The Gun Show Reprise

More Perfect

WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Scotus, Perfect, History, Court, More, Documentary, Courses, Supreme, Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2018

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last year in the wake of the attack in Las Vegas, reporter Sean Rameswaram took a deep dive into America's twisty, thorny, seemingly irreconcilable relationship with guns. It's a story about the Second Amendment, the Black Panthers, the NRA, and a guy named Dick Heller, who in 2008 brought the Second Amendment to the Supreme Court for the very first time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is more perfect. I'm Chad Abumrod. Season three of more perfect. We're releasing an album,
0:06.4	sort of a song cycle of the amendments of the United States Constitution, and we're telling
0:11.0	stories about each of those amendments. Some of you might recall that last season,
0:15.6	we did a deep dive on the second amendment. We're going to rebroadcast that for you now. It comes
0:21.6	from Sean Ramasferram. He hosts an amazing show called Today Explained, and he previously did
0:28.7	a stint with us here at More Perfect, and Sean's going to take it from here.
0:32.2	I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution,
0:35.8	in the Bill of Rights. Not we, the people. Not that one. No, I got a different one. A well-regulated
0:40.8	militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to
0:49.7	keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed. Say it one more time, say it, sorry.
0:56.1	Okay, from the top, and do it, do it with the commas again. Sure. A well-regulated militia, comma,
1:02.4	being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms,
1:10.9	totally unnecessary, comma, shall not be infringed. Is that the one that's about guns? Adam Winkler,
1:18.2	who wrote the book on the second amendment, and that book is called Gunfight. He's a journalist.
1:22.3	He's a professor of law at UCLA. He said it's almost as if James Madison, the author of the
1:27.8	amendment, had just discovered this wonderful new thing, the comma, and wanted to put it in there
1:32.1	as many times as possible, which is like a nerdy, professorial joke. But like seriously, what is it?
1:39.0	And like it had to be this one. Couldn't it have been the amendment about like,
1:42.2	quartering soldiers in your house that was really confusing? Yeah. No, it's the one about guns that
1:46.0	they made like just indecisive, horrible. And ever since generations of Americans have been confused
1:51.5	by the language of the Second Amendment. So when this thing was written, we had just fought this war
1:56.0	with the British, this revolutionary war, and they tried to win it right from the get-go by coming
	...

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