Let's Start with Guns

San Francisco is trying to outlaw all handgun ownership. Sigh. The words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" apparently is just a suggestion...

The Ninth Circuit Federal Court will no doubt think it all a grand idea. No copy of the Constitution has darkened the doors or desks or minds of those paragons of liberty for at least two decades.

Which brings me to my point...(I like long introductions). Today I read another version of the argument that the Founders REALLY meant that "militias" like the National Guard are guaranteed weapons, certainly not actual citizens.

We've all heard it before. But it is not only wrong, it is absurd. And people using this argument need to shut up and read history. Here's why:

First, anybody who has read anything the Founders wrote understand that they considered the most dangerous threat to a free people to be government. The bigger, the more powerful, the more dangerous. That was the whole point of creating a government held in check by three competing branches, and limited to specific powers set down in the Constitution. To imagine that the Founders would grant exclusive possession of the means the very coersion they feared, to the institution they most feared would become coersive, defies logic, and is a mockery of any serious interpretation of the Constitution.

Second, in the Constitution the "rights" devolve to the people...individuals, citizens, the governed. "Powers" devolve to the government. This is consistent throughout the document...except, these pinheads would have us believe, in the ONE sentence with which they disagree.

Third, the placement of the guarantee of the right to bear arms is significant. The Constitution is an orderly document. The first Article relates to Congress, the second to the President, the third to the Court. Each section follows the subject matter of the article in which it appears. The 2nd Amendment is placed in a listing of specifically spelled out rights guaranteed to the individual citizen of the United States. Are we to suppose that the thinking or writing of the Founders was so sloppy and slipshod, that they included a "power" of government in this listing—so out of place—and further, inconsistently and uncharacteristically called it a "right"?

I think not. I think the Founders meant exactly what they said...that the people have the right to keep and bear arms particularly in the defense of freedom...against the sort of coercive government now ruling San Francisco.

(Unfortunately, you can't just shoot the bastards.)

The Gunslinger