The Claptrap Propaganda About Guns in America

Strategic Culture – by Eric Zuesse

In the 2008 five-to-four majority Heller decision defining what the Second Amendment means, the US Supreme Court said that the Amendment’s “prefatory clause,” which stated the Amendment’s “purpose,” is irrelevant to understanding the Amendment, and must therefore be ignored when applying the Amendment to determine whether a given law has been passed which violates this Amendment. That Heller decision reversed 69 years of prior settled US Supreme Court rulings, and it basically ignored the key part of the Second Amendment itself — the Amendment’s very purpose — in order, basically, to promote gun-sales. Heller was the most pro-gun-sales ruling ever by the US Supreme Court, and it blatantly lied about the US Constitution, in order to do that. Here’s how:  

The entirety of the Second Amendment is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Heller decision used the following absurd excuse as its ‘justification’ for ignoring the Amendment’s very purpose:

“The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

That wasn’t actually “a purpose” but the purpose; and to ignore a law’s stated purpose is outrageous and should never be tolerated by any judge — especially a law that’s part of the Constitution itself, and most especially when the nation’s Supreme Court is perpetrating this atrocity against the entire nation, which is an act of treachery to do. Such judges virtually spit upon the Constitution they are obligated to protect. Instead of the 2nd Amendment’s stated purpose, the Court introduced its own, alleged, purpose, from the Court’s supposed investigation into the Amendment’s history — and they even lied about that. The Heller decision went on to assert that the Amendment’s purpose was a very different one from the stated purpose, and was a purpose which came from the “Antifederalists”: the Heller ruling said “The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia.” This supposed other ‘purpose’, which the five who signed the majority-decision accepted and which was supposedly inferred by them from ‘history’ instead of from the Founders who wrote the Constitution and wrote the 2nd Amendment, with its stated purpose, reigned for them, as if it were the ‘actual’ purpose of that Amendment.

However, only the Federalists had written the US Constitution. They did it during 1787-1791. They were opposed — not supported — by the Antifederalists. The Antifederalists opposed the Constitution. They were the minority, and so the Constitution became democratically passed as America’s Constitution. Only after the US Confederacy, of slave-states during the subsequent 1860s US Civil War rebellion against the Federal Government, did the anti-federalist position, of states-rights being supreme above the authority of the federal Government, become briefly re-established in those rebelling states, and so those states re-established, but only in these slave-states, much of the pre-American-Revolution system, against which the Founders had fought and won the Revolutionary War, though this time it was being applied without specific reliance upon the British monarchy and empire.

The new US Government — today’s US regime — is mainly the nationwide restoration of the Southern Confederacy, which US President Abraham Lincoln had temporarily defeated during the Civil War and thereby secured the progress of democracy in America, which has since ended. The Southern Confederacy was a local and successful antifederalism, which became defeated by the Union, which restored the federalism that had been established by the Founders. But the Union’s — and the Founders’ — victory has increasingly been reversed, through treacherous actions, such as the US Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case.

Unfortunately, Lincoln’s progressive and democratic victory is being successfully challenged and defeated by today’s American fascists, not only in the White House and Congress, but even on the US Supreme Court itself.

The Heller decision reflected the fundamental position of the Southern Confederacy (a feudalist society) (1861-1865) (to which America is returning in the modern, fascist or “corporationist” version), the position rejecting the US Constitution. These modern far-right people have gradually rewritten the US Constitution, to comport more with the views that prevailed in the slaveholding South.

The Heller decision is one of an uncounted number of decisions by the US Supreme Court which have re-authorized the US Government as imposing a dictatorship (such as America’s Founders had rebelled against and overthrown and replaced, by their instituting, through a Revolution, a limited democracy).

In fact, the Second Amendment makes very clear what its sole and exclusive purpose is: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” It’s stated clearly, right there. The US Supreme Court’s ‘interpretation’ is instead their insertion of a lie, which they claim to be based upon their own examination of ‘history’, from which they supposedly infer a different or another ‘purpose’ for the Amendment. Only a fool can respect such judges as they. As a matter of historical fact, the actual debate, when that Amendment was being considered for addition to the US Constitution, was itself based upon the implicit understanding that everyone had, regarding what the then-clear meaning was, of “a well regulated militia.” That then-universally-recognized meaning was: all physically capable adult males who are organized under the laws of the individual states and operating under their state’s laws as a military reserve force to be called up in emergency for battle, in case the US Congress, which is within the national (not in any state’s) Government, declares war, so as to defend the entire nation against a threatening aggressive foreign nation (such as, certainly, Britain then was, and still remained).

The meaning of “a well regulated militia” was, then, the exact opposite of what the fascist judge who wrote the Heller decision said: “to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms.” The 2nd Amendment had nothing to do with protecting the American people from an evil Congress. It was instituted to enable the entire federal Government to raise an army in a national emergency.

All existing state militias at that time were organized under the laws of the then-existing British colonies, which had just recently become states within the newly established US federation. In no instance were the militia’s individuals organized only under their own personal authority. And now that the US Constitution existed, those armed men were subordinate ultimately to the US federal Government, and not only to their respective state governments.

The US Supreme Court’s Heller ruling represented a dramatic reversal of the Court’s previous interpretation of the Second Amendment. In the 1939 United States v. Miller case, the Court had stated, in a unanimous decision (which was arbitrarily being overturned by the 2008 US Supreme Court’s 5 fascists in the Heller case), that the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of” the state militia, and that the Amendment “must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.” No other end, no other purpose, but only the stated one. This precedent wasn’t a bare majority of the Supreme Court speaking in the Miller case and to future American history; it was instead everyone on the Supreme Court, who were subsequently being reversed and nullified by the Heller decision’s bare majority in 2008.

Here was the Miller decision’s key passage:

The Constitution as originally adopted granted to the Congress power: ‘To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.’ USC.A.Const. art. 1, 8. With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces, the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.

The Militia which the States were expected to maintain and train is set in contrast with Troops which they [307 US 174, 179] were forbidden to keep without the consent of Congress. The sentiment of the time strongly disfavored standing armies[such as today’s US Department of ‘Defense’ provides, unConstitutionally]; the common view was that adequate defense of country and laws could be secured through the Militia: civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion.

The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense.

As is clear there, the purpose of the state militias was not only the “defense” against foreign invasions, but the state militias were organized also in order to put down “Insurrections,” such as the 2008 fascist US Supreme Court majority, in the Heller case, sought actually to encourage and assist (“Insurrection”). The Miller decision said — to the exact contrary, and with documentation that the Heller judges simply ignored — that the Founders’ reason for the Second Amendment was to enable “calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” The Heller fascists, to the exact contrary, wanted instead the encouragement of such far-right “Insurrections.” The Heller 5 were, actually, boldly raping the US Constitution. And apparently no one has noticed.

The Heller decision simply ignored the reason why state militias actually existed; the Heller decision said:

The adjective “well-regulated” implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training.

It actually implied and meant a great deal more than that. The 5 Heller judges simply ignored the power and authority under which the state militias operated, and to which the militias answered. Insofar as those 5 judges were concerned, these militias were self-organized, and maybe fighting together against the Government — an “Insurrection,” precisely such as the militias were instead intended to protect against.

Furthermore: the very idea that, as the Heller ruling said, a Constitutional provision’s “purpose … does not limit or expand the scope of… the operative clause,” is, itself, a blatant lie, which even people of low intelligence can easily recognize: its falseness is blatant enough so that the clearly fascist intent, of the 5 jurists who agreed there in asserting it, was flamingly obvious and outrageous. Nothing can be more obvious than the fact that a law’s purpose needs to be adhered-to by the entire legal system that is enforcing the law. (Otherwise, for what reason does the law even exist?) The law’s purpose is supposed to be the supreme guide to the law’s interpretation, application, and enforcement. But today’s US Supreme Court is instead dominated by outright traitors, who baldly deny this obvious and blatant fact. They did it right there. They don’t want the actual intent of the Founders to rule in this country.

Only in a dictatorship can such brazen lying from the nation’s highest court be tolerated so much so that none of the national press were pointing out each one of that decision’s brazen falsehoods (such as is now being done). The United States has thus been descending into a fantasyland, in which only fascist myths are publishable and publicly accepted as being more than the lies they are, by the ‘news’ media, and by the ‘expert’ juridical commentators (such as this one), all of whom in 2008 and afterward should be laughing-stocks today for accepting that ruling. Because, if they are not being ridiculed, then what hope is there that a Constitution will be adhered to, and honored, in anything like the sense that it was written for, and intended? Laughing-stocks, indeed! They either are that, or else there can’t even be a hope for democracy, at all.

With blazing boldness, the US Supreme Court in Heller overthrew the Founders, and reasserted the Southern Confederacy, more than a century after the South’s defeat in the Civil War. But that’s merely one of the many ways in which they’ve done this. And, apparently, nobody even cares.

Strategic Culture