Gun rights and the gun vote are not about guns. They are about promoting a very malignant vision of economic, social and political life and controlling political outcomes to further that vision. See below.

The letter of May 5 cited below to Ms. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has received no response. We cannot expect leadership or consciousness out of members of Congress or from the Democratic National Committee or the Women's National Democratic Club. They cannot get beyond advocating and supporting more lame, failed, piecemeal gun control legislation. Progress will be made on fundamental civic values.

The Schultz letter with attachments was placed in the hands of Michael Blake, White House Director of African American & Minority Business Outreach in the Office of Public Engagement, at a community meeting in Washington on May 11, 2011, He said he would forward it to the Justice Department. If there as any intelligent life at the DOJ the Potowmack Institute would have no reason to exist.

What are at stake are the most vital and fundamental issues of political life. The courts have given the opportunity to define basic civic values on fundamental concepts. There is much more that could be added to the discussion. On May 15, 2011, CBS's "Sixty Minutes," hardly a credible voice, gave a segment on anti-government militants who call themselves "Sovereign Citizens". That is a contradiction in terms. Citizens consent to be governed. They accommodate to a governing authority. They give civic obligation. They surrender up, from John Locke well understood by the Founding Generation, the "executive power of the law of Nature". A sovereign gives and enforces law. A sovereign does not accommodate to a law giving authority. States are sovereign. They make treaties not governments.

This is all part of the same story. More is at
http://www.potowmack.org/5issues.html
http://www.potowmack.org/196rehm.html

Political leadership will come from public pressure. Political leadership can create public pressure. That has to start somewhere. It can start here.

This letter was placed in the hands of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, May 5, 2011, newly appointed chairperson of the Democratic National Committee.
http://www.potowmack.org/dwschultz.html

It remains to be seen if there will be political leadership coming out of the Democratic National Committee.

President Obama: "We must seek agreement on gun reforms"
President Barack Obama: Special To The Arizona Daily Star
Arizona Daily Star; Posted: Sunday, March 13, 2011 12:00 am
http://azstarnet.com/article_011e7118-8951-5206-a878-39bfbc9dc89d.html

Obama's baby step approach to firearms policy has been rightly criticized.
http://www.potowmack.org/ejdionne.html
Obama's statement is as lame as it is long overdue. It is another example of the failed political leadership of the bankrupt Democratic Party. It is little more than pandering to a malignant constituency. Not EJDionne or anyone else at the gun lobby's most reliable asset, the one the NRA calls the "rabidly antigun Washington Post," has now or has ever had any constructive policy advocacy.

Editorial
Democrats and Gun Control
Published: April 22, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/opinion/23sat3.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss
It remains to be seen if Ms. Schultz can separate herself from the failed strategies and failed consciousness of the Mayor Bloomberg and his mayors.
http://www.potowmack.org/mayobloom.html

There is a reason why the NRA worked hard to control and sabotage the true believing Cato lawyers' pursuit of Parker starting in 2003.
Battle of the Gun Ban from July 22, 2003.
The NRA cannot control federal judges with demagoguery.
http://www.potowmack.org/nfp.html
http://www.potowmack.org/abcnews.html
http://csgv.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-about-citizenship.html

See:

Chapter 4 in Jeff Faux's The Global Class War

"The Courts and the New Deal," Wm. Anderson, Oct., 2005
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson123.html

"The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement," Wisc. state AFL-CIO, Joanne Ricca, August, 2002
http://www.potowmack.org/NRAlabor.pdf

"Rolling Back the Twentieth Century," William Greider, The Nation, April, 2003
http://www.thenation.com/article/rolling-back-20th-century

"Wisconsin: The Conservative Class War, Part III," Eric Alterman, The Nation, March 28, 2011.
http://www.thenation.com/article/159156/wisconsin-conservative-class-war-part-iii

"Stealing the Constitution," Gerrett Epps, The Nation, February 7, 2011.
http://www.thenation.com/article/157904/stealing-constitution

"Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom," Cory Robin, The Nation, April 25, 2011.
http://hnn.us/node/138369

"How Socialists Built America," John Nichols, The Nation, May 2, 2011.
http://www.thenation.com/article/159929/how-socialists-built-america

The Nation magazine, the source of most of these articles, has not responded for twenty years to proposals to put gun rights and the gun vote in the larger context.

Why they need a gun in every pocket has not been questioned or explained.
Can we ask the politicians the simple questions?:
1) Do you accept and support the The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 upheld in US v. Darby (1941)?
2) Do you accept and support the conclusion of the courts that we can have "registration ... for militia service if called up".
Asking a few simple questions changes everything in the present politics.

Update, January 21, 2011

Letter of January 17 to Sen. Cardin, Sen. Mikulski, Rep. Hoyer, Rep. Edwards of Maryland where the Potowmack Institute is located. The letter challenges them get serious about the most vital and fundamental issues of political life and take the opportunity the courts have provided.
http://www.potowmack.org/cong7.html

Now we have an armed assault on a member of congress which also took out a federal judge. Will members of congress now get serious about their oath of office and how it relates to the most vital and fundamental issues of political life or will more deranged individuals have a civil right to act out the gun lobby’s childish political fantasy that the purpose of all those guns in private hands is to maintain a balance of power between a privately armed populace and any and all government?

The courts have provided now in the Parker/Heller/McDonald cases the opportunity and framework for a national firearms policy whose sole function should be to contain the illegal traffic of firearms between and among jurisdictions. The federal government need to do little more. The crisis is now no longer domestic. It is international. It is no longer a matter for congressional judiciary committees but also the foreign relations committees.

It is very simple. After many pages of ignorant and fallacious argument in which Judge Silberman in Parker subordinates and disparages the original civic purpose of militia duty and the Second Amendment to invent a civil right to be privately armed for he falls back on the original civic obligation and military preparedness. He concludes that we can have “registration ... for militia service if called up.”
http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200703/04-7041a.pdf, p. 54
Registration and reporting of private sales is the only way the illegal traffic can be controlled. All other efforts are counterproductive.

But, doesn’t anyone understand this issue? The gun rights militants led by the NRA would fight viciously to defeat any legislative attempts to implement Judge Silberman’s conclusions. Registration for militia service means not only the civic obligation to serve but also means accountability to a governing authority and the submission to a regulator scheme. Self-defense is the false demagogic appeal. The way we defend ourselves as citizens under law and government is to apply a regulatory scheme against the lawless. There is no conflict between gun ownership for self-defense and accommodation to the law. The only reason we cannot apply the law against the lawless is that the law would also apply against "armed citizen guerrillas" and others with insurrectionist fantasies.

The constitutional authority for national policy is not the much abused and inappropriately applied Commerce Clause. It is the militia clauses in the constitution, the Second Amendment, and the purposes of the early militia acts.

Accountability is the one point of policy which the NRA works hardest to prevent,
http://www.potowmack.org/parkappd.pdf
It means the consent to be governed. A civic culture and a national policy follows from there.

The next step toward national policy is to get the Eric Holder Justice Department to conduct a study that updates Attorney General Ashcroft’s 2004,
http://www.justice.gov/olc/secondamendment2.pdf
study in the context of Ashcroft’s own reasonable restrictions and the decisions of the courts that we can have “registration ... for militia service if called up.” Policy follows:
http://www.potowmack.org/nfp.html
http://www.potowmack.org/abcnews.html
http://csgv.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-about-citizenship.html

A DOJ study is necessary to clarify issues. There is no issue on which there is more ignorance, absurdity and sheer nonsense. Just for starters analysis starts with these points:

One) The Constitution is a frame of government. It is not a treaty among sovereign individuals. The founding generation understood the difference,


Two) Citizens are citizens under law and government—bound by law. They are not individual sovereigns in the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy. The consent to be governed has serious implications for private gun ownership. Militia duty in the militia clauses of the Constitution, the Second Amendment, and the Militia Act of 1792 was conscript duty.

Three) What James Madison was really describing in Federalist Paper No. 46 was not a civil right of private individuals. The gun rights crowd has invented a whole preposterous, anarchic, insurrectionist, treasonous doctrine of political liberty out of words—"the advantage of being armed”— lifted out of context from one paragraph. Regardless of what the “rabidly antigun Washington Post”,
http://www.potowmack.org/washpost.html
NPR’s Diane Rehm,
http://www.potowmack.org/196rehm.html
The NRA, a host of gun lobby/libertarian pseudoscholars,
http://www.potowmack.org/emerappi.html
and growing number of anarchic federal judges would have us believe, Madison was describing military federalism— a federalism which today is anachronistic and irrelevant. The opinions of federal judges is particularly appalling. Madison is interpreted to have asserted a right of “an amorphous body of the [armed] people as a whole.” Is this amorphous body any different from the “armed masses” idolized too many times to count in V. I. Lenin’s State and Revolution.

The next step of getting the Holder DOJ to undertake this clarifying study will require public pressure. The gun controllers and Mayor Bloomberg and his mayors have not been up to the objective.
http://www.potowmack.org/denhen.html
http://www.potowmack.org/mayobloom.html
Now that the momentum toward a national firearms policy has taken on a new urgency, will the congress, if not the Holder DOJ, get serious about the serious business of government and political leadership?

August 27, 2010

The Supreme Court released its opinion in McDonald v. Chicago on June 28, 2010. Briefs in McDonald v. Chicago, NRA v. Chicago

The Supreme Court in Heller in 2008 decided on a qualified fundamental right. In McDonald it has decided on 14th Amendment incorporation protecting an individual right from the infringement by state and local government. The problem is that as a matter of policy making the courts have rendered the individual right versus collective right distinction perfectly meaningless.

What is at stake is very far removed from public consciousness. The Potowmack Institute prepared a crude draft of a brief to file in McDonald but no lawyer could be found to refine and file the arguments.
http://www.potowmack.org/McD2.pdf
There is no political consciousness among lawyers. The brief would not have made any difference. The courts have become highly politicized and are not interested in arguments. There is no public that holds the courts accountable.

Much of the Supreme Court's historical reasoning in Heller and McDonald was taken from Joyce Lee Malcolm. The Potowmack Institute has challenged Malcolm to put her research, reasoning and purposes to the test of policy making in the context of former Attorney General Ashcroft's "reasonable restrictions" and courts' conclusions that we can have "registration ... for militia service is call up". The challenge is to pursue the next step which is a study by the Eric Holder Justice Department that updates Ashcroft's 2004 study, which was a gun lobby propaganda piece likely written by NRA operatives.
http://www.potowmack.org/jlmalc.html.
Much is explained and outlined in this appeal to Professor Malcolm. The challenge is general. There needs to be public pressure to force leadership on the Holder Justice Department. The challenge was made in August, 2010. Prof. Malcolm has not responded.

A Department of Justice study could be the beginning of the process of political leadership that will lead to the effective policy making the courts have opened the path for. We cannot be optimistice when the appeal is for political leadership.

The Potowmack Institute's previous homepage from May, 2008 to August, 2010 is at
http://www.potowmack.org/index2.html.
The homepage prior to May, 2008 is at
http://www.potowmack.org/gunviol.html
Much more information is on those pages.

II. Sovereignty and the appalling spectacle of anarchic federal judges

III. Failing our history and historical concepts

IV. Civic values and the politics of the modern state

V. Guns and controlling political outcomes

VI. Toward a national firearms policy

VII. Adolescent insolence, insurrectionist fantasies and personal sovereignty

[PotowmackForum] interactive posting