Harboring a degree of skepticism about "sex addiction," I googled it. The first return was a national hotline for horny people to call. I clicked on the second return, which looked like a reliable medical site, and read:
What is sex addiction? Considerable controversy surrounds the diagnosis of "sex addiction." It's been excluded from the fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-5), but it's still written about and studied in psychology and counseling circles.
Apparently, then, the experts behind the DSM-5 share my skepticism, but if you present at a counselor's office, complaining of sex addiction, you'll receive therapy and a bill. Perhaps good insurance covers treatment for a condition not recognized by DSM-5, or maybe there's a workaround related to how the therapy is coded.
As a cause of mass murder, such as recently occurred in Atlanta, sex addiction must lag behind lax gun laws by a wide margin. Georgia does not permit same-day voter registration, but at least the self-diagnosed sex addict was able to use his gun on the same day that he bought it—no waiting period required before exercising that right. He went to the gun store for the express purpose of buying a weapon and ammunition so that he could then drive from the gun store to some massage parlors and shoot people dead. As we all know, this is the price that must be paid for freedom as enshrined in the Second Amendment.
But this argument continues to perplex me. By the school of constitutional interpretation favored by the people most in love with the Second Amendment, the words can mean only what they meant to the men who wrote them toward the end of the 18th century. It seems to me that the Constitution, understood this way, cannot give anyone a right to keep and bear a weapon of a kind that had not yet been invented when the Second Amendment was adopted. The sex addict did not buy a muzzle-loading musket before embarking on a killing spree. Moreover, the Second Amendment reads:
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.
The Founders could have written:
The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
But they didn't. It's not as if they were poor authors who needlessly spread their straightforward meaning across a lot of extra words about a militia. I won't say it's useless to argue that the two sentences mean the same thing, because that is the view that has prevailed, but to think the two sentences are equivalent requires . . . determination.
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