"Are you at a computer?" asked Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School. I had called him because we had been scheduled to talk about the constitutionality of the filibuster. But just a few hours before our call,
"Are you at a computer?" asked Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School. I had called him because we had been scheduled to talk about the constitutionality of the filibuster. But just a few hours before our call, a madman had killed 26 people, mostly children, at a Connecticut elementary school. Neither of us was very interested in talking about the filibuster. So I asked Amar, one of the nation's leading authorities on the Constitution, about the Second Amendment. That's when he sent me to Google.
"Okay. Good. Go type in 'John Trumbull' -- that's T-R-U-M-B-U-L-L -- and 'death of General Warren' in Google image search," Amar continued. "Do you see the picture?"
"That’s the initial vision of the Second Amendment," Amar continued. "The good guys are on the left. They’re the local militia. The bad guys are on the right in the red coats. They're the Union Jack. That's arms-bearing, Founders-style. Originally, the Second Amendment is very much about local militias keeping check on a federal military establishment. It’s about Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. It’s a product of the American Revolution. The motto at the founding is when guns are outlawed only the king’s men will have guns."
"Now go type in 'Freedmen's Bureau.' Do you see it?"
"The militia men have become klansmen. The uniforms have come off. In the original, very far corner of the screen, right hand of the page, is one black person. Now there are lots of black people. Now there's a uniformed officer keeping law and order. But as soon as the army goes, these blacks will be vulnerable. They’ll at least need these bayonets in their homes or they’ll be terrorized."
"In a nutshell, almost everything ordinary Americans think they know about the Bill of Rights, including the phrase 'Bill of Rights,' comes from the Reconstruction period. Not once did the Founders refer to these earl