Kurt Nimmo TruthNews November 28, 2007

Mike Cox, the attorney general of Michigan, understands the Second Amendment: “Not only does history demonstrate that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but experience demonstrates that the broad ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia has led to precisely the opposite effect from what was intended. For legal and historical reasons, and for the safety of the residents of our nation’s capital, the Supreme Court should affirm an individual right to keep and bear arms,” Cox writes for the Detroit Free Press.

In regard to the attempt of statist gun-grabbers to misconstrue and turn the Second Amendment on its head, Cox writes: “Consider the grammar. The Second Amendment is about the right to ‘keep and bear arms.’ Before the conjunction ‘and’ there is a right to ‘keep,’ meaning to possess. This word would be superfluous if the Second Amendment were only about bearing arms as part of the state militia. Reading these words to restrict the right to possess arms strains common rules of composition.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, writing for the same newspaper, however, tells us the “language of the Second Amendment is a puzzle.” Chemerinsky, like gun-grabbers far and wide, chooses to ignore the last clause and emphatically states “the Second Amendment was meant to keep Congress from interfering with state militias.” Indeed, Mr. Chemerinsky believes the Bill of Rights is not absolute but rather like a sewing pattern that may accept a bit of deviation. “Just as free speech has never been regarded as absolute, nor should an individual right to bear arms be seen that way. The crucial question, therefore, is even if the Second Amendment is regarded as protecting an individual right to own firearms, how much should courts defer to government regulation?”

No, the “crucial question” is why do so many Americans believe the Constitution and Bill of Rights are open for interpretation?

Daylin Leach, a Democrat who represents the 149th District in the Pennsylvania House, is typical of the sort of statist infecting government these days. Like Mr. Chemerinsky, he believes the Bill of Rights does not mean what it says and he is in a position to act on that belief. “The Second Amendment, like the First (and all other parts of the Bill of Rights) is not absolute,” writes Leach for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Constitutional law is never absolute. When someone asserts that their constitutional rights have been infringed upon, the courts employ a balancing test to evaluate the law in question. They measure how much a law infringes on a right and balance that against how important the state’s interest is in that law.”

No doubt… and the state has an interest in disarming the public, especially when the public approaches open resistance to tyranny, as Thomas Jefferson declared is their right when faced with tyranny, as they will be soon enough, especially with “representatives” such as Mr. Leach.

Daylin Leach, like other anti-gun statists, is fond of word games. “The fact is that the Second Amendment does not prohibit passage of any law that happens to have the word ‘gun’ in it. It allows the state to pass reasonable restrictions related to public safety, so long as they still respect and preserve the underlying right to have a gun to protect your home or to hunt. Overcoming false impressions about the nature and scope of the Second Amendment will allow us to actually consider legislation on its merits, which will be good for public safety and gun owners alike.”

Never mind this fallacious “gun” argument — as if “arms” and “guns” are two different things — Leach would have us believe the Second Amendment is all about hunting and home protection. Indeed, the founders were interested in the latter, but the former is not why they drafted the Second Amendment, as the gun-grabbers would have it.

As I noted here yesterday, the founders included the Second Amendment as a hedge against repressive and tyrannical government. Mr. Leach and Mr. Chemerinsky, among many others, would have you believe otherwise. Simply reading the Federalist Papers and the published correspondence of the founders, of course, produces a drastically different conclusion.

But then people don’t read much anymore. And schools do not teach introductory constitutional law or even much history.

Because of this, it will be much easier this time around for the gun-grabbers to “regulate” your Second Amendment right out of existence. As well, they will regulate your other constitutional rights out existence, as none are, according to them, absolute. Government has the final say. And if history teaches anything it is that government is invariably tyrannical, as the founders understood well.