias over standing armies. Which means they wanted you to own weaponry that would scare tyrants. To the founding generation, "well regulated" meant well-trained, not government regulation.

McIntire's piece, culled from his book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, mainly concerns itself with the "distinctly American tradition" of defending yourself and property — though he says it like it's a bad thing. The "stand your ground" doctrine, traditionally, he argues, allowed Americans to "defend yourself but not your stuff."

Well, Roger Sherman, the only person to sign the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, disagreed. He maintained that "the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made." And he was far from the only one.

Still, the "castle doctrine" and "duty to retreat" are merely "abstractions" that increasingly benefit gun owners, McIntire writes, to justify homicide.

"Tennessee recently enacted a law making it easier legally to shoot someone who's stealing the lawnmower, bicycle or power tools you left in your garden shed," McIntire writes. "… Under the expanded provision, you can kill to protect your belongings as long as you believe the interloper is a threat to you or others."

Now, I've not won any Pulitzer Prizes, but it's clear to me that the second part of the contention severely undermines the first. If you believe someone is a threat to you or others, you have a moral obligation to act and legal reason to do whatever else the criminal is doing. Tennessee merely clarified the law.

McIntire correctly notes that the right to defend yourself with lethal force is an American tradition. (Huzzah.) Most European laws require proportionality. So, for instance, if an unarmed burglar enters a house in which your wife and children are sleeping upstairs, you can't escalate to deadly force even if he won't leave. I guess you're supposed to bore into the mind of the intruder to figure out if he is armed, just there to steal your lawnmower.

When not conjuring up mythical historical restrictions on your rights, control activists are endlessly conjuring up easily debunked statistics.

McIntire, who concerns himself with the history of castle doctrine, relies on a hyperlink to a Christian Science Monitor piece by reporter Patrik Jonsson to make the case that "as stand-your-ground laws expand, so do firearm fatalities."

Jonsson, whose piece also teems with historical falsehoods, points to a 2022 study that found around an 8% increase in firearm murders in states with stand-your-ground laws. "Alabama, Missouri, and Florida — all states with these laws — have seen homicide rates rise by about 30% in recent years," he writes.

The study in question conveniently measures homicides at the height of the "recent" pandemic spike. But Florida's law dates to 2005, when the murder rate was 6.2 per 100,000 people. Today, it is 3.7 per 100,000. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the homicide rate has fallen around 40% since stand-your-ground laws have been passed?

Missouri passed its law in 2016 when its homicide rate was 8.8 per 100,000 residents. It is at 7.8 per 100,000 residents. Alabama is the only one of those three states that has a slightly higher rate.

Then again, states such as Arkansas and Ohio both passed stand-your-ground laws, removing the duty to retreat in public, in 2021. In "recent years," Arkansas's homicide rate has dropped over 55%. Ohio's rate fell over 30%.

Idaho passed a stand-your-ground law with no legal duty to retreat only last year. The state has one of the lowest murder rates in the nation. Maryland does not have a stand-your-ground law, and that state's case law imposes a duty to retreat on the victim, yet it has one of the highest homicide rates in the country.

It's almost as if one of these things has nothing to do with the other.

It's easy to uphold your priors when you expediently narrow your window of evidence and ignore all counterevidence. This is the norm among gun-grabbers.

I've noticed a slew of pieces scaremongering over stand-your-ground laws over the past year. Anti-gun organizations typically launch these campaigns, and the media typically regurgitate them with a patina of journalistic verbiage.

We all have a moral and civic duty to avoid deadly violence if possible. Every concealed-carry class instructor will tell you that gun ownership comes with an immense responsibility. Then again, if media and activists spent half as much time warning criminals that illegally entering the house of a gun owner was tantamount to a suicide attempt as they do distorting history and statistics, they might actually save some lives.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

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