There are days when I wonder if Harold Hutchison gets a check from the Vichy NRA.
Or maybe Bloomberg.
When All You Can Do Is Limit the Damage
The other benefit damage control can have is that it could prompt anti-Second Amendment extremists to kill a bill. This happened 20 years ago in the wake of the Columbine shooting. After the NRA’s damage-control bill became the preferred version in the House, anti-Second Amendment extremists voted it down, teaming up with “no compromise” Second Amendment supporters.
He’s a big fan of compromises, and wastes a lot of ink justifying rationalizing the Vichy NRA’s preemptive surrenders.
compromise [ kom-pruh-mahyz ]
noun
a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an agreement reached by adjustment of conflicting or opposing claims, principles, etc., by reciprocal modification of demands.
Mutual. As in, I’ll give you this, you give me that. The way the VNRA plays it goes thusly:
Victim Disarmers: “We want a [insert VD wishlist].”
VNRA: “OK, we’ll give you [insert VD wishlist]. What will you give us?”
VD: “The shaft.”
VNRA: “What? No.”
VD: “Fine. We’ll give you half the shaft now, and the rest later.”
VNRA: “Sold!”
More specifically, the Firearms Owner Protection Act, for example, was a VNRA compromise. They gave the VD carriers machineguns. The VDs gave us…. must… not… say.. it… gave us interstate transport protections and a registry ban. Those concessions to our side have been so effective that no one has been arrested for lawfully transporting a firearm in New York since, and the ATF stopped copying dealer records en masse. And it isn’t like it also led to the banning of bump-fire stocks (in which the VNRA bypassed compromise and went straight to preemptive surrender).
Oh. Wait.
Here’s a three-part challenge for Mr. Hutchison:
1. Name one VNRA compromise in the past 50 years that resulted in a net gain for Second Amendment rights.
Gain; not deferred or delayed loss. Not It coulda been worse. HELLER doesn’t count; they tried to stop it, and only jumped in later when they realized it was going forward to SCOTUS. MCDONALD doesn’t count; SAF and ISRA, not VNRA.
2. Explain how refusing to compromise hurts Second Amendment rights. Specifically:
The other benefit damage control can have is that it could prompt anti-Second Amendment extremists to kill a bill. This happened 20 years ago in the wake of the Columbine shooting. After the NRA’s damage-control bill became the preferred version in the House, anti-Second Amendment extremists voted it down, teaming up with “no compromise” Second Amendment supporters.
The VNRA-backed House version expanded background checks. The Senate version expanded background checks even more. The no-compromise faction caused the bill to die in the House. It appears that not compromising prevented the expansion — lesser or greater — in that fight. Explain why I’m wrong.
3. Explain why we should ever compromise on an enumerated, constitutionally “protected” right at all.
The Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, is a list of things specifically protected from government abuse. We aren’t supposed to have to compromise on any of it, because these rights were hard-coded into the document. But compromisers let slip in the idea of differing levels of scrutiny. At least “strict scrutiny” used to be the default setting for all of the Bill of Rights, but the VNRA bargained it away — we’re now lucky if 2A human/civil rights even get intermediate scrutiny.
Suddenly, infringements become hunky-dory so long as the government invokes a magic need to override what was never supposed to be overriden, for some alleged public good.
Even the infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott saw the majority maintaining that if Scott were recognized as a citizen then he — as an individual — would have the right to bear arms and all other enumerated rights; because that’s what rights are without question. But in 1934, the VNRA capitulated on 2A rights, and the Second Amendment was effectively edited to add “unless we want to.”
Please Mr. Hutchison, tell what good “compromise” has done us, and why we should be compromising in the first place.
[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]
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