John Feinblatt of Everytown:

When militia members and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday with Nazi flags and racist placards, many of them also carried firearms openly, including semiautomatic weapons. They came to intimidate and terrify protesters and the police. If you read reports of the physical attacks they abetted, apparently their plan worked.

They might try to rationalize their conduct as protected by the First and Second Amendments, but let’s not be fooled. Those who came to Charlottesville openly carrying firearms were neither conveying a nonviolent political message, nor engaged in self-defense nor protecting hearth and home.

Plain and simple, public terror is not protected under the Constitution. That has been the case throughout history. And now is the time to look to that history and prohibit open carry, before the next Charlottesville.

Historically, lawmakers have deemed open carry a threat to public safety. Under English common law, a group of armed protesters constituted a riot, and some American colonies prohibited public carry specifically because it caused public terror. During Reconstruction, the military governments overseeing much of the South responded to racially motivated terror (including the murder of dozens of freedmen and Republicans at the 1866 Louisiana Constitutional Convention) by prohibiting public carry either generally or at political gatherings and polling places. Later, in 1886, a Supreme Court decision, Presser v. Illinois, upheld a law forbidding groups of men to “parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized.” For states, such a law was “necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.”

In other words, our political forebears would not have tolerated open carry as racially motivated terrorists practiced it in Charlottesville. They did not view open carry as protected speech. According to the framers, the First Amendment protected the right to “peaceably” — not violently or threateningly — assemble. The Second Amendment did not protect private paramilitary organizations or an individual menacingly carrying a loaded weapon. Open carry was antithetical to “the public peace.” Lawmakers were not about to let people take the law into their own hands, so they proactively and explicitly prohibited it.

Today, the law in most states is silent on open carry — and because most states do not explicitly prohibit it, it becomes de facto legal. Because it is legal, open-carry extremists take full advantage of this loophole, typically operating up to and even past the limits of the law. They carry everywhere, and the predictable result is the open carry of semiautomatic weapons in Charlottesville.

“They came to intimidate and terrify protesters and the police.”  This is so ass backwards on so many accounts it needs to be addressed.  First of all, the police weren’t intimidated.  Period.  The police have automatic weapons, MRAPs, and other weaponry that the militias didn’t have.  Feinblatt isn’t considering the possibility that the police were complicit in the whole thing.

But complicit in what?  The protest was by the militias, not Antifa.  They had permits, Antifa didn’t.  They were peaceable, Antifa wasn’t.  I said Feinblatt isn’t considering the possibility that Antifa and the police were on the same side, but in reality, he probably knows it and doesn’t want a conflict to go to waste to craft his anti-gun message.  But the point wasn’t to intimidate, but to protest.  Their carbines didn’t even have rounds chambered.  I’ve tried to consider whether I would have allowed myself to be put in those circumstances without a chambered round, and I think the answer is a resolute no.  The militias showed great restraint, contrary to the picture painted by Feinblatt.

Next, consider his statement that “Historically, lawmakers have deemed open carry a threat to public safety. Under English common law, a group of armed protesters constituted a riot, and some American colonies prohibited public carry specifically because it caused public terror.”  Prove it.  And when Feinblatt tries to prove it, consider what we already know.

In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.” In 1658 it required every householder to have a functioning firearm within his house and in 1673 its laws provided that a citizen who claimed he was too poor to purchase a firearm would have one purchased for him by the government, which would then require him to pay a reasonable price when able to do so. In Massachusetts, the first session of the legislature ordered that not only freemen, but also indentured servants own firearms and in 1644 it imposed a stern 6 shilling fine upon any citizen who was not armed.

When the British government began to increase its military presence in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, Massachusetts responded by calling upon its citizens to arm themselves in defense. One colonial newspaper argued that it was impossible to complain that this act was illegal since they were “British subjects, to whom the privilege of possessing arms is expressly recognized by the Bill of Rights” while another argued that this “is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defense”. The newspaper cited Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England, which had listed the “having and using arms for self preservation and defense” among the “absolute rights of individuals.” The colonists felt they had an absolute right at common law to own firearms.

But Feinblatt says “colonies.”  What colonies, when?  Prove it.  I want proof, Feinblatt.  Be specific.  As for his notion that the militia didn’t carry their weapons for the purpose of self defense, so the second amendment cannot apply (“The Second Amendment did not protect private paramilitary organizations or an individual menacingly carrying a loaded weapon”), he misses the point of the second amendment, or more specifically, he really knows the point but wants you to miss it.

The second amendment is specifically about what he says it is not.  It is about the amelioration of tyranny, not personal self defense.  But since he reserves the right of collective violence only to the state, he never applies his missive to the police, who were complicit in the sins of Charlottesville.  He applies it to the only peaceable, law-abiding men there that day.  Because night is day, black is white, and every day is backwards day to the progressive.

Regardless of the moral backwardness of Everytown and their ilk, you should expect that our battle to ensure legal open carry in all fifty states will get infinitely harder, and there will be many attempts to reverse the open carry laws already on the books.  You can count on it.