Joel Mathis

My conservative co-writer Ben Boychuk and our mutual conservative friend Julie Ponzi take turns this week trying to defend — or explain — Donald Trump's discussion of how " Second Amendment People " might try to undo the horrors of a Hillary Clinton presidency. (Yeah, that was several scandals ago, but sometimes these things are worth extended pondering.) First up, Ben : Hewitt asked Trump if he intended to incite violence against Clinton. “No, of course not, and people know that,” Trump replied. “We’re talking about the power of the voter. We’re talking about the tremendous power, and you understand this probably better than anybody, the power behind the Second Amendment, the strength behind the Second Amendment.”  That’s pretty deft. In the United States, with the exception of an unpleasant period between 1861 and 1865, we settle our political differences with ballots, not bullets. But the Second Amendment is a lot like the nuclear deterrent the Republican national

I believe in the right to self-defense. I believe that that right encompasses, to some extent, the right for individuals to bear arms — even though that's a particular right I personally choose not to exercise it. By recognizing that right I have, in recent years, focused my solutions to the gun-violence problem around the edges — solutions I thought might be effective in keeping guns out of the wrong hands (convicts, the mentally ill, domestic abusers, and so forth). I've even suggested expanding gun-safety classes. (Yes, I've also argued that guns, far from being the inanimate objects their defenders try to suggest they are, are uniquely efficient tools of death. It's possible to hold both ideas in my head.) It's meant nothing.  The latest mass shooting has changed my mind on one part of the issue, though. I now favor an assault weapons ban.  My conservative friends will be angry with me. Some will say "what do you mean by assault weapons?" They&

NRO's Charles CW Cooke: “It is not acceptable to treat the Second Amendment as if it is a second class or less important right, and it’s not acceptable to deprive individuals of it purely because they are under suspicion… In my view, the way to take someone’s rights is to convict them of something.” I hear this kind of thing a lot from my conservative friends, but it seems there's a kind of willful naiveté involved here. The reason our discussion of the Second Amendment is different is because the effects are different. As I've said a million times: The function of a gun is to kill. Other things that a gun is useful for — hunting, self-defense — are a byproduct of its function to kill. That differentiates it from other tools or inanimate objects that can also cause death: Yes, lots of people die in cars each year, but that's an accidental and unfortunate byproduct of the car's essential function to provide fast transportation — and, incidentally, we've

Two years ago, trying to find a radical solution to the gun violence problem in Philadelphia, I suggested that maybe it was time to stop clamping down on guns and time to start inculcating a culture of responsible gun ownership and usage. It was kind of a controversial idea.  While there are plenty of guns circulating in Philadelphia, there are also plenty of guns — per-capita, at least — in my home state of Kansas. Yet there are relatively few gun deaths there: As best I can tell, 9.9 gun deaths per 100,000 residents in Kansas , compared to 24.3 in Philadelphia . (The comparisons aren’t quite exact, but I think the disparity between those two numbers is probably in the neighborhood of correct.) Why?  One of the reasons, surely, is that cities are simply more violent places: Living cheek by jowl can produce short tempers; short tempers can produce violence.  But it’s also true that my rural friends have built a culture of gun safety that goes hand-in-hand with the culture of

Clive Crook, National Review, Monday : The ACLU’s stated mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Given its record, however, one would be forgiven for concluding that its copy of our charter is incomplete. Unfortunately, the ACLU appears to base its actions on the text of a tattered and torn document, from which the Second and Tenth Amendments are missing entirely , the Fourth was re-written in 1973, and the words “more or less” are appended to each paragraph along with an explicit invitation to interpret the document as broadly as humanly possible. Emphasis added. Randy LoBasso, Philadelphia Weekly, today : Here’s something you weren’t expecting: The ACLU, along with the law firm of McCausland Keen and Buckman have filed a federal lawsuit today against the City of Philadelphia on behalf of Mark Fiorino, a Lansdale resident who was allegedly harassed by Phil

Whenever a gun massacre happens—at Virginia Tech, say, or someplace else—we usually get a revival of the mostly neutered gun debate in this country. Some liberals decry lax gun laws, some conservatives suggest that if only everybody was armed you'd somehow see less gun violence. A new study from the Violence Policy Center suggests the conservative analysis is wrong: States with higher gun ownership rates and weak gun laws have the highest rates of gun death according to a new analysis by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) of just-released 2008 national data (the most recent available) from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The analysis reveals that the five states with the highest per capita gun death rates were Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Wyoming. Each of these states had a per capita gun death rate far exceeding the national per capita gun death rate of 10.38 per 100,000 for 2008. Each

Kevin Drum grouses about the California push by gun-rights advocates for "open carry" laws that let owners walk around with loaded firearms strapped to their side: Maybe victory always makes people eager for more more more. But why don't they just accept their victory and bask in it instead? Get Heller and McDonald enforced around the country and call it a day. None of them cared about carrying guns around in public twenty years ago, after all. And if there's any way to get a sympathetic public to turn against them, demanding the right to have armed posses of obsessive gun enthusiasts marching around in supermarkets and bars and school corridors sure seems like a good way to do it. I've written before that I don't think the Second Amendment is always and everywhere a good thing—if it were up to me, this would be one of those items to be decided at state-level, a la "laboratory of democracy" federalism. What's good for farmer in Kansas isn't

Regarding that gun confiscation story , let me note this tidbit near the end: Mary Catherine Roper, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania's Philadelphia office, said that the cases seem "pretty outrageous." "This idea of taking people's guns who are carrying them legally and arresting them is absurd," she said. "The police don't get to decide what is a crime - they only get to enforce what is a crime. "They are simply acting as vigilantes here and deciding they know better than the law." And: Roper said that citizens should remain wary of police who arrest people complying with the law and take their property, even if it is a gun. "The public may be saying, 'You're getting guns off the street,' " Roper said. "But there's got to come a point where you want your police, of all people, to respect the law. "This isn't technical, it's fundamental."

I'm pretty much on record that I find gun ownership the most ambiguous of all the civil rights. It's not that I dispute the meaning of the Second Amendment -- that debate, I think, is for all intents and purposes over -- but, let's be frank: Guns are instruments of violence. Period. I'm not at all certain that the Second Amendment is always and everywhere a good thing. But I like civil rights a whole bunch, and it seems to me that if I call on folks to defend them when they don't like it, I should do the same thing. That's why I find this story in the Philadelphia Daily News so disturbing: In the last two years, Philadelphia police have confiscated guns from at least nine men - including four security guards - who were carrying them legally, and only one of the guns has been returned, according to interviews with the men. Eight of the men said that they were detained by police - two for 18 hours each. Two were hospitalized for diabetic issues while in

This Ralph Reed -- remember him? -- post at The Corner , about Elena Kagan's radical tendencies, deserves a thorough fisking. But there's one point in particular that I found interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "dishonest." In response to questions during her confirmation as solicitor general, Kagan argued the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, like freedom of speech, enjoys “strong but not unlimited protection.” This is a dangerous view of the law when it leads to the creeping erosion of the Bill of Rights. Why is this dishonest? Because if you check what Kagan said at her solicitor general hearings, it's clear that she was citing DC vs. Heller , the 2008 case that upheld gun rights. This is a fuller and untruncated quote of what she said : Once again, there is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides

A friend points me to this Huffington Post articl e, where Sen. Lindsey Graham defends allowing people on terror watch lists to buy guns -- but doesn't want American citizens accused of terrorism to be given their criminal defense rights: New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's appeal to what he called "common sense" at a congressional hearing Wednesday morning failed to sway two Republican senators who said that giving the government the ability to block the purchase of guns by suspected terrorists would undermine the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. Graham described the bill as an instrument of those who would ban guns altogether. "We're talking about a constitutional right here," he said, explaining that he could not support a bill that would force "innocent Americans" to "pay the cost of going to court to get their gun rights back." Graham wasn't nearly as concerned about rights when he launched into a disq

Ben and Joel are joined by Joyce Lee Malcolm to discuss  McDonald v. Chicago , a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court, and the history of the right to bear arms. Malcolm is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. She is a historian and constitutional scholar. She is the author of seven books including  To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right  and  Guns and Violence: The English Experience .  Her work on the Second Amendment and the right to be armed has been widely cited in court opinions and legal literature including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 opinion,  District of Columbia v. Heller This coming week -- on May 5 -- she'll appear in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center  for a discussion about "RETHINKING THE SECOND AMENDMENT: THE CHICAGO GUN CASE AND THE FUTURE OF GUN RIGHTS." The event is 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and is free, but reservations required. Check  constitutioncenter.org  for details. CL