Neal Goldfarb

So if I'm right about "bear arms," that raises serious issues about how to give (legal) meaning to the Second Amendment given the tectonic changes in American society over the past 230 years. 9/

E.g., regarding the defending-against-tyranny theory: How does that theory translate to a situation in which the country is deeply divided about what does and does not constitute tyranny? During the Obama administration, many of the gun-rights people regarded him as a tyrant. 10/

Those of us on the other side thought that they were delusional. Now many of those on the opposite side of the gun issue think that Trump is an authoritarian, a tyrant wannabe,... 11/

and precisely the kind of demagogue that the Founders were worried about when they decided against direct election of the President. As a practical matter, if the people walking around wearing camo and toting AR15-type weapons start using in earnest for political purposes, 12/

[using *them in earnest] they're not going to use them against the federal government, they're going to use them against the people who oppose Trump. 13/

Shifting focus... Jonathan, you've obviously read at least some of what I've written about the 2nd Am (otherwise how would you have known anything about what I'd said about "keep arms"?) 14/

You haven't said anything suggesting you think that I'm wrong about anything I've said (nor has anybody else on the pro-gun-rights side). That could be interpreted as a tacit admission that I'm right. 15/

It's been more than a month before I finished discussing "bear arms," and Dennis Baron's conclusion about "bear arms" goes back 14 months. It's been a year since @JoshMBlackman reported the results of his own corpus analysis (w/James Phillips), 16/