The Second Amendment guarantees every American citizen the right to bear arms. Yet, over the years, ambitious bureaucrats have attacked this right to the point of no return, arguing that gun control lowers the crime rates and reduces gang violence, and that our dearest Constitution had specified this right strictly to the states.
The so-called American Civil Liberties Union has perpetuated this myth not to protect individual liberties, but to push a radical statist agenda. They contend:
"The original intent of the Second Amendment was to protect the right of states to maintain militias."
No, Mr. Romero. That was already mentioned in the original intent of Article 1, Section 8.
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.
Now let's take a look at the Second Amendment.
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.
Throughout the Constitution, the government is referred to as the "state", and individuals are referred to as the "people." If our Framers not only would have replaced the word "people" with "state," had they intended to deny its citizens the right to self-defense; moreso, it's likely that the Second Amendment wouldn't have been written at all.
In an interview on CSPAN, historian Garry Wills made a blatantly preposturous claim.
"The idea that my gun protects me from my government is not in the Founders... it's just not there ... The use of the militia originally was to be a defense of the country, and the proof of that is very simple. The federal government can federalize, can put into federal service any militia at any time it wants. So the idea that the militia can be used against the federal government is nonsense."
A respected historian who thrives on historical ignorance is a dangerous person.
What would George Mason, the "Father of the Bill of Rights," think of Wills' claim, not to mention, San Francisco's failed attempt to ban handgun possession and firearm sales? According to this quote, not too favorably:
"What is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
There's that word, again - the people. In Thomas Jefferson's commonplace book, as the author of the Declaration of Independence is quoted:
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
Also from Jefferson:
"What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
As George Washington, our first president, is quoted, "A free people ought to be armed."
If that isn't enough, we can always look back on how the early courts interpreted the Constitution. In 1833, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story had this to say.
"The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms has justly been considered the palladium of the liberties of the republic, since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."
Yet, in spite of what history has proven, the Second Amendment has been trampled upon today more than ever by law, media, academia, and globalist-leaning politicians who propagate fear of gun owners to make face time. The fearmongering has caught up with a small but vocal minority of American citizens who are led to believe that private citizens purchase guns because they intend on using them. This logic is faulty, and requires a vast distrust in individualism in general, and mankind in particular.
Take for example the incident at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, on January 16, 2002. After a student recieved news of a suspension for low grades, he bursted through campus with a handgun, killing the dean, a professor, and a student, in addition to wounding three other students. The Washington Post, CBS News, and NBC News were quick to inform viewers about three heroic students who stopped the gunman. As the news broke all over the country, very few news organizations told the whole story - two out of three of the students who stopped the gunman did so by carrying guns.
After the incident, criminologist, author, and scholar John Lott performed a LexisNexis search on the story and found a fascinating case of media cover-up: only 4 out of 208 reports bothered to mention that the students stopped the shooting spree by carrying guns. James Eaves-Johnson conducted his own Nexis search, only to discover that two of 88 stories reported that fact. He gave it a second go with Westnews, finding that only two out of 112 stories on the incident mentioned how the students subdued the perpetrator. Former CBS anchor Bernard Goldberg took matters in his own hands and found just six out of 100 papers that told the real story. Shockingly, the New York Times was one of them.
On September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists, which killed 2,972 people in our home and native soil - or 2,992 if you would, like Reuters, include the jihadists as "victims." In any event, three out of four of those planes hit their assigned targets. One headed towards Washington, DC crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The passengers on the plane who fought back are hailed as heroes for one reason: when the government wasn't there to protect them, they took matters into their own hands.
But that didn't stop the local government in Washington, DC from litigating over whether private citizens can even possess a firearm in the privacy of their own home, citing the gungrabber's invented notion that "a well-regulated militia is a "collective right" rather than an individual right. Thankfully, a federal Appeals Court rejected the proposition.
Yet in spite of the Constitution's victories in DC and elsewhere, the attacks on gun owners show no end in sight. The Roanoke Times went ballistic enough to treat gun owners no different than sex offenders. On their website, they enforced their own version of Megan's Law, publishing the names, addresses, and additional confidential information of gun owners in the area. Thankfully, enough pressure led them to take down the list. So much for respecting anyone's right to privacy. Speaking of Megan's Law, back in February of 1995, U.S. District Judge Nicholas H. Politan ruled it unconstitutional, comparing public notification of nearby sex offenders to the Nazis forcing Jews to wear the Star of David. This judicial atrocity was thankfully overruled by the state attorney general, under the basic principle that a sex offender's right to privacy ends when a crime is committed. As should a gun owner's.
Today, the insanity only gets worse. As the community of Littleton, Colorado honored a fallen hero who served in Afghanistan, Navy Seal Danny Dietz, with a statue at a park where he grew up, opposition grew on the grounds that it glorified violence (Click on "Video" at link). In spite of the unneccesary outcry, the town's plans are set to continue in honoring the fallen soldier.
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