This ignorant editorial looks like it was penned by the VPC. The Fredrick News Post has to be getting pretty desperate if they are publishing dreck like this. but on the plus side, it seems to only be the real suckers in journalism that fall for this stuff this hard these days:
It was then that the NRA began to reinterpret the Second Amendment, thus giving birth to its political agenda, which eventually spawned the extremism of today.
This idea that the standard model of the Second Amendment was single handedly created by the NRA in the 1970s is one of the more insidious and persistent lies of our opponents. People like Patricia Weller, the author of this editorial, and “semi-retired legal assistant” is either willfully misleading people, or woefully uneducated on this issue. This is especially true given how much of the debates surrounding the ratification of the 14th Amendment were concerned about protecting the Second Amendment rights of newly freed blacks:
There are, however, many sources contemporary to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment that indicate the framers and ratifiers thought the Amendment supported an individual right to bear arms. As Professor Amar points out, ironically both abolitionists Joel Tiffany and pro-slavery activist Roger Taney reached the same conclusion: “if free blacks were citizens, it would necessarily follow that they had a right of private arms bearing.†Judge Timothy Farrar specifically included the right to “keep and bear arms,†as one of the rights protected under Article IV that could not be “infringed by individuals or States, or even by the government itself.â€
And that’s hardly the only source out there. Professor Akhil Amar and Steven Halbrook both have thorough scholarship in this area. This is generally accepted as fact everywhere except in the heads, thoroughly buried in the sand, of the anti-gun people. The anti-gun folks don’t get a pass on this. If you believe that the Second Amendment, as a fundamental, individual right, was an invention of the NRA in the 1970s, I’m here to say unequivocally you’re either delusional or poorly educated. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
My book For the Defense of Themselves and the State also demonstrates the widespread individual rights understanding of the Second Amendment in the nineteenth century. I didn’t know NRA had time machines.
On the other hand, if the NRA had done such a thing they would be such an incredibly powerful force that no one would dare raise their voice in opposition.