The Gun Show

More Perfect

WNYC Studios

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4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2017

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For nearly 200 years of our nation’s history, the Second Amendment was an all-but-forgotten rule about the importance of militias. But in the 1960s and 70s, a movement emerged — led by Black Panthers and a recently-repositioned NRA — that insisted owning a firearm was the right of each and every American. So began a constitutional debate that only the Supreme Court could solve. That didn’t happen until 2008, when a Washington, D.C. security guard named Dick Heller made a compelling case.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Leadership support for more perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation.
0:05.2	This is more perfect. I'm Chad Abumrod. So one of the big conversations that's come out of
0:11.1	the Vegas mass shooting comes out of every mass shooting and unfortunately we are averaging one
0:16.2	a day here in America is like what is it about America and guns? What is it that makes us so unique
0:25.6	when it comes to guns? A complicated question, a lot of different answers I'm sure but part of it,
0:30.8	the obvious piece of it is that we have these words baked into our founding document.
0:37.5	Today we're going to tell you the really surprising story of how those words came to be
0:43.3	or how we came to read them the way that we do now. Producer Sean Ramasferm takes it from here.
0:50.0	I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution in the
0:53.8	Bill of Rights. Not we the people. Not that one. No I got a different one. A well regulated
0:58.6	militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to
1:07.6	keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed. Say it one more time, say I'm sorry.
1:14.0	Okay, from the top and do it do it with the commas again. Sure. A well regulated militia, comma.
1:20.2	Being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms,
1:28.8	totally unnecessary, comma, shall not be infringed. Is that the one that's about guns? Adam
1:35.7	Winkler who wrote the book on the Second Amendment and that book is called Gunfight. He's a journalist.
1:40.1	He's a professor of law at UCLA. He said it's almost as if James Madison, the author of the
1:45.6	Amendment had just discovered this wonderful new thing, the comma and wanted to put it in there
1:49.9	as many times as possible, which is like a nerdy, professorial joke. But like seriously, what is it?
1:56.8	And like it had to be this one. Couldn't it have been the amendment about like quartering soldiers
2:00.9	in your house that was really confusing? No, it's the one about guns that they made like just
2:05.4	indescipherable. And ever since generations of Americans have been confused by the language of
	...

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