scholarly journals Second Amendment and the Gun-Control Controversies: A Flaw in Constitutional Framing and an Antinomy of American Conservatism

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (8) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Acheoah Ofeh Augustine
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
Control Question ◽  
The People

This article is a critical input to the national and international debate on Gun Control and the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution since 1791. Auspiciously, the paper interrogates the historical, ideological, and socio-cultural roots of the Gun Rights from Medieval Europe to modern America as well as its implications for homeland security in 21st Century American society. The whole legalistic, philosophical and socio-cultural rationale for and against the Gun Control Question in mainstream American politics elicits many questions: Why has it been legislatively infeasible to address the frailties inherent in the 2nd Amendment texts? Is the Second Amendment immutable amid post-1791 realities? Has morality lost its place in American politics? Was the rights prescribed under 2nd Amendment vested on the individuals as construed impliedly or on the people as expressly stipulated in the constitution? And why has America with the most sophisticated military and intelligence architecture in the world failed to demonstrate the capability to contain sectarian killings in the land? The paper submits that the Gun Control Debate lays bare, one of the internal cleavages within the American political and social system, a nation so admired not just by her military, economic and diplomatic clout but also by the valued she stresses and defend world over: freedom, justice, equality and global peace, ideals for which the United States supplanted pax-Britanica for Pax-Americana. The appalling antecedents of gun killings in America knows no rank with 11 presidential assassination attempts for which four American presidents died: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881); William McKinley (1901) John F Kennedy (1963) with Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan seriously injured in the 1912 and 1981 assassination attempts. The quartet presidential assassins: John Wilkes Booth; Charles J. Guiteau; Leon Czolgosz and Lee Harvey Oswald were all some of the first high profile abusers of the 2nd Amendment and the gun rights it granted. The death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X among many also resonates one of the foundational flaws of a nation globally reputed as the policeman of the earth. When will this trend ever end?.Millions have gone yet there seems to be hyper-partisanship about the Gun Control Question. This political cleavage represents a failure of the present generation of the political elites, the people and the American institutions to rise above and repeal the frailty of the 2nd Amendment, couched in one of the most nebulous languages in constitutional framings since the first ten Amendment to the world’s first-ever written constitution was ratified on 15 December 1791.The lessons from the government response to the Gun Question never placed America as a society developing societies should aspire to become, it is totally antithetical to the admirable values known about the greatest nation since the collapse of Nazism, Fascism and in the last decade of the 20th Century Communism for which in the submissions of Francis Fukuyama, Liberal Democracy became the Last Man metaphorically outlasting all other contending ideological contemporaries thus: “The End History”. The moral, spiritual, political leaders of America must converge on one front on the Gun Question, the Republicans must not hide under conservative garb and watch the blood of innocent generation of Americans been wasted by abusers of the Second Amendment. The appropriate measures to put a permanent lid on the mindless gun-related deaths must be carried out. The Democrats must forge a bipartisan consensus to arrest the moral drift in the land under the guise of the 2nd Amendment’s immutability clause: “shall not be infringed upon”. American political leaders must not under whatever guise send the wrong signal to the international community that will characterize the state as a policeman that cannot police his home, Charity begins at home, it is contradictory, antithetical and undermined every value upon which America prides herself under the rubric Pax-Americana. Historical antecedents show that the National Rifle Association is a shadow of itself, haven being skewed from its original goal to promote martial qualities and marksmanship to a lobbyist group without conscience for humanity. The American Institutions must live up to their mandate to tame the sinister and overbearing influence of the group. To the political leaders of the land the patriots of the 1775 Revolution fought for a land of the free it is your bounden duty to ensure their labor never be in vain: Lincoln was conscious of this during the heady days as was Andrew John who put their differences aside to restore national psyche, President Trump must not trade the blood of the children of America with his 2020 presidential re-election ambition as the NRA pro-Trump for 2020 billboards suggests. The Gun-Control debates further lays bare one of the antinomies of American Conservatism “being pro-life, anti-abortion and at the same time, pro-gun” as the abuses and defense of the 2nd Amendment represent one of the Ideological conspiracies against under the garb of Classical Liberalism propagated by contemporary votaries of American conservatism.

scholarly journals The Politics of Gun Control in the United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-59
Author(s):  
Vibeke Sofie Sandager Rønnedal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
The People ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right ◽  
Standing Army

The discussion of the right to keep and bear arms has been a growing issue in American society during the past two decades. This article examines the origin of the right and whether it is still relevant in contemporary American society. It is found that the Second Amendment was written for two main reasons: to protect the people of the frontier from wildlife and foreign as well as native enemies, and to ensure the citizen militia being armed and ready to fight for a country with a deep-rooted mistrust of a standing army and a strongly centralized government. As neither of these reasons have applied to American society for at least the past century, it is concluded that American society has changed immensely since the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, and that the original purpose of the right to keep and bear arms thus has been outdated long ago.

Handguns: Risks versus Benefits

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 77 (5) ◽  
pp. 781-782
Author(s):  
KATHERINE K. CHRISTOFFEL ◽  
TOM CHRISTOFFEL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Supreme Court ◽  
P 16

THE ISSUE There are an estimated 40 to 50 million handguns in the United States, with approximately 2 million more being manufactured annually1 (The New York Times, July 9, 1985, p 16). The high prevalence of handgun injury in the United States is unique in all the world and is increasing. Children are among the growing legions of US citizens harmed by the handgun epidemic.2 The effort to control handguns is focussed on developing laws to control their manufacture, importation, purchase, possession, and use. Opponents of these legal approaches claim that gun control endangers constitutional freedoms. When asked, the US Supreme court has consistently rejected that position in favor of the view that the Second Amendment protects a collective, not a personal, right to bear arms.3,4

Children’s Views of the American Presidency

2020 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe M Oxley ◽  
Mirya R Holman ◽  
Jill S Greenlee ◽  
Angela L Bos ◽  
J Celeste Lay
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Elementary School Children ◽  
Political Socialization ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
American Presidency ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
Children’S Views

Abstract What do children think about political leaders? In classic political socialization studies of the late 1950s, children tended to hold idealized views of political leaders. In spite of enormous changes in the political landscape, we know little about how these attitudes have changed in the last 60 years. To assess the views of children today, we surveyed over 500 elementary school children (grades 1–6) in the United States. Children no longer possess favorable views of the president. However, the institution of the presidency continues to be held in high esteem.

scholarly journals Antimonopoly in American Politics, 1945–2000

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Scroop
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Politics ◽  
National Level ◽  
Consumer Welfare ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Late 20Th Century

Antimonopoly, meaning opposition to the exclusive or near-exclusive control of an industry or business by one or a very few businesses, played a relatively muted role in the history of the post-1945 era, certainly compared to some earlier periods in American history. However, the subject of antimonopoly is important because it sheds light on changing attitudes toward concentrated power, corporations, and the federal government in the United States after World War II. Paradoxically, as antimonopoly declined as a grass-roots force in American politics, the technical, expert-driven field of antitrust enjoyed a golden age. From the 1940s to the 1960s, antitrust operated on principles that were broadly in line with those that inspired its creation in the late 19th and early 20th century, acknowledging the special contribution small-business owners made to US democratic culture. In these years, antimonopoly remained sufficiently potent as a political force to sustain the careers of national-level politicians such as congressmen Wright Patman and Estes Kefauver and to inform the opinions of Supreme Court justices such as Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Antimonopoly and consumer politics overlapped in this period. From the mid-1960s onward, Ralph Nader repeatedly tapped antimonopoly ideas in his writings and consumer activism, skillfully exploiting popular anxieties about concentrated economic power. At the same time, as part of the United States’ rise to global hegemony, officials in the federal government’s Antitrust Division exported antitrust overseas, building it into the political, economic, and legal architecture of the postwar world. Beginning in the 1940s, conservative lawyers and economists launched a counterattack against the conception of antitrust elaborated in the progressive era. By making consumer welfare—understood in terms of low prices and market efficiency—the determining factor in antitrust cases, they made a major intellectual and political contribution to the rightward thrust of US politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978, popularized and signaled the ascendency of this new approach. In the 1980s and 1990s antimonopoly drifted to the margin of political debate. Fear of big government now loomed larger in US politics than the specter of monopoly or of corporate domination. In the late 20th century, Americans, more often than not, directed their antipathy toward concentrated power in its public, rather than its private, forms. This fundamental shift in the political landscape accounts in large part for the overall decline of antimonopoly—a venerable American political tradition—in the period 1945 to 2000.

The Politics of Peace

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Willy Brandt ◽  
Catch 22

The last chapter examines the migration of a politics of peace from the margins to the centers of political power. As leading antinuclear and peace advocates became increasingly marginalized by the student and antiwar movements, their efforts were beginning to bear fruit in the arena of international politics. They were helped by a popular groundswell of sentiment that saw the arms race and the political ideology of nuclear deterrence as increasingly absurd. Absurdist writers, filmmakers, and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s creatively underscored the absurdist nature of Cold War politics through works such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction film Dr. Strangelove, and the fictional secret government Report from Iron Mountain. Together, they helped pave the way for political leaders, including Nixon in the United States, and Willy Brandt in West Germany, to develop a more pragmatic politics of peace.

The Political Paranoid in Contemporary Politics

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-391
Author(s):  
Greg Dimitriadis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Paranoid Style

In this brief essay, I take up Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) to discuss key social and psychic energies at work across the United States today. Although they have longstanding roots in the United States, these paranoid tendencies have only intensified in recent years. I see this in two, intertwined ways–new social and psychic vulnerabilities as well as the rise of so-called “eliminationist” rhetoric.

scholarly journals A charming German in the jaws of American politics: US influence on Willy Brandt's political profiling and Eastern politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Slavojka Beštić-Bronza
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
Willy Brandt ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship

The aim of this paper is to show to what extent and by what mechanisms the United States influenced the political formation of the personality and activities of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Special emphasis was placed on American influences during the implementation of Brandt's most famous political concept, 'Eastern Politics', which provides the chronological context of the development of relations in line with pan-European and world political movements and their correlation with Brandt's political path in exile and later in occupied Germany, and, finally, in the newly created independent Federal Republic of Germany. Circumstances, personal (dis)inclinations, and mutual influences gave birth to a rather ambivalent relationship, created mainly due to the interests of both parties, which overlapped in certain periods of time, while later they moved away and became cold, even often hostile.

“America’s First Freedom”

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-128
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Lacombe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
The Political ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
National Rifle Association ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Political Unity

This chapter employs the same American Rifleman editorials and gun control-related letters to explain how the National Rifle Association (NRA) has created a gun-centric political ideology, in which gun rights are central to a broader set of issue positions, and thus how gun rights became so closely related to contemporary conservatism in the United States. For many gun owners, gun rights stand at the center of a broader political ideology that embraces liberty, nationalism, limited government, and law and order. The chapter addresses the roots of this ideology and its relation to the gun owner identity by examining NRA's decades-long efforts to build an ideology around gun rights. Working in conjunction with its group identity, the NRA's ideology comprises the second stream of the gun-centric worldview it has used to advance gun rights. This group ideology increases the political unity of gun rights supporters — they are similar not just in their shared support for gun rights, but also along a broader range of issue positions and values. In connecting gun rights to other issues, the chapter unveils how ideology linked the gun owner identity to other politically relevant identities, strengthening each.

Belonging to an Ancient Church in a Modern Republic

2020 ◽  
pp. 18-40
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Major Party ◽  
Roman Catholics

This chapter talks about Al Smith as the first Roman Catholic to gain the nomination for president of the United States by a major party, the Democrats. It mentions Jacques Villeré, a Roman Catholic, who became the second governor of Louisiana. It also explores the political career of Smith and Villeré, which suggests that Americans were generally comfortable with Roman Catholics holding public office. The chapter refers to Charles C. Marshall, a New York attorney and member of the Episcopal Church, who reminded Americans of the incompatibility between Roman Catholicism and American politics. It details how Marshall pointed out the conflict between Roman Catholic canon law on marriage and the secular laws governing the institution in Protestant countries such as the United States and England.

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