OPPOSITE!:

Should We Scrap the Second Amendment? (Michael Manville, September 18, 2002, Freezerbox)

The Second Amendment enjoys a rather exalted place in American jurisprudence precisely because, it seems, no one can agree on what it means. A few days before Charles Andy Williams sat in the dock awaiting judgment for his crimes, I was given an article, written by the economist Robert Solow, about the proper place for "intellectual ancestors." Solow was talking specifically about the land reformer Henry George, but in the article he took some time to discuss the downfall of Marxist economics. Whatever promise Marxism had, Solow said, fell apart when its original form, which as an innovative and highly learned form of social science inquiry, was replaced by a political movement. When that happened, the ideas of Marx himself stopped being a framework to apply to the still-moving world, and instead became considered incontrovertible truths. "Das Kapital," Marx's signature contribution to political economy, stopped being a useful starting point for the analysis of current events, and started being a political Bible. Marxist scholars, as a result, are often stuck making two arguments: that first, what they say is consistent with what is in "Das Kapital;" and (only secondly), that what they say has a bearing on the real world.

The parallel here is obvious. [...]

How appropriate is it for us to decide the question of weaponry using a two hundred year-old document? One doesn't often compare the problems of Constitutional law with those of Marxist economics, but the parallels are again strong. Marxism failed to accurately predict the impact that technology would have on the industrial world. The Founding Fathers, it could be said, failed to do the same with firearms.

Huh?
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 21, 2002 10:16 AM