The Second Amendment Part II

I haven’t gotten all the Second Amendment blogging out of my system yet so I beg your indulgence for one more post.

I have heard anti-gun politicians attempt to obfuscate their anti-gun positions by claiming to support hunter’s rights. It is standard fare in presidential races to have the pro gun control candidate (the Democrat) photographed on a “hunting trip” in which he poses with some bird carcass that someone else shot for him. The only good thing about a Hillary run for the White House will be seeing her tramping around the bush with a double barrel shotgun and a dead duck.

The standard retort from the pro-firearms camp is that the Second Amendment isn’t about duck hunting.

This is very true, but I want to look at some other things that the Second Amendment “isn’t about”.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution isn’t about:

1. Formal target shooting
2. Plinking (informal target shooting)
3. Collecting
4. Defending your home against criminals
5. Defending yourself against muggers, rapists, car jackers or any other criminal.

The Second Amendment is about defending the liberty of the American people against tyranny, either the tyranny of a foreign conqueror or of a domestic government gone bad.

The reason the Framers didn’t mention recreation; hunting or self defense in the constitution is twofold. One is that it just never occurred to them that any future government would be so crazy or so evil as to try to disarm law abiding citizens as a lame-brained crime control measure. They could foresee a tyrant disarming people to give himself more power over them but the nanny-state was so alien to their thinking that they couldn’t even imagine the faintest outline of it.

The other reason that they didn’t mention anything about the non national defense uses of the firearm was that the language which they used in the Second Amendment was so clear and so powerful in the way that it placed an absolute prohibition on the government passing any kind of law whatsoever which would hinder, obstruct or limit the citizen’s rights to own and carry firearms that nothing else was necessary.

The Constitution tells congress that they cannot pass laws against the people keeping and bearing arms in the same kind of language which it tells congress that it may not establish the National Church of the United States.

If there is any conceivable limit to the types of firearms protected by the Second Amendment it would be to arms useful to an infantry soldier on the battlefield. This would mean that the 2nd Amendment would protect M-16 assault rifles and MP-5 submachine guns and .50 caliber sniper rifles and short barreled shotguns, but not double barreled fowling pieces or .22 caliber target pistols.

Lets ask Sara Brady what she thinks of that.