David Cohen’s appeal to authority

David Cohen is (allegedly) a Constitutional law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the very city where the Declaration of Independence was penned in the days leading to July 4th, 1776,

Why someone would pay this man to teach law students about the Constitution is beyond me, because the drastic solution he proposes won’t solve the problem he thinks is epidemic — gun violence.

In a recent op-ed published in Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Cohen argued for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment on the grounds that the Founding Fathers “got it wrong” when they granted ordinary citizens the right to bear arms (radical liberals: ‘bear arms’ means the right to own a gun.)

Mr. Cohen began his embarrassing article with the somewhat pompous declaration, “I teach the Constitution for a living.”

This statement is intended to imply to Mr. Cohen’s audience that he possesses superior knowledge about the Constitution, even to the Founding Fathers (implied by his “correcting” them and identifying things he claims were mistakes in the original document, and only in his own mind, of course) — an appeal to establish his opinion as authority – which by doing with his very first words, commits a logical fallacy. Mr. Cohen continues:

“I revere the document when it is used to further social justice and make our country a more inclusive one. I admire the Founders for establishing a representative democracy that has survived for over two centuries. But sometimes we just have to acknowledge that the Founders and the Constitution are wrong.

What is this nonsense about social justice? Where can those words be found in the Constitution, pray tell? Personally, I revere the Constitution. Period. End of Sentence. New Paragraph, even.

It is the very foundation for our government, defining the rule of law for what has been until now the greatest nation in the history of man on Earth. The United States has been the greatest nation in the history of civilization for one reason: freedom. But now we have college professors purporting to teach Constitutional law who openly brag about lacking respect for their area of expertise.

Were I the president of Drexel University, I would recommend that Mr. Cohen seek a new line of work.

Mr. Cohen wasn’t completely wrong about everything he wrote. He accurately pointed out that the Founding Fathers were forced to compromise between slavery for some, or slavery for all. Otherwise, colonies that depended on the barbaric practice of slavery to rapidly expand economic growth would not join the revolution against England, and the United States of America probably would still not exist. But then again, slavery didn’t officially end in England until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was passed by Parliament, a full 60 years after our declaration of independence from Great Britain. Sure, practically everyone knows that Thomas Jefferson, the man who literally wrote the Declaration of Independence (with considerable help, of course), third U.S. President and founder of the Democrat Party, owned slaves.

And less than a century later even when Abraham Lincoln, the first President elected from the anti-slavery Republican Party, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he only freed slaves being held in Confederate states. The barbaric practice of human slavery did not officially end everywhere in the United States until Congress passed the 13th Amendment in 1865, which the states ratified.

Presumably, a Constitutional law professor would know all of this already.

Therefore, finding fault with the Founding Fathers because the Constitution required an amendment to permanently resolve the problem of slavery seems awfully petty and judgmental, especially for someone with extremely questionable judgment, as we shall soon discover. It turns out Mr. Cohen has a rather sinister agenda.

The most troubling words written by Mr. Cohen (I’m reticent to give his appeal to authority any credibility by referring to him as ‘Professor’) were these: social justice.

What does that even mean?

Well, according to one internet source, social justice is a fancy way of saying “government redistribution of wealth”, which of course, is a form of socialism.

However, if we click on the words ‘social justice’ in the Rolling Stone article, strangely enough, the reader is taken to a page about abortion and Roe vs. Wade. What on earth does abortion have to do with social justice and Constitutional law? To unravel that mystery, the first question I asked myself was this: on what grounds did the U.S. Supreme Court find that abortion was legal, according to the Constitution? After all, the U.S. Constitution is the sole determining factor the Supreme Court is supposed to use when they rule on a case.

In the case of Roe vs. Wade, it turns out the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was cited as the reason abortion became legal. Roe’s attorney argued that Roe was being denied due process and her right to privacy was being violated denied the choice of aborting her pregnancy in the first trimester. Prior to the ruling in Roe v. Wade, abortion had been considered a form of infanticide and treated as a criminal act.

If I’m following the logic of all this correctly, in effect the court’s decision determined that the unborn child (now called fetus) was technically not human, and therefore not entitled to due process.

13 weeks into pregnancy

Therefore, it has now been ruled legal to kill this “thing” or blob of tissue that would become a baby if nothing happened, even if it happens to look exactly like a developing unborn child.

Again, what does abortion have to do with gun control, anyway? Was it a mistake by Rolling Stone? Of course not.

It turns out that Mr. Cohen is co-author of a book titled Living in the Crosshairs: the Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism.

How many untold stories of murdered abortion doctors have there been? Did the murder of Dr. George Tiller go underreported? If so, I must have missed something.

According to Wikipedia (admittedly not the greatest resource of information, but this is a Saturday and I’m feeling a bit lazy about getting into more serious research) between 1993 and 2015, there have been a grand total of 11 murders of abortion doctors.

Between the years of 1973 and 2013, a whopping 56, 405, 766 legal abortions have been performed. Murder can never be condoned or justified, no matter how appropriate it might seem to end the life of another. If the person is guilty of a crime, then they should be punished according to the law. Even the horrific, murderous butcher Kermit Gosnell deserved a fair trial. He probably should have been executed for his heinous crimes, but rotting in prison will have to suffice, because that’s what the court ruled. Vigilantism is not justice.

Shooting abortion doctors can never be justified, no matter how many innocent children are “terminated” in the womb. If the law permits abortion, it is legal, even if not moral. Murder of the abortion doctor is both illegal and immoral. Any such murderer who claims to have committed his crime because of his Christian faith must have been asleep when Matthew 7:3 was read in church.

In my opinion it should not have been legal for doctors to have ended the lives of more than 56 million children in the womb, either. Obviously, there must be some agreeable compromise between zero and 56 million abortions.

Before we completely forget what started this conversation in the first place, let’s get back to the 2nd Amendment, which Mr. Cohen says we must repeal because the Founding Fathers didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t know about AR-15 rifles, which is technically true.

The Founding Fathers were much more familiar with muskets and cannons that were manned by occupying British armies fighting on behalf of a tyrannical foreign government that believed in taxation without representation than they were prescient about modern weaponry.

Automatic weapons (which are currently illegal for civilians to own) had not been invented yet. You know what else never occurred to the Founding Fathers?  Fifty-six million abortions of unborn Americans. Mr. Cohen might know parts of the Constitution better than I do, but he apparently doesn’t know much if any of the history of our Founding Fathers. The colonists most certainly understood the value of human life — remember how many people were killed in the Boston Massacre?

Five. And yet they still called it a massacre. The Founding Fathers realized that freedom could be taken away from the people if the people could no longer defend themselves.  A “well-regulated militia” wasn’t referring to the police department or a branch of the military.The most frequent scenario to the police responding to the scene of a crime is that by the time they arrive. the criminal has already left.

Despite Mr. Cohn’s mistaken opinion, the Founding Fathers did actually know exactly what they were doing, which is why another amendment to the Constitution would be necessary to repeal the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights, to prevent people with tyrannical ideas…people like Mr. Cohen, for example.

Such an amendment is highly unlikely to pass because of the popularity of gun ownership. The overwhelming majority of gun owners are honest, law abiding citizens. Too many people like to hunt for the 2nd Amendment to be successfully repealed. Too many people like to watch Duck Dynasty.

Gun control isn’t really about guns. It’s about control.

Currently, there are 27 amendments to the Constitution. To pass a 28th Amendment to the Constitution would require veto-proof 2/3 majorities of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, then ratification by 3/4 of the individual states, which means 38 out of 50, by my calculations.

Attempting to disarm 90 million law-abiding citizens by force would be a very bad idea and cause a great deal of social injustice, because only criminals (and police) would be left with guns, and the criminals  will not surrender their guns willingly.

Walter Williams is not a Constitutional law professor; he’s an economics professor at George Mason University. He’s got some strong opinions about social justice with which I strongly agree.

When it comes to the Constitution, I also prefer Professor Williams’s ideas about how the Bill of Rights might be amended.

Professor Williams says that the Bill of Rights only needed to include those first five words: “Congress shall make no law…”