 This is a very exciting show. The Second Amendment of Free Society, it's important now. Maybe it's always been important, but it's going to be important, even more important, in the future. We have Abhi Soyfer, former dean of the William S. Richardson School of Law, and who teaches even today on constitutional law. That's been his expertise for the past 200, 240 years. And Peter Hoffenberg, who is a history person at UH Manoa. And he's into history for the past 10,000 years. Welcome to the show, you guys. It's so nice to see you. Aloha, good to see you. Good to be here. So we're talking about the Second Amendment. And I wonder if I could tap Peter first on the history of it, from the time the Constitution was well, from the time the amendments were passed. It's not exactly the same time. And just a historical perspective on it. Sure, of course. And then Abhi, I'm hoping you can correct me. My background, as you know, is European history. So for your audience, my lens is how the founding fathers and Americans have reinterpreted what they thought was their European heritage. I think this is important because the originalists today on the courts are going back and researching documents from the 18th century. So if we're going to think about originalist argument what was intended, I think we need to understand the inheritance that they have. So historically, it seems to be a couple of key questions. And Abhi, you can help us with the law for these. One is, ever since the first gun was created out in public, there have been efforts to manage and limit guns as in gun control. The 16th century British state had efforts because they worried about what would it mean for weaponry to be in the hands of people who may not have either the state or the public interest in mind. So that's the first thing. There's a long history of this debate. I'm sure everybody in the audience has enjoyed Romeo and Juliet. And you can distill Romeo and Juliet down into what should the prince do when two families are dueling? And what they're dueling with are the equivalent guns today, right? They're in public. They're dueling. No particular interest is actually causing chaos. So one is there's a very long history of this, particularly in the Western world. Secondly, it really, to great degree, historically comes down on your view of who should have guns. The European tradition, and we don't have exactly the same here, is the Europeans worried about aristocrats having weapons. Farmers and popular people would grab farm weapons. And I'm sure all of us in one way or another imagine what can be done with a farm weapon, all right? So we're talking about a particular class and social interests, right? The equivalent in America is the southern plantation lords and their monopoly on coercion. So one would be long term. Secondly is who has the right. And thirdly, and Avi can definitely, very importantly correct me, add here, is we have this great debate about what freedom is. And we seem to the extreme have a belief that freedom is your title to do whatever you would like to do. And that's not really the tradition of freedom in most of the world. So let me stop there. And Avi can bring up the law. And I think also the audience knows that there are several very public cases right now. So I'm hoping. They didn't have to have a second amendment. They didn't have to have it. They decided they would have it to ensure that some people in the society would be entitled to carry guns. But the title question of the show is, is it necessary for a free society? Does it help? Does it hinder? Interesting. One of the arguments fairly recently in the Supreme Court was, hey, look, there are all these other countries that don't have the equivalent of the Second Amendment. And they're civilized. And it used to be sometimes the Supreme Court would worry about where our fundamental rights fit in the civilized world or the Anglo-American world they said at one point. Well, we don't worry about that anymore. We're on our own. And we have not had this right. It's an important thing to underscore. We have not had this right as individuals until 2008. The Supreme Court, several times, rejected the claim that there was a right to these arms and was only when Justice Scalia discovered, he thought, history on his side in saying there is an individual right to their arms. And it's interesting how little is actually said in the Second Amendment and what he did with it. So the Second Amendment says, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state comma, the right of the people to keep in their arms comma, shall not be infringed. So the Heller case, carefully selected, was a guy who was a security guard, actually a security guard at a federal judicial center for a good Marshall building, which is ironic in itself. And he said, DC's a really dangerous place and DC has a very strong gun control law. And when I go home, I have to take my gun apart. I can't have live ammunition in it. I can't even use it. And I'm nervous about my own security. So it was that case that got to the Supreme Court. And what I think is the key to the Scalia opinion for the court is to say the following about the text that you've now seen. The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts. It's prefatory clause and the operative clause. The former does not limit the latter dramatically, but rather announces a purpose, a purpose. So he didn't believe in natural law, natural justice. That's why we had texts and why he claimed to be an originalist or a textualist, but here naturally it has two clauses, which is a remarkable thing to say. What does that mean? It actually has two clauses anyway. What it meant was I can talk about the second part and not about the first part. This is the first part was about militias and it was important to the Americans, former colonists who had after all just come out of a war. And so they were concerned about militias. And it is traditional, as was said in passing, that cities and states regulated airing guns. In fact, I want to quote from a Hawaii territorial, pre-territory of the monarchy. So the monarchy had the following action to prevent the carrying of deadly weapons, which recognized the habit of carrying deadly weapons is dangerous to life and public peace. So they said in 1854 that we're gonna have fines and imprisonment for any person not authorized by law who shall carry or be found armed with any bowie knife, sword, cane, pistol, air gun, slung shot, or other deadly weapon. And that was continued in territorial time. So the history of laws regulating carrying openly or concealed is a history of saying no, only certain people, which they went on to say, soldiers and so on, or maybe exempt. That's what the Hawaii law is right now. Hawaii law is perhaps on the ropes because of a case out of New York, which is similar to what we have here. And the Supreme Court looks inclined at least to strike it down. Now, what happened just to fill in a little bit and then we'll go back to Peter and to Jay. So that's a federal decision in 2008 in Heller. Question then was, does it apply to the states? And that's the argument about what's fundamental. In 2010, the Supreme Court's in a fractured decision said, yes, it does apply to the states with different opinions as to why it applies to the states or whether this is like substantive due process, which the conservatives claim not to like. And Scalia said, yeah, it is substantive due process, but I'll go along. Thomas interestingly said, we should go back to the beginning and it's the privileges or immunities part of the 14th Amendment, which has been a dead letter basically since 1873. So he would go off in that direction. In any event, they said it does apply to the states. So that's why our law and the laws of all the other states are in a way before the Supreme Court right now. Even in Heller, however, the court recognized that some kinds of arms could not be carried, were not covered by Heller. And secondly, that if you had a long standing law against carrying arms, then that was presumptively legal. So we don't know what the court's gonna do, but just to finish this, Judge Bybee on the Ninth Circuit recently wrote, and they've been looking at this for a number of years. So this is about Hawaii and the name of the case is young. And he said, and he's someone who considers himself an historian, but he's also a very conservative guy. He is regarded as the main author of the torture memo during the George W. Bush administration. So he's no flaming liberal. He says, our review of more than 700 years of English and American legal history reveals a strong theme. Government has the power to regulate arms in the public square. History is messy. The record is not uniform, but this is the overwhelming evidence. I think that's right. I think Peter can fill that in and add to it. But does the court really care about the history? We shall see. Oh, Peter. Thank you. I'm coming to your class for sure. I've always wanted to. Yeah. So, Jay, did you have another question or do you want to? Oh, many, many questions. But Avi suggested you might want to, you know, get into this right now. Well, just very briefly, I obviously prefer to agree with Avi for a variety of reasons, including baseball. But I think today what we have, and contrary to what some of the justices would see, really it's hard to see a political court. I don't know if it's ever been, but right now it seems to be very difficult. And that's not to say partisan. It's to say, picking up on what Avi said, this court seems to be inclined towards American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism about religion and about abortion. I'm not saying right or wrong, but philosophically, the American experience with gun control is also exceptional in a couple of, I think, important ways. The question of a militia made perfect sense in the late 18th, early 19th century when there was no standing army. There was still plenty of violence, not internally, both Native Americans and potentially with Canadians. So to have a militia, right, made sense. Right, that made sense. Then at least two or three very important works by renowned historians have suggested that let's also be honest about this. That the Southern States, again, wanted the Second Amendment. They did not want African-American slaves arms. There was no army to protect slavery until 1861 with the army in North Virginia, but weapons in the hands of slave owners and their allies were either one, a deterrent to rebellion, which everybody went to bed hearing, or two, a dramatic response. When we talk about American conceptualism, I think those are two we need to act. Most European kingdoms had standing armies, and so militias were not really relevant. You see what militias mean in European tradition. They mean the arming of political extremists, all right? And secondly, and I don't think the court wants to really mess with this, Avi, you can correct me, is it is one war at least partial legacy of slavery. At least that's what two very well-respected authors who are American historians have written. Times have changed dramatically, and we are in times, you know, when I was a kid, I belonged to the NRA, and I took my Mossberg 22 out, and, you know, I hate to admit to shot little tiny animals and things. Okay. I am now resigning for the show. So wasn't it Cain, it was a gun you had. But, you know, the NRA has changed. They were threatening queens. You were doing this in self-defense. No, no, no. This was up in the Catskills. Thank you very much. Yeah, I could see Jay as head of the militia. Yeah, he was. But my point is the NRA has completely changed. And the people in and around the NRA, including the Russians, you know, have a whole new view of guns, and it's connected, you know, with assault rifles. It's connected. It's political. It's Trump. It's a right-wing militia. To use militia in the common definition today, it's a lot different than in revolutionary times, the word militia. So we have a very dangerous situation on our hand because of the political environment in which we live. And I think we have to look at the Second Amendment in the context of that. I consider the Second Amendment a very dangerous part of our constitutional future. Don't you, Avi? Well, if the Second Amendment said what the court has said instead, maybe, but it's not that you can't blame the Second Amendment, you got to blame the court, I think. And I've got to emphasize that the Supreme Court of the United States several times had the opportunity to say it protects individual rights and several times said, no, it doesn't. So what they did in 2008 was not following precedent at all. And it was really just saying, we don't care about that. We've now found something in the text which I tried to suggest is not really in the text at all, nor is it in history or tradition or the usual things that you looked at. So you have Parkland and dozens of other examples all in the last few years where it's obvious that we need more gun control. It's also obvious that the GOP is never, in its present form, never gonna vote for any gun control and it becomes very dangerous for the citizen. That leaves it in the hands of the Supreme Court to reverse or modify Heller, to come up with a new approach where the average person has greater security on the streets of our country. But this doesn't seem likely either. Where are we going, Avi? Well, I'm more optimistic than you as a general rule but on this one, it's very hard to be optimistic. Now, it may be the Supreme Court has a narrow decision and that could be for lots of reasons including that some of the most conservative and most recent justices wanna kind of keep their powder dry as it were for another term or two before they really do much more damage. And I personally think they're not gonna overrule Roe versus Wade, for example. They're cutting away at it as the court has been doing for decades. So they will cut away at it further. And I think that's not the Texas case. I think it's the Mississippi case. And they'll say, oh, it's an undue burden. No, it's not undue burden. We hear by fine. So the court has a lot of discretion and a lot of ways of hiding what they're doing from the general public. And optimist that I may be, that's really tricky. Now, an argument about the vigilante part of the most recent Texas abortion law was, hey, if the state can do this and then say, oh, you can't sue us. You can't sue anyone in the state. The same thing could go on in a state that likes gun control. But they could say, well, private citizens can enforce this. So that one little moment, the second amendment argument was actually useful when Justice Kagan pinned down the Texas lawyer. But let's hope. Now, we have people, and it's dramatic right now as we're watching two jury trials that people say self-defense. You just say, okay, self-defense. And that's why I carried from cross-state lines, I carried this gun, an assault rifle. I needed that for self-defense, which is the written house of the Wisconsin case. We'll see what the jury does. He may be acquitted, it's a possibility at the moment. And what's troubling about that is there are people who really won't like an acquittal. And that takes us back to the streets. And on the streets, there is a lack of gun control, I would say, that stands in the way of gun violence in the streets. So the whole thing is, it seems to be accelerating. I was telling you about an article, a blog in the Vera Institute of Justice. This was in 2014 where they made an analysis of why young people and maybe not so young people got involved in guns, got involved in violence. And what seems clear is that in our current environment, including the media, not only entertainment media, which has plenty of violence with guns, I mean, you could count the number of guns you see every day, every day in so many movies and shows. It's ridiculous and it doesn't, even with all the violence in the country, the amount in the media does not accurately portray. The reality either is so many guns, but also it's the news itself, all parts of the news, which seems to extol the virtue of guns. And then of course, the Vera Institute talked about what makes guns and violence so popular among young people and how they're attracted to it. It's a whole psychological process, including minimization of the violence when you get hurt. And if you survive, then the psychological mechanism is to go back and do it yourself. The victim becomes the assailant. And so what we have in our modern society thanks to the media and other factors, I suppose, is an increase in the amount of violence and guns are central in the amount of violence. I'm going to report to our audience that Peter Havenberg's internet went down and he is unable to join us. And so it's just, it's just obvious me to talk about, you know, I mean, this is more than just guns. It's the ability of the government as it stands to properly interpret the constitution and to keep us safe, which is a fundamental obligation of government everywhere and anywhere. And so, you know, what does this tell us about the constitution in current times and the government's enforcement at the right word, government's interpretation, the government's deployment of the constitution in current times. It's a larger question than just guns. Well, I haven't asked you to ask that or say that, but it does feed right into something that I've been working on for decades without any effect and I'm now trying to write about. And that is that there was such a notion of the government as protecting the citizenry. And that was actually constitutionalized, wasn't it, with equal protection in the 14th Amendment. And the equal part is where we have spent all our time really and we've forgotten the protection part, but they were quite serious about the protection part. And in fact, they based the 14th Amendment largely on 1866 Civil Rights Act, the first civil rights act ever which guaranteed, first of all, declared that blacks were citizens of other people too, but it said, okay, blacks are citizens, former slaves, now you're citizens. And as citizens, you have the following rights and it went through a long list and said, full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings. You are guaranteed that, you're guaranteed full as well as equal. So what does it mean to have full protection? And they listed some of the things but they also had an idea correctly that there was a need for protection for former slaves because what happened in the South was somewhat for civil is worse than they thought, but of course there was violence immediately aimed at former slaves and attempts to keep them in everything but slavery and not let them leave the plantations where they had been enslaved and so on. And that's what the 39th Congress was responding to, both in the statute I mentioned and in the 14th Amendment. And the court's scary to worry about protection because paternalism is a part of it and other things. And so we've just steered away from it almost completely. But if you go back to the point you made, Jay, why do we come into society from the jungle or the forest or wherever we came from? And John Locke was very influential theoretician but not high pollutant theory. He was read and understood certainly by framers of the constitution. He was a major factor, someone they read. Jefferson sent Madison John Locke so he'd be prepared for the constitutional convention. John Locke said, you come in for protection. That's why you enter society. And that makes some intuitive sense. So yes, the government is a correlative relationship, it says, and you have rights and duties and they go together and the state has some duties to protect you in your rights, which is actually what the 14th Amendment is largely about. And we talked about the First Amendment. Well, they have a duty to protect the freedom of expression, even if the crowd is hostile. They have a duty to protect the person who's pissed them off and make sure that the speaker doesn't get beaten up or killed or whatever. So it's a longstanding but overlooked part of what equal protection and what the 14th Amendment are about. Peters may be back. I'm sorry. Avi and I were talking about the protection part of the 14th Amendment and how security is a really important part of government. Government should protect us. And I guess where I get stuck on that is what we're talking about originally. Does the 14th Amendment, I'm sorry, does the Second Amendment provide a free society? Maybe then, because we didn't have, as Avi pointed out, a standing army or Peter, you pointed that out. And did we need it? Do we need the Second Amendment then? We need the Second Amendment now. It seems to me that protection against too many guns is more important now. We have a standing army for larger security issues. Why do we need it at all? The thing people always say when they talk about exceptionalism in this country is that this country has the ability to change with changing times. I would dispute that. I don't think we change fast enough. I don't think, for example, we've been fast enough about infrastructure and all our restructuraries old by decades, not just a few months. And the same thing with guns. Guns and violence has changed the country. It's made us less secure in our personal lives. But we haven't changed in favor of greater protection. We've changed in favor of less protection. Is the government, is the interpretation of the Constitution changing with changing times? Isn't there a complete disconnect on that, Abbey? Yes. Moving on to the next question. But Peter, Peter, I even invoked John Locke without you to correct me. Oh, thank you. I would hardly correct you except on who is starting the institution. Otherwise, I defer to you. But the Constitution- Do you want to pick up that one first? Sure. Sure. The Constitution, of course, has changed in interpretation over time. And to some extent, that's a good thing, right? So, classically, in there are many places one could cite, but Earl Warren or unanimous court in Brown versus Porter Education that we can't turn the clock back. We have to recognize what segregation means in this society right now. And it has effects on hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. That was, I think, a good decision. Now, you can argue that black teachers lost their jobs, which is true in many other things. And it's certainly said in motion Southern resistance, which we're still paying for in many ways. Nonetheless, a good decision. And I think he was a bit wrong about what you could have found in the history of the 14th Amendment, but it was complicated. And history is complicated. It's messy. As I quoted Judge Abbey is saying, history is messy. It doesn't give you the kind of security and the psychological reassurance of, oh, it's all in the text. We'll just look at what the words mean, which is kind of silly, actually, but it is where our current court tends to be. Peter. So I think a couple of obviously existentialist questions. What is a free society? And I think other than the absolute stream of anarchism, the understood inclusion is freedom in a safe society. So it seems to me just as the comment at the well of Congress yesterday about, does the First Amendment cover an enemy video in which one person is clearly killing another? No, because that enemy and that expression, and Abbey can correct me again, is equivalent to yelling fire in a crowded theater. You can tell that there will be a lack of safety as a consequence of that fear. It seems to me that as Abbey suggested, all decisions have always been political. I think the problem now is that they are partisan. I mean, need to separate partisan from political. Make a political decision legally is to say like, justice randomized, there is a social context to this, times have changed. But clearly what has happened, and look at among many things about Trump being wrong, Trump was honest. I have appointed these justices. They are bound to my partisan view. I think that's the problem. And so what many people recognize, the majority of Americans recognize that there should be some gun control. It's like abortion, every single point, right? So the question is whether a partisan minority can overtake a majority and lead to an unsafe society. I think the case, regardless what you think about Kyle in Kenosha, what the prosecution said is really true. When you go to a place armed and throw yourself into an armed situation, you really cannot cry self-defense. And that's why I think the NRA argument really falls on its head. Increasing guns do not make that safe. You can't simply say then, I have the freedom to then bring an AR-15 to make society unsafe. All right, so we all, most people want an open society. Well, it's not everybody that's true. But I think we also want a safe society. So $64,000 question is, does a 17-year-old with an AR-15 make for a safe society, whether it's open or not? Well, let's talk about the future of the society just for a moment, Dobby. Some people think we're on the way to some kind of autocracy. And it isn't just Trump. It's the GOP, it's the new base. It's people who kind of like autographs because autographs can quote, get things done, end quote. So a free society may not be what we have, at least in the current understanding of what that means, going forward. How does the Second Amendment work in a society that is less than the free society we have that is more like an autocracy? How does the Second Amendment work in that case? Oh, I think that you're pointing to the, or underscoring what Peter just said, which is, if you start arming people, then other people are gonna get armed and this gets back to the Vera Institute study you were talking about before. That happens to be true and has been recognized for a long, long time and is recognized in most countries. We have a Wild West mythology and it's hard to get over our mythology. On the other hand, also as Peter said, you poll Americans and they are in favor of reasonable gun control. And Heller allowed for reasonable gun control. The court hasn't taken a gun case, so they've certainly been asked to for more than a decade. So that's what's really worrisome about this New York case and the fact that the court took it because they don't care about the popular majority. And indeed, for good and ill, the court has often stood up to the majority and it's called the counter-majoritarian problem and by Alex Bickel. This court is interventionist, activist all the time. And it seems on behalf of a certain agenda items that are high on the list for those who appointed and confirmed them. So we have a real problem. Yeah, I think it's highly partisan, it's highly partisan. I don't know if you've heard it, but my sister-in-law, Linda Greenhouse, was on a Terry Gross fresh air a week or two ago and she talked about the court in general. And one of the questions that came up that I'd like to ask you guys about is this. Is the court sensitive? And this goes to what you were just saying, Abby, to public opinion in general, or does it wall itself off from that and take the partisan approach because that's what put them on the bench essentially or that's what they are. But should the court be sensitive to public opinion? Because it seems terribly wrong looking down the bike that the court won't care, doesn't care. This was discussed on the Terry Gross fresh air show. It's troublesome to think the court doesn't care about public opinion and would go the other way and relieve most of us in the lurch. I know it's nothing we can do about that except maybe pack the court maybe. But right now, it seems to me that they're not very sensitive. Should they be more sensitive? What would you tell them to do? You go first, Peter. Okay, so I will go as the poorly informed citizen and then turn to the expert. I think there's still some value from Montesquieu of having an independent judiciary as much as possible. And that means, sure, you stick one finger out the window but again, one finger out the window in light of the larger issues we've been talking about. A free and open society as much as possible, honoring as much as possible the foundation principle, meaning that you don't bring ideology into it unless Bobby can correct me here. Unless really the Senate is allowed to ask about those questions. I mean, part of the difficulty I think in your answering question about the public is we all knew that this would happen. Both those who asked for it and those who did not ask for it but the Senate would not allow it to be discussed. I think previous decisions should be discussed. Previous views should be discussed. The court has to be somewhat, it's like, I think you can see from particularly Breyer's recent book tourer, he's very sensitive about this issue. But I also think unless you're gonna sequester judges like a jury, it's impossible. So I think though the final point is the sense of the public needs to be more open. What I find with this court is yes, each side says it's in the public interest, but each side is appealing to the silo view of their own public interest. And that's really, I think, a fundamental problem. There's no consensus about public interest. Your advice, Bobby? Well, I can give examples, I think, on both sides of this issue because we want the court to pay attention, but sometimes we want them to be independent. And so let me talk about a couple of cases from the same period. So when Dunkirk occurred is when the Supreme Court handed down its first decision about mandatory flag salute in the public schools. And Frankfurter wrote for the court and they said, yes, it's okay. That's the need for patriotism. Just a few years later, when the World War II was still going on, one of the best essays of all time written by Justice Robert, sorry, by Justice Jackson, is about the importance of not forcing what seems to be orthodoxy. Patriotism was still important. Now, maybe it looked better at that point. But Korematsu came down at the same time and Korematsu said, we're basically not gonna look at, we're not racist, we're just gonna uphold internment because of national security. That's what the experts say. So what did the public want in those three situations? Well, in the first one, I think they clearly wanted Jehovah's Witnesses not to be protected. And horrible things happened to Jehovah's Witnesses. A lot of violence of a really egregious sort. So was the court paying attention to the violence? Was it paying attention to the war? When Korematsu came down, people really knew that national security was not an issue. There's a big fight in the Justice Department as to whether to drop a footnote in a brief that said that. And I actually talked to someone who was clerking on the Supreme Court at that time. He said, we all knew, but they didn't think they could say it because the war was still going on. And then comes the Trump travel ban, which looked a lot like Korematsu in some ways. And the court just said, this isn't Korematsu. Korematsu has been overruled morally, but we don't have to overrule it legally. This isn't Korematsu. It wasn't or wasn't it with the travel ban? And Hawaii of course played an important role in providing standing in that challenge. Ultimately, the travel ban that was upheld was not nearly as bad as the first one. It was still pretty bad in the name of national security. And who knows where the public was as you had put it to a whole or a whole. You thank you for opening up a very important Pandora's box, which is what is has done during wartime. From Lincoln, of course suspended, maybe it's Corpus. And one of the problems with our constitutional system, which has generated hundreds and hundreds of constitutions, is it's not an organic system. So in Britain, for example, wartime measures can be more easily overturned than here. And I think that's a fundamental problem of having a single document. We're really among the first to do it. But Abhi, you're talking about very important cases in which allegedly there were national security interests. So should those national security interests though have a clock on them? Should a wartime measure, after the war is formally over, and we know war is due to continue, but at least the states are fighting, it would be an interesting constitutional question whether that expires. Let me return to the second amendment for a minute. We have no war. The abiding concern is the security of kids in high school, of toddlers in Sandy Hook. Yeah, I have to interrupt you just for a second, just for a second, because you and Abhi and I agree with that. But the other side, that's not, that's the issue. For them, it is a war. And they look at this as a war. I understand, I agree with that. But culturally, I think that we gotta at least recognize that for them, the other side, this is a battle. And why should not it be a battle? Let me just take a question from World War II then. Okay. Abhi, my question to you is, you are a constitutional lawyer who's been thinking about reading these cases, interpreting the constitution and the cases for a lifetime. And if you were in a room with those guys right now, to talk about their sensitivity to American values, their sensitivity to the future of the country, their sensitivity to public opinion, what would you advise them? What would you say to them? What would you advocate for in terms of their interpretation of the second amendment going forward? Well, one thing I would say, and it gets back to my point about what Scalia did to the second amendment text is you really should look at the text, but you have to be honest about it. And you look at the text in the context of context, not just because you look at five dictionaries and they are making a parody of looking at the text now and talking about syntax and telling us about the difference between adjectival and adverbial and so on. That doesn't capture why we care about the text, but the text doesn't answer the questions. There's a great saying by the founder of Reconstruction Judaism, Amor de Chai Kaplan. And he said, the past has a vote, but it doesn't have a veto. I think that's right. I think that's important, but I think that doesn't mean we ignore the text. And I've just finished co-authoring an article which went up on SSRN today, I think, which is about section two of the 14th amendment. And other people in my co-authors know a lot more about it than I do. But section two was saying, if a state interferes with the vote, they get their electoral college representation reduced. Now, this was in the context of the Civil War, hasn't been in vote for a long, long time, but it sits there as an interesting and important text which might keep us from state legislatures doing what they are now doing, which is to say, oh, we don't care what the vote was in the state, we, the legislature, get to select the electoral college representatives. Well, they don't. They want to, they have political clout. In some states, they have the majority for sure, but at least this text is a speed bump, if you will. You know, I can't help but tell you my original reaction when I went and looked at the text of the second amendment which we had on the screen. And we put that back on the screen for one more minute. My first reaction, Avi and Peter, was, you know, if you took this problem and you referred it to a first year law student at the William S. Richardson School of Law, they could have drafted it better. It is, in my view, not well drafted. If we could only go back there now and talk to those people. You agree, Avi? I mean, you're talking about looking at syntax and all that, it's not well drafted. That's true. And one of the things one learns in constitutional law quickly, I guess, is that at times there was what's been called purposeful ambiguity. Now, I don't think that's true of the second amendment, actually. I don't think it's so ambiguous, but other parts of the constitution clearly were compromised parts. Okay, Peter, it's time for you to summarize and thank Avi for coming down today. First of all, my apologies for the Zoom mishap, but Avi, thank you very much. Once again, as always, providing insight and also more than insight if you're own personal analysis and touch, which I think is really appreciated. You're one of the jewels of our community. So thank you very much. Jay, as always, he came up with a good question. So I look forward to what we're gonna discuss in two weeks. I don't know if we've answered anything, but I think if nothing else, going back to the title of the show, we've said history can't help but only so much. I think we're once again at that situation. We have to be honest with how we use the past. I think that's, particularly don't use the past as a catch-all. If you will, constitutional law can help, but only so much. And I guess if anybody and if any of my students are listening, watch where you put your comments. You're very careful about your comments. Oh, that's for a comma, right? Yes, they will come back to my chewing our collective talk. We are unanimous on that point. All right. Thank you, Avi. Thank you, Peter. Thank you so much. Everybody be well. See you.