Author Archives: Editors

Is It Time To Amend The Amendment?

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Is It Time To Amend The Amendment?

This Post is created by Dr. Shoeb Amin

The second amendment that is….

After the Parkland, Florida High School shooting there was a sense that this time it was different; that something big will emerge from this tragedy to control gun violence in this country; laws passed for background checks before ALL gun sales at ALL venues, registration and licensing of all guns, a ban on assault weapons, even a more controversial law holding gun manufacturers liable for civil action by victims of gun violence. NOTHING of that sort happened at the federal level (some states may have enacted new legislations)and many more mass murders have occurred since, including the recent one in Boulder, CO.  And even though these mass murders get media coverage they account for a very small percentage of deaths due to gun violence; many more die in one’s and two’s from suicide, accidental deaths and homicides.

The NRA gets the blame – deservedly so – for lack of gun control legislation but really the bigger obstacle is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which gun lovers and  the NRA use to their advantage. It is hard to argue against a constitutionally given right; your patriotism itself is questioned if you speak in favor of gun control. So with the NRA in bankruptcy – and possible dissolution if the New York AG’s lawsuit succeeds – energy is better focused towards the Second Amendment. So what exactly does the Amendment say? More importantly let’s look at what its predecessor, the Virginia Bill of Rights said.

Section 17 of the Bill of Rights of Virginia said:  That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defence(sic) of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

It clearly says only a well regulated militia, IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ARMY should bear arms, that those bearing arms be well trained and those folks be subordinate to the government. Madison and the framers changed it to this as the Second Amendment of our constitution:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The critical word is “people”, which constitutional scholars and gun rights activists use to mean ANYBODY, with no training and no oversight- even though we now have a standing army that can very adequately take care of the security of the State.

So is it possible to amend the Amendment? YES.  After all the Constitution has needed 27 amendments so far; six more have been proposed but have failed to be ratified. And more importantly the 18th Amendments – for prohibition – was rescinded by the 21st amendment. So yes it is possible to amend an Amendment. But it has to be ratified by the House, the Senate and 75% of state legislatures and that’s not easy. The Equal Rights Amendment got everything except 3 states out of the 38 needed. It was derailed by one driven person. So a similar driven person/s and a lot of financial backing may be able to get it done. But what exactly would be the possible amendments to  the Amendment??  Here are a few suggested by James Hefferman on Huffpost: (changes in upper case)

INSOFAR AS a well regulated militia IS necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” (Word “being” is removed)

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms IN SUCH A MILITIA shall not be infringed.”

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed EXCEPT TO ENSURE PUBLIC SAFETY.” (This is Hefferman’s change of choice)

My suggestion:  IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ARMY, a well regulated militia being necessary for the security of the state the right of rhe people to bear arms shall not be infringed.

In all these “amendments” the current wording is not changed; just caveats are added that makes gun ownership by the people conditional on different conditions – conditions that don’t exist 200+ years after the Second Amendment was written.. This is not to take all guns away from people but to make it easier to pass simple and sensible gun control legislations because now lawmakers cannot use the Constitution as a cover for bowing to the NRA and suppressing or killing such legislation. And the courts would have a harder time overturning such legislation that have become law. 

I understand this seems like a looney and wild idea but nothing commonsensical has worked so far. As long as the Second Amendment stays the way it is we’ll keep hearing about such carnages every so often. Not to mention the daily toll gun violence takes that you only see and hear about in annual statistics.

Shoeb Amin

“Indians – A Brief History Of A Civilization” By Namit Arora

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Book Review by Ruchira Paul

“The warrior like Aryan invaders from Central Asia swept over India and supplanted its older religious and linguistic traditions with their own due mostly to the absence of any meaningful resistance from the inhabitants of India’s western borders and central plains. The Aryans brought with them a proto Indo European language which later developed into Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu scriptures and liturgy. They introduced the tradition of fire worship, a pantheon of gods very similar to that of the Greeks, the practice of burning their dead and Sati (burning the living widows of powerful men on the funeral pyre of their husband), the caste system and horses. The caste system most likely took root quickly in India because the light skinned invaders saw the darker skinned natives as an inferior class of humans. The original Aryan Vedic religion evolved to adopt and incorporate older indigenous gods such as Shiva and some powerful female gods who went on to become leading deities in the Hindu tradition. Despite the fundamentalist Hindu right’s claim that the Aryans and their language Sanskrit were entirely of local Indian origin, modern day linguistics and genetic studies convincingly point to an Aryan migration trail radiating east and west towards Persia, South Asia and Europe from a region in Central Asia.”

 Hindu-Muslim relations India have been studied and there is much to examine and contemplate especially in light of the rise in Hindu nationalism in present day India which describes the Muslim rule in India as an unmitigated disaster. In that context it is fair to ask why India did not go the way of Iran, another ancient Aryan civilization with an old established religion and a magnificent history of scholarship, art, architecture and warfare that converted almost entirely to Islam after the Arab invasion while India remained a majority Hindu entity throughout the almost 700 years of Muslim rule. (At the time of the Indian Independence in 1947, undivided India was about 25% Muslim)

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A vision for agriculture

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( A worth reading article on how farmers are reverting back to old healthy ways of raising livestock-f.sheikh)

We know how to replace toxic, intensive livestock raising with beautiful, efficient grasslands. Do we have the will?

It hit him about 1:30 on a Sunday morning last September, as he hurried to combine the last of the corn and beat the building thunderstorms: ‘Why am I killing myself to feed these cows? Why am I scraping and hauling their manure to the fields, milking three times a day – for a check that doesn’t cover the bills?’ Chatting at the local coffee shop, Zeke and his buddies discussed the pros and cons of managed grazing as an alternative. Most of them dismissed it as ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘good for the hippies but not real farmers’. But Zeke had heard stories of it saving a farm or two, so he figured: ‘What do I have to lose? I’m not payin’ the bills this way!’

Progress has manifested itself in odd ways in agriculture. Grass farmers say: ‘Animals have legs, and plants have roots, for a reason.’ Allowing cows out to harvest their own feed and spread their own manure is the most profitable means of producing meat and milk. But, somehow, agricultural science has encouraged farmers to mount a treadmill of increasing yields of milk or meat by increasing the amount of production per unit input. This means reliance on three intensive practices: first, genetic alteration for higher plant feed and animal yields; second, the application of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and growth compounds; and third, concentrating livestock in barns and feedlots where they can be fed a carefully balanced, high-priced diet, and their excreta is collected and redistributed elsewhere. These strategies were wildly successful with respect to increasing yields. But they have come with two general downsides that are inescapable: first, the profits of the system accrue mainly to the suppliers of seed, pesticides, fertilisers and genetics; and second, the costs of the system accrue to all of society in the form of devastating environmental degradation.

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Where were the protesters when the Rohingya were being murdered? By Kenan Malik

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Myanmar’s coup has brought thousands on to the streets, but in 2017 they were empty.

For almost three weeks there have been mass protests on the streets of Myanmar. On 1 February, the Tatmadaw, or military, moved against the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, claiming fraud in last November’s elections, which her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), comprehensively won.

Since then, civil servants and teachers, bus drivers and garment workers have taken to the streets. Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, was brought to a standstill by a “broken-down” rally, where drivers left their cars parked across the roads, with bonnets open. There are even stories of police having joined in.

The nationwide defiance of the military coup has been courageous and impressive, and echoes similar protests in Russia, Belarus and elsewhere. But, as welcome and important as these demonstrations are, they also lead to a difficult and uncomfortable question. Where was all the marching and shouting and defiance over the past four years as the Tatmadaw organised a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people, razing their villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh?

The Rohingya, Muslims who live mostly in the north-west state of Rakhine, bordering Bangladesh, are the most persecuted of Myanmar’s many ethnic groups. Though Rohingya have lived in Rakhine for generations, they are treated, officially and unofficially, as foreigners. The authorities refer to them as “Bengalis”, and the 2014 census refused to include Rohingya as an ethnic category.

The military junta that came to power in Myanmar in 1962 (or Burma as it was then) fomented hatred against the Rohingya as a means of cementing support. The latest and most vicious drive began in 2017. Under the pretext of a campaign against “terrorists”, the army implemented a programme of ethnic cleansing, which many deem as possessing “genocidal intent”, a clampdown as brutal as China’s suppression of the Uighurs.

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posted by f. sheikh