With so many on the Left ranting and raving about how President Bush has violated key constitutional rights and liberties during the so-called War on Terrorism – a charge, for the record, with which we do not wholly disagree – it is breathtakingly hypocritical to see their indifference about the blatant, long-standing violation of the Second Amendment in our nation’s capital. This right of which we write, of course, is ‘the right of the People to keep and bear arms’– deeply ingrained into the Anglo-American ethos since, at least, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the ensuing parliamentary Declaration of Right and English Bill of Rights.
On June 26, in D.C. v. Heller, the Supreme Court directly ruled on this right for the first time in the history of the Republic. It definitively stated, ‘The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home’. Further, it ruled that D.C.’s ‘total ban on handgun possession’amounted to an unconstitutional prohibition, far exceeding the reasonable restrictions that the Court has generally allowed.
The issue of what constitutes a militia is an interesting one to which more Americans should give thought. We must understand a very crucial concept: the state militias, that is, the National Guard branches in the states,are not the only type of militia in existence! Only a statist – harsh, but true – thinks that the apprehension of criminals or the defense of the nation is a purely governmental or military prerogative.
In other words, each person, by virtue of being a person, is endowed with the right to catch criminals (preserved in the long-forgotten common-law right of citizen’s arrest) and to defend the nation from all existential threats, foreign and domestic. The latter is especially important for the discussion at hand because it informs the definition of a militia, which ‘comprise[s] all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense’. That is to say, a man need not be in an organized militia with ranks, bases, etc., in order to be in a militia. Always remember that we only delegate rights to the government.
(The debate about a ‘well regulated militia’is a red-herring issue anyway, since the prefatory clause merely ‘announces a purpose’,and certainly ‘does not limit [the operative clause] grammatically’, thus marking the Second Amendment explicitly as an individual right. But, here is the kicker – would the liberals like the Court to rule that the Second Amendment only applies to males? If not, then we kindly ask them to refrain from self-incriminating themselves through red-herring appeals to the prefatory clause.)
Now let us return to the decision. The opinion of the Court in D.C. v. Heller is a phenomenal work of originalist jurisprudence, in which Justice Antonin Scalia declares that ‘it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct’. Indeed, seeing that the very reason that a People establish a written Constitution is to prevent evolution in their rights and liberties, apart from deliberate amendments, the Supreme Court must never pronounce a right extinct simply because a few regard it as ‘outmoded’.
Our liberal friends who clamor against warrantless wiretapping should heed Justice Scalia’s words. What, after all, per the living Constitution theory, could stop President Bush from disregarding the Fourth Amendment as ‘outmoded’ for a nation engaged in a war against terrorism? If we lack rock-solid principles and the mettle to adhere to them,we shall likewise lack rights and liberties.
