Las Vegas predictions for 2023

Las Vegas predictionsAlmost none of my Las Vegas predictions for 2022 from last December came true. But of course they weren’t supposed to. It was just me, still New To Las Vegas, committing satirical social commentary. Here I go again for 2023.

–Fresh off his second straight defeat for statewide office, Adam “Fourth Generation Nevadan” Laxalt moves back to the Washington, D.C., area where he grew up and lived much more of his life.

–Facing a lawsuit claiming deceptive marketing, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority changes the official slogan from “What Happens Here, Only Happens Here” to “What Happens Here, Could Happen To You.”

–The Nevada Department of Education throws a party after a new national study ranks the state’s public schools only the 48th worst in the country, an improvement.

–Cisco Aguilar, the newly elected Nevada Secretary of State, continues the policy of not enforcing a new state law requiring many telemarketers soliciting funds within Nevada for dubious causes to first register their cause with the state.

–Clark County officials call a press conference to declare that a new specialized court set up just to handle crime committed near Las Vegas Blvd. should not be interpreted to mean the Strip isn’t safe for tourists. Continue reading

Despite vow, Las Vegas fallen-cop charity transparency hasn’t improved

Las Vegas fallen-cop charity

See update at end of story

In my annual look last year at Las Vegas’s Injured Police Officers Fund, its new leadership said the nonprofit agency to aid families of fallen cops in the Las Vegas area would work to add transparency to its operations. So far, I haven’t seen evidence of this.

IPOF, as I will explain below, is a meritorious law-enforcement-themed nonprofit in many ways. But it still does not post its latest annual IRS 990 tax filing, a public record that contains a wealth of information, on its website. This isn’t legally required so long as a charity provides a copy to a requester upon request, but has been highly recommended by the IRS and charity watchdogs for years as a good governance practice for nonprofits.

At my request, IPOF recently sent me its 990 for the year ending December 31, 2021 (there’s always a long lag between the end of the reporting period and when the document becomes available). The filing still didn’t list–or give any hint of–the magnitude of what may have become IPOF’s major function: overseeing the collection of designated donations for specific fallen officers, which are then remitted to the officer or his next-of-kin.

It’s possible these individual campaigns in some years total in the millions of dollars, or at least dwarf the relatively modest numbers shown on the 990. I would suggest that tax-exempt nonprofits acting as the public face for such donations have an obligation to disclose the collective extent of such fundraising to the public. None of this is revealed on IPOF’s 990. Continue reading

Around Las Vegas–as predicted here–‘None of These Candidates’ ballot line in Nevada keeps U.S. Senate with Dems

None of These Candidates

Part of mail ballot in Las Vegas

See update at end of story

In this space on October 24, I made a bold prediction. Nevada’s unique and even cynical “None of These Candidates” ballot line could cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate. No one else I saw at the time wrote about the spoiler scenario I envisioned from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.

Now I’m getting ready to take a bow.

For four days in a painfully slow vote count, first-term incumbent Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto trailed upstart Republican Adam Laxalt. But on Saturday night, mainly on the strength of continual counting of mail-in ballots from heavily Democratic Clark County (home to Las Vegas and 74% of the state’s population), Laxalt finally fell behind. If that holds–and almost all the uncounted votes are from Clark County–Cortez Masto will become the 50th Democrat in the 100-member U.S. Senate. With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, that would give the Dems control for another two years regardless of who wins the run-off election next month in Georgia. CNN and the Associated Press just called the race for Cortez Masto.

Laxalt is now trailing Cortez Masto by 4,982 votes. But None of These Candidates is pulling more than twice as many votes, 11,877 votes. It’s widely believed among political pros in Nevada that NOTC disproportionately draws far more votes away from disaffected Republicans than it does from disaffected Democrats. Continue reading

Around Las Vegas, could ‘None of These Candidates’ ballot line determine U.S. Senate control?

None of These Candidates

Portion of mail-in ballot in Las Vegas

Nevada elections are quirky, and that was true long before voters in the county immediately to the west of Las Vegas elected a dead pimp to the state Assembly. But two unusual provisions in Nevada election law–banning write-in candidates while affording voters the option in statewide primary and general races to formally choose “None of These Candidates”–might actually determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the U.S. Senate come next January.

That’s because (1) the Senate is now split 50-50, and (2) first-term Nevada incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto is in a surprisingly tight race with Republican Adam Laxalt. Pollsters now rate the contest a toss-up.

This is where None of These Candidates (NOTC) might come into play as the spoiler. It is an article of faith among political experts in Nevada that NOTC attracts far more upset Republican-leaning voters in general elections than it does upset Democratic-leaning voters. There even have been several contests in Nevada where NOTC has gotten more voters than all candidates. (How do you put that on the “winning” candidate’s resume?) NOTC votes are disregarded when determining the winner, but the law requires that the results for NOTC be included in every official voting tally. A public shaming, I suppose.

Think I am engaging in rank hypotheticals? In 1998, long before I became New To Las Vegas, Harry Reid, the incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator (and later majority leader) seeking a third term, won by a scant 401 votes over Republican John Ensign. NOTC received 8,011 votes, 20 times Reid’s margin of victory. Continue reading

Las Vegas Review-Journal touts journalism awards but buries news of circulation drop

circulation dropThe coverage was hard to miss. “RJ sweeps top journalism awards,” screamed the headline stripped across the top of the regional news section cover of the print Las Vegas Review-Journal on Sunday, September 25. The story said the paper took “every top investigative and institutional award in the urban division” of the annual Nevada Press Foundation competition. The story jumped to two inside pages and was adorned by 29 photos of winning staffers. The pictures included Jeff German, the investigative reporter murdered just three weeks earlier allegedly by an elected official he was writing about.

But the previous Sunday’s paper had information at least equally significant about the RJ that was much, much harder to find. It was buried in a legal notice itself buried at the right-bottom corner of page 8-G of the real estate section, near classified ads for a missing parrot, taxi driver openings and the sale of “top XXX DVDs.” In effect the RJ fessed up to yet another year of paid circulation declines, leaving the count at barely a quarter of what it was when present ownership assumed control in 2015, the year before I became New To Las Vegas.

The RJ published the data, officially called the Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation, only because it’s a condition of having a second-class mailing permit allowing lower postage for subscriptions. This is the same kind of government subsidy the paper’s conservative editorial pages regularly bash when offered to, say, ordinary folks in the form of entitlements. (A few years back, the paper published the annual statement so full of typos it violated the requirement that it be truthful and had to publish a corrected version a week later.) Continue reading

Forbes 400 members in Las Vegas rise 50%–to three

Forbes 400 list in Las VegasWay back in 1892, the highly influential New-York Tribune published the first-ever list of the richest Americans. And what a roster it was: an astonishing unranked compilation of the 4,047 persons the paper’s editors thought were “reputed to be worth a million or more.” (Based on the per-capita share then of the total U.S. economy, that’s the equivalent now of $1.5 billion each.)

But despite its scope–1 out of every 6,300 adult Americans and more than 10 times the number of swells that Malcolm Forbes nearly a century later starting in 1982 would call the Forbes 400–the Tribune list included no one living in Nevada. Why? “The enormously valuable silver mines of Nevada have laid the foundation of a large number of private fortunes,” the Tribune explained. “But the possessors of them now live in other states, the majority in San Francisco and New York City.”

They certainly didn’t live in Las Vegas. It was not yet a city and barely a place. Eight years later at the 1900 census the total population was recorded as a mere 18 (all of whom can be viewed on this single census enumeration page). The entire state population was just 42,000.

The New-York Tribune, which never again published such a rich list, is long out of business. But Forbes magazine is still around. The 41st edition of the Forbes 400 was published yesterday. The number of folks included from the Las Vegas area rose from last year by 50%.

To all of three.

That’s a shadow of the high point in 2016, the year I became New To Las Vegas, when nine folks from the area made the famous roster. Since then, failure to keep up with other fortunes, often technology-generated, has helped to take its toll on the local count. Continue reading

Wide coverage of reporter’s murder reflects Las Vegas reputation

Las Vegas reputation

The New York Times, front page, Sunday, September 11, 2022

The murder of a working journalist anywhere is big news. This is especially true when it appears the motives were anger with past investigative reporting and a desire to stop future investigative reporting.

But as I have written in this space, bad things that take place in Las Vegas often get more attention elsewhere simply because of Las Vegas’s reputation for–bad things. I think that might help explain this headline and its display yesterday about the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, allegedly at the hands of a terribly obscure elected official, on the most prominent and prestigious media venue in the world, the front page of the Sunday edition of The New York Times:

Violent End to a Career Exposing Las Vegas Sins 

Editors, I think, love putting derivations of the word “sin” in close proximity to “Las Vegas” and then playing them up. By contrast, 45 years ago, The Times reported the June 2, 1977, bombing in Phoenix of investigative reporter Don Bolles of the Arizona Republic the next day on page 47, and his death 11 days later, equally buried on page 34. A veteran investigative reporter like German, Bolles was only investigating Mafia connections, of which Phoenix–like the Las Vegas of old–had plenty.

I don’t mean to pick just on The Times. If anything, the Las Vegas citizenry has only itself to blame for this kind of media treatment. After all, it was the publicly funded Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority that about 20 years ago came up with the wildly successful marketing slogan, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” The alluring motto all but invited external media to see what was going on here. Of course, that also meant what happens here wouldn’t stay here for too long, as I have detailed in a series of reports entitled “It Didn’t Stay Here,” a list of which can be found elsewhere on this page.

History plays a big role in imaging. In 2018 ex-UNLV teacher Jonathan Foster published a book that identified Las Vegas as a “stigma city,” which he defined as a place whose perceived qualities “reside outside of a society’s norms at a given time.” Even today, Los Vegas promotes its mobbed-up past as a tourist draw, with restaurants and monuments named for killers and the government-backed Mob Museum in the downtown area. Indeed, in my view, as someone New To Las Vegas, the locals generally remain proud of their stigma. Continue reading

Another iffy police fundraiser in Las Vegas flouts Nevada law

iffy police fundraiserThe caller to the New to Las Vegas world headquarters identified himself as Brian Hill. The purpose: to solicit a contribution for National Police Support Fund PAC, which he described as an organization to bolster law enforcement.

I cut to the chase. A new Nevada law requires fundraisers in the state working on behalf of law enforcement causes to register and make filings, I said. Are you registered to solicit in Nevada?

“Hold on a sec,” the caller replied. There was a pause. “Hold on.”

Then “Brian Hill” hung up on me.

I’m using quotes around the name because Brian was not a real person. Rather, I was hearing a realistic-sounding voice generated by a computer monitored by an anonymous supervisor using what is known as soundboard technology. But the hang-up hardly surprised me. I’ve gotten calls before from “Brian Hill,” and I’ve researched NPSF, which is based in Arlington Va. It is not registered to cold-call in Nevada, according to the website of the Nevada Secretary of State. But in this minimal government state, I don’t expect authorities to do anything about that. When it comes to Carson City, what they say isn’t always what they do.

Moreover, from what I can tell from its filings, NPSF has terrible financial efficiencies, spending the overwhelming bulk of the money raised in raising it, leaving very, very little to further the stated mission. Would-be donors, of course, are not told this. There is no shortage of withering commentary on the Internet about NPSF, although not so much on financial matters. The criticism is tempered a bit by posts suggesting the outfit does actually advocate for cops, even if not a lot in my judgement given the amount of money raised.

The PAC in the name stands for political action committee, meaning NPFS is not a charity although its pitch on the phone about helping police officers might make you think it is. This accounts for some of the expressed hostility. Continue reading

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez continue grand Las Vegas wedding tradition

Las Vegas weddingThe celebrity gossip site TMZ broke the big news today that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got hitched over the weekend in Las Vegas. E! News reported marriage was solemnized–you know, the “I do” stuff–at the venerable A Little White Wedding Chapel. Can there be better evidence that Sin City is back as a destination?

Five years ago next week, not long after becoming New To Las Vegas, I wrote about the quicky wedding industry in Las Vegas and Nevada, and its surprising influence and importance in the regional economy. I described how it’s possible to get a marriage license on a weekend–as Ben and Jen did at 11:32 p.m. on Saturday night–and even described the history of A Little White Wedding Chapel. The post, with a touch of updating, is reproduced below. Were I writing anew on the important topic, I might change a few numbers–the pandemic certainly affected things–but not much else.


Las Vegas weddings are still a big industry

Continue reading

Far from Las Vegas: Phony Roswell Incident hits 75th anniversary

Roswell IncidentJuly 4 today marks the 246th birthday of the country’s founding. But there’s another anniversary of note this week. It was 75 years ago, in 1947, the world learned about something that happened in the New Mexico desert which later became known as the Roswell Incident. Over time–like more than 40 years–the affair morphed into a fantastic account that an alien flying saucer crashed and recovered alien bodies sat in a morgue somewhere amid a giant government cover-up. Notoriety about the Roswell Incident helped spur public interest about UFOs, which continues to this day. Last year, the Pentagon admitted to Congress that it can’t explain 143 incidents dating back to 2004 of what it now calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

Long before becoming New To Las Vegas, I lived in New Mexico and had occasion more than a quarter-century ago to delve at length into the legitimacy of the Roswell Incident. I took a hard look at the evidence and interviewed a lot of folks.

I’m not here to opine about all the other UFO claims out there (although I once wrote on another blog about the Maury Island Incident, a debunked UFO episode in Washington State the same summer as the Roswell Incident). But I am here to tell you there’s no good evidence that anything extraterrestrial happened around Roswell. And no bodies. The only noteworthy element I found was the ability of the Roswell Incident to turn alleged little green men into actual big green dollars for an army of enthusiasts including certain authors and some Roswell residents. (Las Vegas and Nevada are not immune from UFOs as a business opportunity, either, as I wrote here in 2017.)

In August 1996, I published my investigative findings in Crosswinds, at the time New Mexico’s largest alternative newspaper, co-owned and edited by my good friend, Steve Lawrence. Sadly, both Steve and his publication are now deceased. The lengthy story was entitled “Now where was it those aliens crashed?” The text, with any substantive updates [in brackets like this], is reproduced below. (A version of this post was published in this space in 2019.) Were I writing it from scratch today, I’m not sure I would revise anything beyond adding more evidence of the grift. A later article by me in 2001 also in Crosswinds debunked the Roswell Incident in even greater detail.

The New Mexico map illustrating this post was published with my 1996 story in Crosswinds. Please refer to it as you read, as it pretty much gives away the Roswell con. Continue reading

In Las Vegas there’s vision–and then there’s reality

The “vision statement” on the website of the Clark County (Nevada) Assessor’s Office in Las Vegas says the goal is to become “the most technologically advanced, user-friendly Assessor’s Office in the country.” As this montage of screenshots shows on Wednesday, the day before some property tax cap forms are technically due and taxpayers, including those at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters, are frantically trying to look up their parcel number, the vision is still a bit short of reality.Clark County Tax Assessor

Poor financial efficiencies for first responder ‘faux charity’ illegally trolling Las Vegas

first responder 'faux charity'Recently, at the New To Las Vegas world headquarters I got a cold call from one “Ralph Bennett” soliciting money for Firefighters and EMS Fund, which lists an address in Alexandria, Va. I use quotes because “Ralph” wasn’t a person in the traditional beating-heart sense of the word. Rather, “Ralph” was a voice generated by a computer monitored by a human operator using what is known as soundboard technology. The operator chooses–sort of like a DJ–among scores of pre-recorded sound bites to entice the would-be donor.

“Ralph” went on about how his national organization helped first responders. I cut in and asked if Firefighters and EMS Fund was a charity. “Yes,” he replied. I politely challenged that characterization, suggesting with another question the outfit was simply a political action committee. A PAC most definitely isn’t a charity since, among other reasons, contributions aren’t tax-deductible and it doesn’t do what most folks would consider good works for society.

“Yes,” replied “Ralph” again.

Perhaps even he realized this conversation wasn’t going well from his perspective. “Ralph” finally said Firefighters and EMS Fund was “rebranded” and used to be called Firefighters Support Fund. Now that piqued my interest “Why was it rebranded?” I asked.

“Ralph” hung up.

Poking around the Internet, it didn’t take long to figure out a possible reason for the rebranding. Under its old name, “Ralph’s” organization had drawn negative comments for misleading would-be donors about what it does.

But for me there are two bigger issues. First, from my review of filings, only a sliver of what Firefighters and EMS Fund/Firefighters Support Fund received in contributions was spent for what I would call its stated mission of generating political support for first responders. Almost all the money went for fundraising expense, overhead and, presumably buried somewhere amid thousands of pages of filings, compensation for its operators. Firefighters and EMS Fund is what I called a “faux charity,” a PAC that hopes would-be donors will think it is a real charity. Some other commentators call such operations a “scam charity.”

Secondly, by calling me, Firefighters and EMS Fund violated a Nevada law that look effect last year. The law requires fundraisers working in Nevada for, among other causes, firefighters and public safety to first register with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office and make financial filings. I just checked with the SOSO’s website, and there is no registration for Firefighters and EMS Fund, Firefighters Support Fund or Firefighters Support Alliance, another name associated with the operation.

But don’t bet on Nevada state regulators doing much about it. Continue reading

Bugsy Siegel murder 75 years ago changed Las Vegas forever

Bugsy Siegel

Murdered body of Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, Beverly Hills,    June 20, 1947

Seventy-five years ago this month, the most famous murder of consequence in Las Vegas history took place. The killing, which officially remains unsolved, profoundly changed the future gambling mecca forever. Yet the crime didn’t happen here, or even within the state.

I’m referring to the grisly assassination on June 20, 1947, of Las Vegas organized crime boss Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel. Just 41, he was shot multiple times at point-blank range while reading a newspaper by an unknown sniper wielding a .30 caliber military M1 carbine. Where?  The living room of the home of Siegel’s girlfriend–280 miles away in Beverly Hills, Calif. His eye was found 15 feet from his once-handsome but now blasted-away face, an image immortalized in famous newspaper pictures.

Siegel was a truly despicable character with, despite his relative youth, a decades-long history of murder, extortion and racketeering on both coasts and points in between. Yet his eternal identification with Las Vegas comes notwithstanding his remarkably short residential stint here–barely one year. Public understanding of Siegel is far more myth than fact, thanks to over-hyping authors, short memories and a popular movie portrayal fudging the facts and glorifying his image.

While Siegel with mob money had opened the Flamingo, Las Vegas’s first lavish casino resort on what would become the Las Vegas Strip, it wasn’t his idea at all. Indeed, it is simply false to say that Siegel during his life was the father of the modern Las Vegas gambling-hotel-entertainment scene.

However, it would not be false to say that his death was. Continue reading

Again from Las Vegas: Second Amendment defenders are defending slavery

Second AmendmentEvery time there’s a mass shooting–like the school shooting this week in Uvalde, Texas, that murdered 21, the supermarket shooting earlier this month in Buffalo that killed 10 or the one just a few miles from the New to Las Vegas world headquarters in 2017 that claimed 60 lives–a national debate breaks out over gun rights and the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The powerful National Rifle Association claims folks have a largely unfettered right under that amendment to pack heat, even assault rifles. Majority public opinion is clearly somewhere else, but many politicians are too afraid of the NRA’s campaign contribution money to do anything substantive. They hide behind language in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, which clearly gets in the way of meaningful reform.

So allow me to throw another log onto this fire. As I read our country’s history, people who defend the Second Amendment are actually defending a provision attached to the U.S. Constitution that was worded to make it easier for Southern states to preserve slavery. That’s right, slavery. The “well-regulated militia” phrase so famously found in the amendment, just before the equally famous “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” was a reference to officially organized whites-only posses in the South created for the purpose of keeping in line black slaves, who in many places outnumbered the whites.

Southern politicians were afraid of the nascent Federal Government, soon to be dominated by Northern anti-slavery interests. They specifically were worried southern states would be prohibited by federal authorities from continuing to have militias that could rummage through slave quarters without warrants and, I suppose, shoot black folks who got out of line.

For background, I am relying on several sources and a certain amount of supposition. By far the most accessible material on this subject is a lengthy 1998 article by law professor Carl T. Bogus (yep, that’s his real last name) in the University of California, Davis, Law Review, entitled, “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.” You can download a copy by clicking here. For a law review article, it’s pretty readable by non-lawyers.

As drafted in Philadelphia and sent to individual states for ratification in 1787, the Constitution contained no provision at all on the right to keep and bear arms. But it had plenty of provisions bearing on militias–state-created part-time armies–and slavery. Article 1 Section 8 gave Congress plenary power to set rules for governing militias and calling them up. Article 2 Section 1 put the President of the U.S. in charge of militias when in federal service. There actually wasn’t much authority given to the states beyond the right to choose militia officers and train its members according to federal standards.

The word “slave” or “slavery” deliberately did not appear in the Constitution. But assorted provisions tolerated the practice. Article 1 Section 9 allowed the slave kidnapping trade from Africa (benignly called “importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit”) to continue for at least another 20 years. The Federal Government could collect a tax on each new slave of up to $10 a head ($330 in today’s dollars).

Article 4 Section 2 prohibited Northern states from freeing an escaped slave (called a “person held to service or labor in one state”) while requiring return of such a fugitive to the slave’s owner. Article 1 Section 2 allowed Southern states to count 60% of slaves (euphemistically styled “other persons”) when determining representation in the House of Representatives, giving those state a lot more seats and electoral votes–although, of course, those slaves couldn’t vote.

Remember, we’re talking about a document whose preface outrageously proclaimed a goal of securing “the blessings of liberty.”

All these provisions were part of a compromise among the 13 states to get approval of the draft Constitution by nine, the minimum needed for ratification. But the ratification process was stalled at eight–not every state wanted to chuck the weak-central-government Articles of Confederation, under which the country had been operating since 1781–when Virginia chose 173 delegates who gathered in Richmond in 1788 to deliberate and vote.

Patrick Henry–the slave-owning ex-governor best known now for his stirring pre-Revolutionary War battle cry, “Give me liberty or give me death!”–warned the assembly that the proposed Constitution gave Congress all the real authority over militias. George Mason, another prominent delegate who owned slaves (but said he was against slavery), said the feds could order the Virginia militia into a far-away state and leave Virginia unprotected. Even worse, Mason said, the feds could order the disarming of the Virginia militia. Mason had refused to sign the draft Constitution.

Professor Bogus argued that this was all coded language for a fear that Virginia could be left defenseless against slave uprisings.

In Virginia and other Southern states, the duties of militias including operating slave patrols, armed groups of white males who made regular patrols. “The patrols made sure that blacks were not wandering where they did not belong, gathering in groups or engaging in other suspicious activity,” Bogus wrote. “Equally important, however, was the demonstration of constant vigilance and armed force. The basic strategy was to ensure and impress upon the slaves that white were armed, watchful and ready to respond to insurrectionist activity at all times.”

Against this backdrop, Henry became even blunter by suggesting that the Federal Government under its power to provide for the general defense could enlist slaves in a federal army and then emancipate them. “May they (the federal government) not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?” he asked.

James Madison, a Virginian and future U.S. President who was the principal author of the Constitution, a delegate to the Richmond Convention and, yes, a slave-owner, too, defended his work by saying Virginia certainly would have “concurrent” authority to arm a militia if the feds didn’t. But if Virginia ratified the Constitution, he agreed to propose amendments to the future Congress. With that proviso, the Richmond Convention narrowly ratified the Constitution 89-79, and it soon took effect.

The Richmond delegates formally suggested a long “Declaration of Rights” for the new constitution, including one holding “that the people have a right to keep and bear arms.” Such language was not revolutionary; the English Declaration of Rights of 1689 contained a similar provision. But a bill of rights Virginia had adopted in 1776 did not contain that wording. However, in the context of the looming Constitution and the perceived need, in the South, anyway, to preserve slavery, it became an imperative.

In 1789, Madison was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the First Congress (defeating James Monroe, another future U.S. President), and resolved to make good on his promises to his fellow Richmond Convention delegates. In pertinent part he initially proposed this language as a constitutional amendment: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country.” The wording seemed to meet Patrick Henry’s concerns about free whites being defenseless against agitated black slaves.

By the time what became the Second Amendment emerged from Congress and was sent to the states for ratification, “free country” had been changed to “free state.” The syntax had been reversed and boiled down to a single 27-word sentence: “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.”

There isn’t a lot of legislative history explaining the rationale behind the wording changes, especially how “free country” became “free state,” although that, too, might be evidence of that Southern state slave revolt fear. Overall, Professor Bogus said the final version squared with the spirit that allowed anti-slavery Northern states and pro-slavery Southern states to agree on a governing document that tolerated the odious practice. “In effect,” he wrote, “Madison proposed that the slavery compromise be supplemented by another constitutional provision prohibiting Congress from emasculation the South’s primary instrument of slave control, and Congress acceded to that request.” The Second Amendment took effect in 1791.

Now, the post-Civil War ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865 ending slavery (except as a punishment for crime, the main reason convicted prisoners today can be forced to make license plates) served in effect to repeal a number of other slavery-linked constitutional provisions. These included the fugitive slave clause in Article 4 and the slaves-count-as-three-fifths provision for Congressional representation in Article 1.

So if the Second Amendment was intended to support slavery, how about someone arguing in an appropriate court case that it, too, was equally repealed sub silentio by the 13th Amendment, and no longer in force? Win that case, and we really can get around to some decent gun-law reform.

That’s yet another log on the fire from me.

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