- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

Hillary Clinton And the Second Amendment

Sandy Levinson, of Balkinization : [1]

According to a blog published by the New York Times, Hillary Clinton has told Iowa voters, â??I believe in the Second Amendment, and I donâ??t see any contradiction between the Second Amendment and laws that keep guns out of the hands of criminals.â? The irony in this statement is that her husband did a great service to the Republican takeover in 1994 by relentlessly pushing his symbolic “assault weapons ban.” According to Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina, it probably cost the Democrats at least six seats in the House (including Speaker Tom Foley from Eastern Washington and Jack Brooks, the long-time Texan head of the House Judiciary Committee) . . . So I take Sen. Clinton’s declaration of support for the Second Amendment–the next question, of course, is what precisely she “believes” the Second Amendment means in 2007–is the best evidence possible for the new-found respect it gathers, at least rhetorically, across the political spectrum.

I suppose this back and forth to be the product of attributing convenient values to words and phrases, rather than the actual meetings of those words and phrases.  This is something the Clintons have been doing since day one, and I have no reason to believe that’s going to change anytime soon.

That Hillary Clinton refuses to acknowledge that there is an inherent contradiction between the position that she takes as regards the second amendment, and what the second amendment actually says, and what it meant in context when it was written, tells me she’s worked with a set of definitions quite unlike the definitions used by those who actually believe in the second amendment.

But consider what I said yesterday about John Howard’s successor in Australia.  He had to act like something he was not… a centrist… to gain office. We should not be surprised if Hillary Clinton’s doing precisely the same thing.

As to the matter of convenience, the fastest way to explain the position that Hillary Clinton has taken here, particularly given her a long held anti- second amendment views, is that Rudy Giuliani… the person she sees as her most likely competition, has a record of being somewhat less than fully comfortable with the second amendment, and citizens owning… and using…  firearms.  It doesn’t take a genius to understand that she would not take her current position under any other circumstances.