Overseeing the destruction of the Second Amendment

If we take Barack Obama at his word -- that he supports the rights of people to own guns -- then we can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Confederate Yankee says hold that sigh because it's not true. Obama used to be the director of the Joyce Foundation, and as David Hardy report for Pajamas Media their grass-roots goal was literally the destruction of the Second Amendment:

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama must demonstrate executive experience, but he remains strangely silent about his eight years (1994-2002) as a director of the Joyce Foundation, a billion dollar tax-exempt organization. He has one obvious reason: during his time as director, Joyce Foundation spent millions creating and supporting anti-gun organizations.

There is another, less known, reason.

During Obama’s tenure, the Joyce Foundation board planned and implemented a program targeting the Supreme Court. The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are impartial, and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend.

In 1999, midway through Obama’s tenure, the Joyce board voted to grant the Chicago-Kent Law Review $84,000, a staggering sum by law review standards. The Review promptly published an issue in which all articles attacked the individual right view of the Second Amendment.

In a breach of law review custom, Chicago-Kent let an “outsider” serve as editor; he was Carl Bogus, a faculty member of a different law school. Bogus had a unique distinction: he had been a director of Handgun Control Inc. (today’s Brady Campaign), and was on the advisory board of the Joyce-funded Violence Policy Center.

Bogus solicited only articles hostile to the individual right view of the Second Amendment, offering authors $5,000 each. But word leaked out, and Prof. Randy Barnett of Boston University volunteered to write in defense of the individual right to arms. Bogus refused to allow him to write for the review, later explaining that “sometimes a more balanced debate is best served by an unbalanced symposium.” Prof. James Lindgren, a former Chicago-Kent faculty member, remembers that when Barnett sought an explanation he “was given conflicting reasons, but the opposition of the Joyce Foundation was one that surfaced at some time.” Joyce had bought a veto power over the review’s content.

This is news to a lot of people who have had a difficult time digging up Obama's stance on the Second Amendment. Whenever he's questioned on it, he chuckles and repeats the campaign BS of "I support the rights of hunters and sportsman to own firearms," and then promptly moves on without another word on the subject. Back on 5 September he tried to assuage voters in Pennsylvania (those "bitter" "clingy" voters) that he wouldn't take their guns:

“If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it."

“Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress."

But as the director of the Joyce Foundation he oversaw the grass-roots effort to undermine the Second Amendment, and the simple fact -- as backed up by the Framers themselves -- that there is an individual right to own a firearm, and that right is protected against the government. Mr. Hardy, in his piece for PJM, notes that the Heller decision effectively derailed the efforts that continue to this day to seize what it rightfully ours. Namely the ability for us to defend ourselves from not only the ugly side of society, but from an overly-intrusive government.

Read the whole piece by Mr. Hardy. It's quite eye-opening, especially the part where Professor Glenn Reynolds, AKA Instapundit and two other law professors were scheduled to discuss the Second Amendment, and the Joyce Foundation threw a hissy fit.

It can't be believed that Obama would abide by the ruling of the Supreme Court in Heller, and should he win this election (we do doubt he will win it), and if the congressional races swing towards Democrats, we will see a whole slew of new gun laws coming out of the Congress further eroding this integral right to Americans. You all thought the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Bill were bad. Imagine an Obama presidency with a rubber-stamp, filibuster-proof Congress, and the havoc they could wreak on our firearms rights.

Publius II