To the Editor:

House Speaker John Boehner boasted in a mass e-mail that he had gotten ahead of President Obama in ordering flags at the Capitol to be flown at half-staff in memory of the four Marines and a sailor who were murdered by a lone terrorist at Chattanooga.

It was an appropriate gesture, considering that the killer targeted them for the flag they served, but it was still only a gesture. Should  Boehner care to do something meaningful, he would confront the gun lobby over assault weapons like the one that left the corpses strewn at Chattanooga.

The slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut ought to have prompted the overdue passage of a ban on such weapons. But since the only results were a nearly nationwide display of political cowardice and the sale of more, not fewer, of those firearms, it isn’t likely this loss will make a difference.

Still, one can always hope, and call out the poltroons who pimp themselves for the gun lobby’s votes and money rather than stand up for the rest of us.

Congress has the power to regulate strictly or even ban such weapons of mass destruction. Even the Supreme Court’s misreading of the Second Amendment in 2008 voided only a prohibition on gun ownership per se.  

Historian Joseph Ellis, an authority on the origins of our republic, writes in his new book, The Quartet, about the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, which he credits to the concerted efforts of George Washington, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

In drafting what became the Second Amendment, says Ellis, Madison was “responding to recommended amendments from five states, calling for the prohibition of a permanent standing army on the grounds that it had historically proven to be an enduring threat to Republican values.”

So Madison’s intention was “to assure those skeptical souls that the defense of the United States would depend on state militias rather than a professional, federal army.”

That accounts for the predicate clause about a “well regulated militia,” which the courts respected for two centuries as the sole reason for the Second Amendment.

“The right to bear arms derived from the need to make state militias the core pillar of national defense,” Ellis explains. Justice Antonin Scalia’s contrary finding “is an elegant example of legalistic legerdemain masquerading as erudition” and Madison “is rolling over in his grave.”

If Scalia and certain cohorts on the court were truly as originalist as they claim to be, they would have read the Second Amendment in the context of its times. There wasn’t a firearm on earth from which an expert could manage more than three rounds a minute. The Connecticut and Chattanooga massacres would have been inconceivable.

Martin A. Dyckman 

Waynesville