Dear progressive scholars,<\/p>\n
Please, I beg you, stop mouthing the same ridiculous and wrong platitudes about the Second Amendment and dismissing the right of the American people to \u201ckeep and bear arms.\u201d<\/p>\n
I suspect many of you are not as foolish as you make out on this issue. You know the actual truth, or at least suspect it, but have decided to parrot the pro-gun control party line instead.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a term for knowing the truth but intentionally substituting a whole other thing. It\u2019s called lying. In academia, that can lead to all sorts of bad outcomes, as you well know.<\/p>\n
Outside of academia, let me give you a specific example of where this is hurting your credibility.<\/p>\n
Paul Finkelman is a historian and president of Gratz College. He is the scholar who is most responsible for knocking<\/a> the late great US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall down a peg.<\/p>\n When the University of Illinois Chicago explained<\/a> that it was removing Marshall from the name of its law school because of \u201cthe newly discovered research regarding his role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, [and] pro-slavery jurisprudence,\u201d it was Finkelman\u2019s research that the school was talking about.<\/p>\n And I almost wrote him off completely.<\/p>\n Why? Because in doing basic due diligence, the Google pointed me to a news report<\/a> of this celebrated historian talking absolute nonsense about the Second Amendment.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Second Amendment is about the militia. It\u2019s about protecting the right of the states to have their own state militias if they feel they need it. It is not about the private ownership of firearms,\u201d Finkelman said in a speech at Ohio Northern University College of Law in 2018.<\/p>\n This was, of course, sophistry of the highest order. Was the Secondment Amendment about the right of the states to have their own militias? Yes. Was it about the right of a people to know that the newly constituted federal government had no right to take their guns. Yes again. But Finkelman wants us to take false dichotomies for $300, Alex.<\/p>\n This is not a new revelation.<\/p>\n The legal scholar Sanford Levinson is a liberal Democrat. He published<\/a> \u201cThe embarrassing Second Amendment,\u201d arguing from significant historical evidence that the framers did indeed acknowledge an individual right to bear arms, in Yale Law Review<\/em> way back in 1989.<\/p>\n In 2000, the Wilson Quarterly<\/em> reported<\/a> that \u201cAgainst their own liberal political inclinations, some legal scholars have reluctantly concluded that in its claim that the Second Amendment protects individual Americans\u2019 right to bear arms, the National Rifle Association is not far off target.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just contrarian liberals or glass-eating conservatives who have concluded this. There has been a huge amount of historical work, by scholars with wildly different political and philosophical commitments, on the history of the Second Amendment.<\/p>\n The \u201cindividual rights\u201d interpretation of the Second Amendment was an outgrowth of that historical rediscovery. It collectively led to the US Supreme Court\u2019s District of Columbia v. Heller<\/em> decision<\/a> in 2008, which held that firearms ownership was among other things an individual right.<\/p>\n Scholars, please hear me on this: When I hear historians such as Finkelman saying \u201cthey\u201d \u2013 the Supreme Court — \u201cthrew out 200 years of jurisprudence with that decision,\u201d my gut reaction is to say, \u201cYou\u2019re just not worth listening to, professor, about any subject. You\u2019re either lazy or you don\u2019t particularly care about the truth of it.\u201d<\/p>\n In the case of Finkelman\u2019s work on John Marshall\u2019s slaveholding, that would have been a mistake. He\u2019s proven his case that Marshall amassed a mini slave empire in a way that is publicly checkable and, moreover, substantially true. It shouldn\u2019t be written off simply because he is publicly checkable and substantially false on the subject of the Second Amendment.<\/p>\n What I wish Finkelman and so many professors, possibly including you, would understand is this: In this age of Way Too Much Information, trust is a ridiculously important sorting mechanism.<\/p>\n We face a deluge of claims on our attention, every day, and have to find some way to sift through that to get at good information.<\/p>\n Understand also that when we do read, we often do so through a hermeneutic of suspicion. If a source isn\u2019t credible in our eyes for some reason, that\u2019s one less claimant on our time to worry about.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m saying, my fine south-pawed friends, is this: Don\u2019t shoot your own credibility in the foot by making ridiculous claims about a cherished, historical right of the American people.<\/p>\n