Welcome back to the Dershow. Tonight we're going to talk about the second amendment that's been a source of lots of controversy among my viewers and people who write to me, as you know, my position is I wouldn't have voted for the second amendment if I had been at the Bill of Rights Convention.

But it's there. It's in there. So I support it. I don't want to change the Bill of Rights in Tampa with the Bill of Rights. So I support a view of the second amendment that I think is is a reasonable view.

Obviously, you know that one of the purposes behind the second amendment, there are many, many purposes. One of the purposes is to grant rights to hunters, hunters, people who want to hunt and back in the day when the second amendment was passed hunting was a major source of food for the people in the colonial and the post colonial revolutionary period.

They hunted for their food and virtually every state permitted hunters to have guns. So with my apologies in advance for the pun, the question that's being raised now is whether the second amendment protects this particular hunter hunter Biden.

Biden's lawyers have said that they are going to raise a second amendment defense to the three charges that are now pending against hunter Biden possession of a gun while addicted to a drug or to drugs in general lying on a form by denying that you were addicted to drugs and failing to file proper proper forms.

And if you asked me the question 50 years ago, the answer would have been, of course, the second amendment doesn't protect against that. But since that time we've had the infamous in the view of many, the famous and the view of others.

Heller decision in which Justice Scalia went through all the history and so did the dissenting judges and they couldn't agree on what the history of the second amendment was second amendment is a terrible terrible job of draftsmanship, a well regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of a free state comma.

The right of the people to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed. Now, just as Thomas said, it's an absolute categorical grant of the right to bear arms. Well, maybe it does say the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.

But it has a modifying clause, a well regulated militia being necessary, et cetera. First of them, it doesn't have a clause like that. It just says Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise or bridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peacefully to assemble. It doesn't say because it's necessary to have political debate, which might limit it to political debate.

So there is a discussion of debate among scholars among judges, precisely what the second amendment means when the Heller case first came down by Justice Scalia because it announced this right, right of personal ownership of guns, really for the first time in our history.

200 years after it was enacted, the court went out of its way to limit the holding and saying it doesn't mean that the states can't impose restrictions on where guns can add to use some examples.

You can't bring gun into a church, you can't bring a gun into various other places, people who are criminals can't have guns.

So that seemed to have given the states quite a bit of breadth of what can be regulated. But then, Justice Thomas, just a few years ago, really narrowed that exception very much and said, no, if you're going to have any exceptions to the second amendment, they must be part of American history and tradition.

That may be one of the most absurd lines ever written in a Supreme Court decision regulating the second amendment.

Obviously, there was no tradition or history regulating most of what we have in America.

Today, people were not addicted to heroin, cocaine and other very dangerous drugs at the time that there was not, at least that we know of a major drug problem.

So there would be no opportunity for the states to say that people who are addicted to cocaine, even crack cocaine, can't be restricted in their right to own guns.

The Supreme Court has a case coming up this sermon, I think in a couple of weeks.

That raises a very interesting case. It's called the United States versus Rahimi, where the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals used the Supreme Court decision to strike down a federal law that prohibits gun ownership by people under domestic violence restraining orders.

That is people who have threatened and beaten their wives. Right now, there are states that say if you've been under restraining order, if you've been convicted of beating your wife or threatening her with a gun, you can't have a gun.

And that's been challenged and there are cases on that in the lower courts and the Supreme Court's going to have to deal with that.

Obviously, when you go back to history, history and spatial abuse is one of the most shameful episodes in America.

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