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.
Thus says the 2nd Amendment of The United States
Constitution. This crucial, self-evident
right of the people was one that our Forefathers enshrined within the Bill of
Rights. James Madison thought that the
Bill of Rights was largely unnecessary since the Constitution itself clearly
defined the specific powers and duties of the federal government. Any other powers not specifically enumerated
within it were assumed to belong to the people or the States, as was then clarified
by the 10th amendment.
Fast forward to the 21st century and I find
myself very glad that our forefathers did indeed stipulate the first ten
amendments (The Bill of Rights) for the American People. Even so, there are many people today,
particularly on the left of the political spectrum, that assume the 2nd
amendment was never intended to be an individual right. After all, it talks about a “well-regulated
militia”, so in their minds this must be a governmental right. Such people are either ignorant of history
and context, or are deliberately dissembling.
First of all, would it make any sense for the Bill of Rights
to enumerate all of the individual rights of Americans that
the federal government was obliged to protect in the other nine amendments but
insist on another governmental right in the second amendment? If that was the intent of that amendment, why
wouldn’t the framers have placed that within the main body of the
Constitution?
No. All of the rights
delineated in the Bill of Rights were absolutely intended to be rights reserved
to individual American citizens and not to the federal government. This was finally confirmed yet again in the
2008 Supreme Court decision of District
of Columbia v. Heller and again in McDonald
v. Chicago in 2010.
Nevertheless, today’s leftist politicians have become a
little more circumspect in how they violate their oath of office to defend the
constitution when they seek to ban private gun ownership. In other words, they have tried to
incrementally infringe on this individual right. The have lied to the American People.
“Nobody wants to take your guns away,” they decry. “We simply want to enact ‘common sense’ gun
laws that any reasonable person should be able to agree with. After all, nobody needs an ‘assault weapon’
or a ten round magazine – let alone a thirty round magazine,” so the paraphrase
goes from politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and Chuck Schumer,
to President Obama himself.
Yes, what the left cannot eradicate carte blanche by doing
an end run around congress or by illegal executive orders, they try to do
piecemeal with innocuous sounding ‘reasonable bills’ presented in
congress. Here are just a few of the
current federal and state attempts to erode our vital 2nd amendment
right:
House Resolution
(H.R.) 1454 – This bill would give President Obama’s Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) the authority to ban nearly all common
rifle ammunition. This was tried
recently with a proposed ban on all “green tip” 5.56 mm ammunition which is
used in perhaps the most ubiquitous of rifles in the United States: the
AR-15. Luckily the outcry from the
public was so great, that the BATFE backed down on this ban for the time being.
Operation Chokepoint
– This is the Obama Administration’s new set of shadowy banking regulations
that is currently responsible for shutting down gun shops nationwide by making
it impossible for them to secure ordinary loans and lines of credit.
United Nations Gun
Ban Treaty – Despite the fact that the U.S. Senate has failed to ratify
this pernicious treaty, the Obama administration is still on mission to
implement many of the anti-gun tenets of it.
H.R. 1217 – This new
proposal in Congress would implement Obama’s national gun registration
scheme. (It is a lot easier to
confiscate all of the legally owned weapons if you know who owns them, after
all!)
S. 407 – This new
bill in Congress would ban the manufacture and sale of standard capacity
magazines.
H.R. 224 – This new
proposal would empower President Obama’s anti-gun Surgeon General to publish
propaganda that frames our Second Amendment freedom as a public health problem.
H.R. 307 – This new
Congressional bill would force us to pay for a national gun “buy-back” scheme
through our tax dollars.
H.R. 225 – This
proposal would give unelected anti-gun bureaucrats at the Consumer Product
Safety Commission the authority to regulate and ban our firearms as they
thought reasonable.
Multi-state
legislation 1 – Several proposals
are pending in multiple states that would require gun owners to keep their
firearms locked away, unloaded, and disabled, thereby rendering them useless
for self-defense.
Multi-state
legislation 2 – Various proposals
are also pending in many states that would increase taxes, sometimes severely,
on all firearm and ammunition purchases.
Multi-state
legislation 3 – Many states are trying to pass Obama’s national gun
registration scheme that failed to pass congress two years ago on state levels.
Multi-state
legislation 4 – Finally, multiple states have put forth legislative
proposals to repeal “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle Doctrine” laws that
effectively strip a gun owner of the right to use a firearm in most
self-defense situations.
The purpose of the second amendment was not to secure
Americans with the ability to go hunting or trap-shooting. Our founding fathers knew that the only way
to protect our young nation against enemies both foreign and domestic was to
provide that “We The People” were able to ensure our own safety, and thus hold
government accountable as it exercises its Constitutional duties – and only
it’s Constitutional duties. It is ironic
and quite worrisome that many of our elected officials today are seeking to
infringe upon or even eradicate the one amendment from the Bill of Rights that
guarantees that we will still retain all of our other rights. After all, an unarmed citizenry becomes completely
reliant upon the beneficence of government in their granting of our other
rights.
Those members of congress and elected officials who would
seek to enact legislation or enforce regulations that are contrary to the 2nd
amendment are indeed in default of their oath of office to support and defend
the United States Constitution. Every
last one of them that so brazenly ignores the dictates of the Constitution,
especially when it comes to violating any of the enumerated amendments in the Bill
of Rights is a disgrace to the public and the nation and should no longer be
allowed to serve in such a capacity accordingly.
If only the American public was not ignorant of civics,
history, and the long-term ramifications of not holding these officials
accountable. It is incumbent upon us to
pay attention to our elected officials with what they say and do, regardless of
their political party. When they do
violate their oath of office by violating our Constitution, we need to all work
as a community to ensure they are removed, or at least not re-elected to
office. It requires diligence, but the
guardianship of our American liberties certainly deserves no less!
