Agreeing to be a guest on the old “Daily Show” with Jon Stewart was basically a suicide mission for conservatives. Segment interviews would be edited and framed to make guests look like hapless nuts trying to match wits with the wise, wisecracking “correspondents.” I’ve not really watched his new show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” but apparently, the host’s new tactic is to invite fringe legislators as straw men.
In a new “8-minute masterclass,” Stewart schools, brutally confronts, eviscerates, and expertly corners an Oklahoma state senator named Nathan Dahm, who’s proposed a number of bills exempting his state from federal firearm laws. Dahm is clearly unprepared for Stewart — though in his defense, it’s difficult for anyone to deal with a host who engages in performative emotional outbursts, filibusters, and deflections whenever you try and answer a question.
The state senator starts off innocently enough, contending that “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and that the Second Amendment is the only amendment that “uses that very specific affirmative language.” To which Stewart responds, “Oh, it’s also the one right that uses the phrase ‘well-regulated.’”
This again. Well-“regulated” merely refers to an orderly civilian military force — rather than a rabble of men — it does not mean “regulation” in the contemporary nanny-istic sense. The regulated militia mentioned in the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment doesn’t weaken, much less erase, the operative clause of the amendment, which protects the individual’s right to “bear” arms —
