You’re Not Disarming Me, Barry

“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.” — Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

In 2008, the Supreme Court laid to rest the once-simmering dispute over the meaning of the Second Amendment. In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court articulated the modern existence of the ancient personal right to keep and bear arms as a pre-political right.

A pre-political right is one that pre-exists the political order that was created to protect it. Thus, the court held, the origins of this right are the ancient and persistent traditions of free peoples and their natural inclinations to self-defense.The president is without authority to negate the congressional will, and any attempt to do so will be invalidated by the courts. As well, by defining what an occasional seller is, beyond the congressional definition or the plain meaning of the words, the president is essentially interpreting the law, a job reserved for the courts.

By requiring physicians to report conversations with their patients about guns to the DHS, the president will be encouraging them to invade the physician-patient privilege; and I suspect that most doctors will ignore him.

Under the Constitution, fundamental liberties (speech, a free press, worship, self-defense, travel and privacy, to name a few) are accorded the highest protection from governmental intrusion. One can only lose a fundamental right by intentionally giving it up or via due process (a jury trial resulting in a conviction for criminal behavior). The president — whose support for the right to keep and bear arms is limited to the military, the police and his own heavily armed body guards — is happy to begin a slippery slope down into the dark hole of totalitarianism, whereby he or a future president can negate liberties if he hates or fears the exercising of them.

We still have a Constitution in America. Under the Constitution, Congress writes the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. The president can no more write his own laws or impose his own interpretations upon pre-existing laws than Congress or the courts can command the military.

As troubling as this turn of events is, it is not surprising. The president is a progressive, and the ideology of progressivism is anathema to self-help or individualism. He really believes that the government can care for us better than we can care for ourselves.

Yet he ignores recent history. Any attempt to make it more difficult for people to keep and bear arms not only violates the fundamental liberty of those people but also jeopardizes the safety of us all. Add to this the progressive tendency to use government to establish no-gun zones and you have the recipe for disaster we have recently witnessed. All of the recent mass killings in America — from Columbine to San Bernardino — have occurred in no-gun zones, where crazies and terror-minded murderers can shoot with abandon.

That is, until someone arrives with a gun and shoots back. Then the killer flees or is injured or dies — and the killing stops.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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