Harvard students against rights

I had kind of decided to get out of the habit of responding to collegiate newspaper editorials that espouse citizen disarmament--it seems more sporting to limit my efforts to arguing with grown-ups. Then again, if I require that the opinions to which I respond exhibit a mature, sober thought process, I'll have to stop arguing with the Brady Bunch, the VPC, and the purveyors of just about every other bit of citizen disarmament advocacy I encounter. Besides, this editorial in the Harvard Crimson, while contemptible, is of a type I find particularly interesting.

The editorial, titled "Pulling the Trigger, The Second Amendment is an anachronism in need of repeal," argues (not surprisingly, given the title) for an end to the Constitutional guarantee of the fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms. The "reasoning" (being generous here) is weak enough that it's really not worth the time to bother debunking, but there is something about the editorial, staff's position for which I can muster some respect.

That respect is based on the fact that the authors, although statist herbivores, are at least honest. Rather than arguing that "the People" are really the National Guard (except everywhere else that term appears in the Bill of Rights), or that "shall not be infringed" poses no obstacle to any law that doesn't ban all firearms, they seem to acknowledge, at least tacitly, that restrictive gun laws will be unconstitutional as long as the Second Amendment exists. This, of course, is a vastly more respectable gambit than the Brady Bunch legal director misquoting the Second Amendment to remove any reference to "the People", or Rudy Giuliani claiming that the Second Amendment allows "limited gun control."

I'm seeing more and more of this (also here, here, and here), and call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I take it as a sign that we're winning. Whether it stems from pessimism (on the citizen disarmament advocates' side) about the outcome of DC v. Heller, or the growing body of respected legal scholarship that indicates that the Second Amendment means what is says, the debate seems to be shifting (very gradually) away from being about the clear meaning of the Second Amendment, to being about whether we should (in the words of Benjamin Wittes) "repeal the damn thing."

"Repeal the damn thing" if you can, tough guy.