Supreme Court to take up 2nd Amendment case

From The Washington Post:

The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will determine whether the District of Columbia's strict firearms law violates the Constitution, a decision that will raise the politically and culturally divisive issue of gun control just in time for the 2008 elections.

The court's examination of the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in nearly 70 years carries broad implications for gun-control measures locally and across the country.

The District has the nation's most restrictive law, essentially banning private handgun ownership and requiring that rifles and shotguns kept in private homes be unloaded and disassembled or outfitted with a trigger lock. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declared it unconstitutional last year, becoming the first appeals court to overturn a gun-control law because of the Second Amendment.

For years, legal scholars, historians and grammarians have debated the meaning of the amendment because of its enigmatic wording and odd punctuation: "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."

Gun-rights proponents say the words guarantee the right of an individual to possess firearms. Gun-control supporters say the words convey only a civic or "collective" right to own guns as part of service in an organized military organization. The Bush administration said in 2002 that it supports the individual-rights position.

Robert A. Levy, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute who has spent years planning a challenge that would reach the Supreme Court, called the court's decision to take the case "good news for all Americans who would like to be able to defend themselves where they live and sleep."

"And it's especially good news for residents of Washington, D.C., which has been the murder capital of the nation despite an outright ban on all functional firearms since 1976," he said.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) has said the District's up-and-down homicide rate would have been higher without the ban, and that the law is a locally supported move to protect police officers, children and other victims of gun violence.

"It's the will of the people of the District of Columbia that has to be respected," Fenty said at a news conference with D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer and several D.C. Council members. "We should have the right to make our own decisions."

The truth is that there is no real controversy over the meaning of the Second Amendment. All one need do is look at both the state of laws restricting firearms ownership in the early Republic and read the actual writings of the Founders on the subject of firearms ownership.

As far as early American laws restricting firearms ownership there were none at the federal level and at the state level the only "gun control" laws were those aimed at keeping slaves from having firearms (and not even all states had those). For a free man there were no restrictions on how many or what type of arms a person could own. In those days if a man wished to buy or build a ship of the line and outfit it with 80 cannon, or assemble an entire division of field artillery in his back yard the law had nothing to say about it.

The fact that the only laws limiting who might own firearms considered acceptable were those aimed at disarming slaves gives us a clue as to how the framers saw the right to keep and bear arms. It was for free men to be armed and for slaves to be disarmed.

Of course if you look at what the Founders actually said about the subject of arms any reasonable doubt is dispelled:

"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." -- Thomas Jefferson

The Constitution preserves "the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. . . (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." -- James Madison

"[A]rms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. . . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them." -- Thomas Paine

"The great object is, that every man be armed." -- Patrick Henry

"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peacable citizens, from keeping their own arms. . ." -- Samuel Adams

"... whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." -- Richard Henry Lee

"... of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trail by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny." -- James Monroe

No honest person who understands the plain meaning of language can have the slightest doubt that the intention of the men who wrote and ratified the Constitution was to recognize and protect an individual right to own firearms.

The only hope the left has of disarming, and thereby enslaving, the American population are Supreme Court judges who will be willing to break their oath of office by ruling based on their opinion rather than the Constitution or else be too cowardly to issue a ruling that will have the Washington Post and the New York Times say disparaging things about them.

John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter can be counted upon to do the wrong thing no matter what the consequences. Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia can be counted upon to do the right thing no matter what the consequences. John Roberts and Samuel Alito will most likely do the right thing (right thing being defined as ruling in a way which upholds original intent). The wild card is Anthony Kennedy.

Kennedy was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan and was once thought to be a conservative. However at some point a strong animosity seemed to develop between Kennedy and the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. This seemed to push Kennedy to take positions which opposed Rehnquist, who was a political and judicial conservative. This caused Kennedy to more and more align himself with the far left judicial activists on the court.

Since Rehnquist's death and the installation of John Roberts as Chief Justice Kennedy has began to recover some of the judicial conservatism which originally made him attractive to Ronald Reagan. However his long sojourn in the intellectual and moral wasteland of the Left has left its marks upon his soul.

Kennedy is going to find himself the swing justice in the upcoming Second Amendment case. Given the unquestionable smallness of character of a judge who would alter his judicial philosophy and harm his nation by bad rulings just because of a personal feud with a coworker I have some misgivings about the upcoming case.

If I can figure out that Kennedy is going to be the key man in this case others can as well. The left-liberal mainstream media is going to do everything in their power to influence him. Expect the Washington Post to start giving Kennedy a hand-job that won't stop until the day the ruling is made public.

Our best hope is to hammer on the fact that the consensus of respected constitutional scholars over the past 20 years has solidified around the fact that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right. In addition to being the simple truth it will bring home to Kennedy that only judicial lightweights continue to cling to the "collective right" interpretation. Bring it home to Kennedy that issuing a ruling which will make the left happy will result in him going down in history as a second rate legal mind and his vanity compel him to do the right thing.