OSU's Second Amendment Research Center shut down; Anti-gun "think tank" had ties to Obama

By Chad D. Baus

Randy Barnett, writer for the pro-gun blog The Volokh Conspiracy, is reporting that the Ohio State University's Second Amendment Research Center (SARC), an anti-gun "think tank" with strong ties to Barack Obama, has been shut down.

Barnett notes that the ex-Center's URL [http://www.secondamendmentcenter.org] is out of service and the OSU operator had no information. The story goes on to say that the Center's director, historian Saul Cornell, this year moved on to a chair at Fordham University, and his bio shows the dates of the SARC to be 2002–2008.

From the story:

This "scholarly" center was one of the initiatives funded by the Joyce Foundation to support writings that opposed the academic consensus that had previously arisen that the original meaning of the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

Readers of this blog will remember the infamous Joyce Foundation funded symposium at Chicago Kent from which any dissenting scholars were excluded in the interest of "balancing" all the rest of Second Amendment scholarship. Apparently, its scholarly purpose having been exhausted by the decision in Heller, it has ceased its scholarly mission. It is no more.

As Buckeye Firearms Association reported in September 2008, Barack Obama sat on the Joyce Foundation's board of directors from 1994 through 2002. During that time, the Foundation awarded SARC $525,000. All told, Obama and the board signed off on more than $20 million dollars in grants to anti-gun groups like SARC, the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, the Violence Policy Center, etc.

Barnett's observation that the Heller ruling obliterated the need for SARC's existence is spot on. As Buckeye Firearms Association Legislative Chair Ken Hanson noted in his analysis of the victory in Heller in June 2008, while the overall victory was a narrow one (5-4), 9 of 9 sharply ideologically divided judges considered all of the body of the law and 100% rejected the collectivist theory (fraud) foisted upon the American people for two decades.

"Saul Cornell and other scholars who have concluded for years that the Second Amendment is merely a collective right are 100% dead wrong on the body of their life's work," Hanson wrote in response to the Supreme Court ruling. "The collectivist fraud has been as soundly rebuffed as it can be rebuffed."

As it turns out, it seems the Supreme Court wrote SARC's death warrant, and Hanson penned the epitaph.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman.