In DC v. Heller, the 5-4 Supreme Court case that decided the meaning of the Second Amendment until Republicans are unable to steal justices, Antonin Scalia cites a 1931 judgment that argues for a very straightforward reading of Our Exceptional Nation’s founding document:

“[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.”

And then, just like any normal and ordinary reader, Scalia proceeds to sort the amendment into prefatory and operative clauses, the absence of grammatical constraint on the latter by the former, comparisons of sentence structure with other constitutional passages, and other normal and ordinary observations that strongly recall our first year as a normal and ordinary graduate student in philosophy.

Really, dude reads the Second Amendment more closely than we read Wittgenstein.

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It’s understandable, perhaps even inevitable, how Thursday night’s events have been framed, and how the consequences are playing out. We have to think back to our early childhood in the Sixties to find such a perfect storm of racial and police tension.

Except it’s not that.

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We can’t think of a damn thing to say about the same damn thing happening again, so let’s watch Sam Bee say something instead.

Where’s this magic post-racial society that Fox gas-bags and SCOTUS tell me we live in since the Unicorn went to the Casa Blanca?

So sad. And more than that, so disappointed that all of my fears and catastrophic thinking that my shrink tells me not to engage in came true.

Not even a fucking manslaughter conviction? Gotta have those fucking guns.

Rest in Peace, Trayvon. Maybe we can do an Underground Railroad to get the blacks, browns, gheyz, and wimminz out of Dumbfuckistan, and let the 13 states secede already.

That’s the running count of how many deaths have occurred due to guns in the United States since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Meanwhile, let’s talk about the not-dead shooting victims.

Like 10-year-old Ka’nard Allen of New Orleans.

He was shot in the face on Mother’s Day during a happy neighborhood parade. This is after his 5-year-old cousin was murdered and he was shot at his 10th birthday party last May. And after his father was killed in October 2012.

This is a national tragedy. And it’s a travesty that this nation doesn’t think it’s a tragedy that 19 people got shot on Mother’s Day.

He wants an adult to start peeling an orange for him because he can’t get it started himself. He wants to dunk an empty juice bottle into a garbage can and launch high, elegant roundhouse kicks at the pail. He wants to get on that black four-wheeler and drive it off the grass speckled with broken glass, watching for traffic, circling on Simon Bolivar — fast. He’ll even give you a ride on the back.

This isn’t the most eloquent way to sum it up, but all I can say right now is, “We fucking suck.”  Hang in there, Ka’nard. People you’ve never met are thinking of you.

[NOLA Times-Picayune]

“It contains no penalties and exempts anyone who objects, convicted felons and those with certain mental and physical disabilities.” —The new “mandatory gun ownership” law in Nelson, Georgia — population 1,300 — that isn’t mandatory, but don’t let that stop you from being outraged. [AP/TPM]

Snap! Go DiFi, tell that little punk where to stick it. From the Ess Eff Chronicle:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a 20-year veteran Democrat, clashed fiercely with Tea Party-backed newcomer Ted Cruz of Texas, when the freshman began lecturing the Californian about the Constitution during a debate over Feinstein’s assault weapons ban. … The clash was reminiscent of an exchange Feinstein had nearly two decades ago with the since disgraced Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, who lectured the “gentle lady from California” on firearms during debate over Feinstein’s successful 1994 ban that expired in 2004.

No issue is more emotional for Feinstein. She became mayor of San Francisco as a result of the assassination of George Moscone, and was the first to discover supervisor Harvey Milk’s body, slipping her finger into the bullet hole as she sought a pulse. […]

Cruz asked Feinstein whether she would “deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights” if Congress did the same thing to the First Amendment that she contemplates with the Second Amendment. Her assault weapons bill bans certain weapons, so Cruz asked whether Congress could ban certain books.

The Stanford-educated Feinstein replied, “I am not a sixth-grader,” and said her bill specifically exempts 2,271 weapons. “Is this not enough for the people of the United States?” she asked? “Do they need a bazooka?”

Clip of DiFi and Cruz after the jump.

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