Having Been Duck Hunting with Cheney, Scalia Should Know Better
“A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.â€
This is the text of the 2nd Amendment, and it preserves the right of the States, against actions of the federal government, to organize and maintain an armed militia. The 2nd is an oddity among the other provisions in the Bill of Rights; while the other Amendments have been held by the Supreme Court to apply to the states, the 2nd has not.* This inconsistency was never advocated by the founders. It was the result of an ad hoc process that began when the Civil War Amendments augmented federalism (the doctrine that respects the balance between State sovereignty and federal enumerated (limited) powers). Before the 14th Amendment, the Bill of Rights bound only the federal government; they were “collective rights†of the citizens of States against federal oppression. The States, pursuant to their police power, were free to act upon their citizens, limited only by their own constitutions. The status of the 2nd Amendment is a jurisprudential inconsistency, but it draws an intuitive line between the individual liberties of speech, thought, privacy, seizure, etc. and state collective rights like “the right to bear arms.†I would describe this line as one that acknowledges externalities: my speech generally doesn’t hurt others, and when it does, it isn’t protected by the First Amendment (e.g., hate speech, defamation, child pornography, etc.); but rarely can an individual use a gun – a weapon by design – in a manner that doesn’t implicate the liberties of others. Incorporation of the 2nd Amendment would trump the ability of a State to impose any but the most compelling restrictions. The Supreme Court will review the distinction between collective rights and individual liberties this term in District of Columbia v. Heller, a decision that could take a giant step toward incorporation of the right and the end of a pragmatic approach to gun control.
Media Bias in Iraqi Death Toll Reporting
During the ongoing debate concerning the future of the Iraq War, one issue remains glaringly undervoiced: the enormous number of Iraqi casualties that have been incurred and will continue to be incurred as the fighting continues. Frequently, discussion about the costs of war in Iraq include only American costs, as measured in gold, blood and political power. Despite calls from some to try to understand the war from the Iraqi perspective, news coverage remains predominantly silent when it comes to Iraqi life, death and politics.
According to a 2006 study released by Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and first published in the The Lancet,‘excess’ Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the war have risen above 655,000. Of those, 601,000 are violent deaths, with 31% attributed to coalition forces. That means, to date, roughly 186,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of coalition violence. Since the media stir over the report in 2006, however, little has been heard about the mounting Iraqi casualties.
The True Global Threat
Be warned:
It’s a fucked-up world out there. Let’s face it. Used to be all one had to worry about was the omnipresent threat of nuclear war with the Soviets and, if you’re older, polio and the Prussians. Nowadays we have even crazier diseases we can’t seem to cure (and it seems like they all started by some yahoo having sex with animals), nightly updates on the “war on terror,” and sensationalist news reporting on everything else from sex offenders to storm watches to celebrity “justice.” This permeates every fold of the fabric of our society, from innocuous water-cooler small talk to inundation by the mainstream media.
Yet I feel calm. At peace. I might even say Zen-like, if I were more educated and knew what that was. Actually, it still sounds pretty sweet. I’m going with it. My tranquility is Zen-like. In fact, there’s only one thing that really scares me at all – and it really freaks the hell out of me. It’s not AIDS. It’s not global warming. It’s not even marriage.
Hippopotamuses.
If I have a boogeyman in my closet that keeps me awake at night, or roams freely in my nightmares, it’s not wearing a knifed glove or wielding a chainsaw. No, it’s a goddamn hippopotamus.
