All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

The Second Amendment and “Weapons of War”

AR-15 rifles showing their configurations with...
AR-15 rifles showing their configurations with different upper receivers (stripped-down lower receiver is visible at bottom) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Put simply,” writes Judge Robert King of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, “we have no power to extend Second Amendment protections to weapons of war.” In Kolbe v. Hogan, the court upheld Maryland’s ban on “assault weapons,” also known as rifles that look scary to people who know nothing about guns.

As talk radio host Darryl W. Perry of Free Talk Live notes, King’s perversely broad statement would cover a ban on the possession of rocks:

“And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him …” — 1st Samuel, Chapter 17

King also displays a poor grasp of history. No judicial power is required to “extend” the Second Amendment to cover weapons of war, because they’re precisely what it was intended to cover in the first place.

The Second Amendment was ratified only a few years after a citizen army — many of its soldiers armed, at least at first, with weapons brought from home — defeated the most fearsome professional military machine in the history of the world, the army of a global empire.

The express purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee the continued maintenance of an armed populace. In fact,  the Second Militia Act of 1792 legally required  every adult able-bodied white American male to own and maintain “weapons of war” (a musket or rifle, bayonet, powder and bullets) just in case the militia had to be called out.

Even in the 1939 case usually cited to justify victim disarmament (“gun control”) laws, US v. Miller, the US Supreme Court held that the reason Jack Miller’s short-barreled shotgun could be banned was that it WASN’T a weapon of war: “[I]t is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”

Yes, you read that right: The Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies ONLY to “weapons of war.” I think that’s too narrow myself, but at least it comes at the matter from the correct historical perspective.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is best understood in terms of a quote falsely attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese navy at the beginning of World War Two: “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

Shame on King and the 4th Circuit for failing to uphold the plain meaning of “shall not be infringed.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Target of the “Border Adjustment Tax” is You

Federal_Debt-VS-Taxes
Federal_Debt-VS-Taxes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“[O]n life support,” says US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) of the “Border Adjustment Tax,” proposed during last year’s GOP presidential primaries  by US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and backed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI). If the idea is indeed dead, American workers and consumers should heave a sigh of relief. It’s a very bad idea, in more ways than one.

The BAT is promoted as a “tax on imports.” Which, I guess, is technically accurate, but doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s not just a tax on  imports. It’s a tax on people who buy the imports. That is, it’s a tax on you.

For obvious reasons, retail merchants don’t like the idea very much. It would force them to raise prices on lots of items. Which is the same reason you shouldn’t like it, unless you like paying more for stuff than you pay now.

For equally obvious reasons, some American manufacturers love  the Border Adjustment Tax. Every extra dollar you have to pay in tax for something made abroad is a dollar they don’t have to find ways to cut from their manufacturing costs to compete on price. For them it’s the equivalent of running a race in which their competitors have to carry backpacks full of lead and they don’t.

The politicians behind the idea love it because it would let them give their business cronies a huge tax cut — reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% — without reducing government spending.

Ultimately American consumers pay both types of taxes, of course, but the BAT would shift the burden to customers who buy goods made in China, Mexico, South Korea, Pakistan and so on, hurting retailers who sell those things in order to subsidize American manufacturers at everyone else’s expense.

All this talk of “tax reform” is just smoke and mirrors, a way of disguising the reality that every dollar government spends has to come from somewhere, and that that somewhere is taxation. Borrowing money is just promising to tax later. Inflating the currency is just a hidden tax.

Shifting the tax burden around with tricks like a “Border Adjustment Tax” isn’t real reform, it’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The first step in any meaningful reform is for Congress to commit to spending no more money than it takes in. The second is for it to start taking in less.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Florida’s Shenanigans Make a Great Case for (Re-)Separation of Ballot and State

Ballot

In mid-February, Florida’s Division of Elections stripped the state’s third largest political party of its official recognition. Tallahassee’s excuse for ending the Independent Party’s ability to put candidates on the ballot and disenfranchising its 260,000-plus registered voters? The party organization’s 2014 financial audit wasn’t conducted by a Certified Public Accountant.

Florida law doesn’t specify any such CPA requirement, and even if it did this dirty trick would exemplify the real purpose of so-called “ballot access laws”: To safeguard the Republican and Democratic Parties’ near-complete control of American elections.

In every election cycle, “third” parties shell out big bucks just to be allowed to present their candidates to voters. According to Nicholas J. Sarwark, chair of the Libertarian Party’s national committee, the party, its state affiliates, and its presidential campaign spent more than $750,000 on ballot access — that is, on jumping through bureaucratic hoops instead of on getting its message out — in 2016.

It shouldn’t be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. And it wasn’t always that way.

Some histories of the Civil War era mention that Abraham Lincoln was “not even on the ballot” in several southern states. That’s true. None of the other presidential candidates were “on the ballot” either, nor was Lincoln “on the ballot” in the northern states. There was no such thing as “on the ballot.”

American ballot access laws only date back to the 1880s. Before that, voters cast ballots in one of three ways: They received ballots from and printed by their political parties of choice, they wrote out their own ballots by hand, or, if they couldn’t write, they verbally dictated their choices to election officials who wrote down those choices for them in the presence of witnesses.

Once state governments overthrew those methods in favor of “Australian” ballots — standardized ballots printed by the governments themselves — the next step was feigned concern over  “voter confusion” from “too many” candidates, quickly followed by the erection of barriers to “solve” the “problem.”

These days ballot access laws are so many, so varied and so confusing that there’s an entire industry centered around helping parties and candidates interpret and meet the guidelines. There’s even a dedicated publication, Ballot Access News, dedicated to sorting out ballot access laws on a continuing basis.

And, once again, it’s important to keep in mind the real purpose of these laws: To ensure that, with rare exceptions, only Republicans and Democrats are elected to public office. Or, to put it more plainly, to protect those parties from the risks of free and fair elections.

The states and the establishment parties have proven, over and over, that they can’t be trusted with control of ballot access. Time to take that control away.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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