Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Rand Simberg has a brilliant editorial about the First Amendment vs. the Second Amendment based on what the Founding Fathers knew then and what is reality today.

On the First Amendment:

But surely the Founders never intended for every single citizen to be able to exercise such a right--they would have known it would lead to chaos and unfettered thought. They couldn’t possibly have imagined the rapid-fire distribution of dangerous ideas made possible by twenty-first-century technology. Why, some people might have even put forth the absurd notion that free speech is the right of everyone.

Had they actually anticipated the possibility that the cost of publishing could drop so dramatically, they would surely have made the First Amendment a much more explicitly collective right (like the Second), in which people would only have a right to free speech in a well-regulated state newspaper.

Surely the far-fringe First Amendment absolutists are misreading it--there is a hint of a shadow of an umbra of a penumbra in there, easily accessed by referencing the Second Amendment. Bearing this in mind, it is more properly read with the following implicit preface: “A well-regulated press being necessary for the security of the State and self-important talk-show hosts, Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble...”

Clearly, viewed in the light of that implicit purpose clause, these were not intended to be individual rights, any more than they were in the Second Amendment, because obviously, the Founders wouldn’t have meant one thing by the words “the right of the people” in the one case, and a different thing in the other, particularly in two adjacent amendments.

[via jay solo]