For years, North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Montandon has shilled for the problem gambling industry, er, neighborhood casinos and also served as a relible yes-man for the sprawl lobby. Naturally he thinks he should be governor.
But it turns out Montandon is also something of a constitutional scholar, as he demonstrates in an essay he wrote for his campaign blog:
Today, supporters of the second amendment fight daily against what they believe are attempts to take away arms. The reality is that fight has already been lost in the purpose for which the amendment was written. As soon as we began to allow a difference between the effectiveness of the weapons that the States (citizens) could have vs. the Federal government, the battle was lost. Citizens involved can continue to fight the small fights, over ammunition rationing, concealed vs. open carry, etc., but they are just distractions. They distract us from the big issue. While we may have the ability to defend ourselves against our own ilk gone awry, we have lost the ability to defend ourselves from a Federal government gone awry. Without that ability, we are simply left to stretch out the loss of our other rights through the exercise of our best diplomatic abilities.Seriously. How can Americans fend off an assault from all-gay armored infantry divisions led by Nancy Pelosi if they don't have weapons of the same "effectiveness" as the enemy, i.e., the military forces of the United States of America? Why are Americans outraged over a puny concern like "ammunition rationing" (!?) when big government has already trampled on the individual's Second Amendment right to mid-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads?
Montandon also writes that the Second Amendment is "crystal clear," and your lowly Gleaner envies the candidate's certainty. Frankly, sometimes it seems like the more I examine the nation's founding and contemplate what the framers were up to, the fuzzier things get. And the professionals are less help than one might hope. The nation's founding "involved processes of collective decision-making whose outcomes necessarily reflected a bewildering array of intentions and expectations, hopes and fears, genuine compromises and agreements to disagree," writes Jack Rakove in Original Meanings. And Rakove admonishes would-be diviners of the framers' "true intentions" to "never forget that it is a debate they are interpreting"
But Montandon's got it all figured out. And wouldn't you know? In contending that "the purpose for which the amendment was written" was to allow citizens to defend themselves "from a federal government gone awry," Montandon, unwittingly, perhaps, is embracing a militia-centric view of the amendment that at least brushes up against the interpretation favored here at Gleaner HQ.
That interpretation was more or less captured by Saul Cornell in A Well-Regulated Militia. The "original understanding" of the Second Amendment, Cornell writes, was as "a civic right that guaranteed that citizens would be able to keep and bear those arms needed to meet their legal obligation to participate in a well-regulated militia."
Alas, it wasn't long before state militias were supplanted by a federal army and, eventually, a national guard. And so the original, contextual intent of the Second Amendment (though not the contemporary bastardization of it) became a relic, just like the the one that comes after it (as you may have noticed, politicians don't scramble over each other vowing to protect our Third Amendment rights). Or as Richard Urviller and William Merkel put it in The Militia and the Right to Arms, the Second Amendment "fell silent."
But if Montandon wants to recover the original meaning as he evidently sees it, reestablish a vigorous, active and purposeful state militia capable of standing up to the U.S. military, and force able-bodied Nevada citizens to muster at Sunset Park whenever they're told with their own military assault rifles, shoulder-launched missiles and surface-to-air artillery, purchased at their own expense, well, that should liven up the campaign trail.
One suspects, however, that he's just launching a bunch of hard-edged pro-gun rhetoric in the hope that it will arouse locals with more guns than brains and supply a spark to a flat candidacy that has thus far excited exactly no one.
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One other smallish point about the framers and their firearms ...
The founders were politicians, not gods. Blindly assigning infallibility to things that were written more than two centuries ago is foolish (that goes for the Federalist essays, though I'll leave the debate about Hamilton's proto-authoritarianism for another day). The founders disagreed among themselves, they changed their minds, and whenever anyone (it's usually somebody from the right) starts yammering on about "the founders believed" this or "the framers said" that, m'kay, Which founder? When (for instance, during revolution or ratification)? And most devilishly of all, Why?
So dusting off a snippet of something some founder or other said or wrote to make a point is rarely if ever as conclusive as its practitioners might think. But what the hell, here's one anyway (cited from Cornell): As a Virginia legislator in 1785, James Madison proposed a bill on deer hunting that also included penalties for persons who "shall bear a gun out of his inclosed ground, unless whilst performing military duty."
Hmm. Sounds like gun control.
Madison "understood the difference between bearing a gun for personal use and for the common defense," Cornell writes. "The state clearly retained the right to regulate the use of firearms and differentiated between the level of restrictions that might be placed on bearing a gun and bearing arms."
Maybe Madison's views on regulating weapons had transformed (changing outlooks was not out of character for him) by the time he drafted the Second Amendment four years later.
Or perhaps the Second Amendment really wasn't intended to mean what today's gun rights enthusiasts think it means.
In any case, Montandon's gun worship may garner him a superior rating from the National Rifle Association. If Madison were running for office today, well, hard to say.
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