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Opening Arguments

Disarmed and dangerous

Here's more on San Francisco's idiotic handgun ban:

So bad guys will keep their handguns, and only good guys will give theirs up. That may be good for the bad guys, but it looks bad for the good guys.

That sounds a lot like my observation that only the victims will be disarmed, and it's a variation of the old "If you outlaw guns, only outlways will have guns" slogan that gun-control advocates like to make fun of. It might be a too-clever play on words; doesn't make it untrue. The ban, incidentally, seems to go against California's constitutional provision giving the state sole jurisdiction over gun control. But why let a little thing like that bother you when you're trying to make a social statement?

Posted in: Current Affairs

Comments

Steve Towsley
Mon, 11/14/2005 - 1:56pm

The whole thing is ridiculous. In the first place, California liberals erroneously insist that the Second Amendment only preserves the right to bear arms to the National Guard. An L.A. Times columnist regurgitated this fictional interpretation of the Bill of Rights within the past couple of weeks.

If that were true, Americans would have no gun rights whatsoever -- nada, zero, zip. Few Americans believe there is no such thing as gun rights. Few assume that guns may ALL be banned in the U.S. -- every one -- without grievous injury to the Constitution. Yet that is what those who dismiss the Second Amendment are claiming.

In the second place, state law does not trump the Bill of Rights. For instance, let's say California had a state constitutional provision claiming that "the state has sole authority" to restrict freedom of speech or the press, or freedom from self-incrimination or cruel and unusual punishment. What good would it do them in light of the federal Bill of Rights? Nada, zero, zip -- liberals mysteriously happen to agree in these other cases, of course.

But a liberal who will defend the First Amendment to the last comma will in the same breath assert that the Second Amendment should be interpreted to exclude the American people from the words "the People's right to keep and bear arms" despite the fact that the founders' copious letters and papers prove that was not their intent at all.

"Well regulated militia" was how the founders simply referred to those citizens with their personally owned guns who volunteered as needed to protect themselves, their families and their community, to defend against "enemies foreign and domestic." There was no national guard for the founders to be referring to. Other than George Washington's uniformed Continental Army, there was only the body of citizens to discuss in terms of maintaining gun liberty. Remember, the founders were not granting these liberties -- they thought they were re-affirming for the people a handful of liberties that they felt were basic and God given.

Ironically, some of the authors of the Constitution felt that there was no earthly need to create a bill of rights at all, that to document such fundamental freedoms as those of speech, religion and arms would be a trivial and redundant exercise, like assuring Americans that the sun would come up every morning. Little did those founders imagine what pompous people would try to restrict if left to their own devices.

One may conclude there is a lot of bad gun law on the books in the sunshine state other parts of the nation, powered by decades of anti-gun rhetoric, misinformation, and fear bordering on superstition. Hopefully justices Roberts and Alito will help to put things right one of these days. We're long overdue, and far afoul of the Constitution.

As I often say, the Second Amendment is not there to protect the guns you like -- it is there to protect the guns some people hate, too. And it makes NO mention AT ALL of hunting or sporting purpose. It specifically guarantees protection of arms necessary to defend "the security of a free state." I'll let the reader figure out which oft-banned arms those surely are.

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