Wired Against the 2nd Amendment

Eliot Van Buskirk wrote a post on the "MP3s and Music Reviews" section of Wired's blog today. While it ostensibly is a review of Ted Nuget's fairly disappointing "I Am The NRA", Van Buskirk does not hesitate to take the same tired jab at the 2nd Amendment and its supporters. While he claims that he can "get down with Ted's...respect for the Constitution", he quickly belittles the meaning of the 2nd:

I can't remember the last time I saw a minuteman leap down his front steps to defend against the British, but maybe that's just me.

I don't know what version of the Bill of Rights Van Buskirk is reading, but the 2nd Amendment does not mention the British or minutemen. Though in the past there has been some debate about the exact punctuation of the actual words, and the nature of the prefatory clause referring to the militia, the amendment is plainly written as a right of the people to keep and bear arms. Just the other day author Stephen Halbrook wrote in the Roanoke Times about how plain the language and meaning become when referring to Noah Webster's dictionary available during that period of time.

Van Buskirk manages, in a pretty short post, to take another jab at both the meaning of the 2nd amendment and the NRA itself:

(The) new song out called "I Am The NRA"...magically equates political freedom with the right to own high-powered assault rifles and Teflon-coated bullets.

The words "high-powered assault rifle" should be a red flag to any supporter of the 2nd Amendment who lived through the Clinton ban. This phrase, and others similar to it, are frequently brought out to sound scary and frighten people into giving up their rights. When using this phrase there are often no ballistics brought up (such as velocity, rate of fire, effective range, capacity, etc), because their similarity to traditional hunting rounds and arms takes some teeth out of the argument. Also suspect is the reference to Teflon-coated bullets. This is frequently brought up in NRA hit-pieces for their fight against banning these rounds. What these articles, and fleeting references such as Van Buskirk's, fail to mention is that the bills written to ban these rounds would also have banned the majority of conventional hunting and rifle rounds. But let's not ever let the truth get in the way of a good argument.

Van Buskirk may only find Nugent's (and the NRA's) support of the 2nd Amendment "myopic and grating", I find his dangerously narrow interpretation of the Bill of Rights and reliance on media buzz words as scare tactics much more offensive.