Posted by
Marked in Pgh on Monday, June 30, 2008 7:06:20 PM
The Supreme Court this week threw out the D.C. gun ban, but only by a 5 to 4 ruling. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, said there is no ambiquity, gun ownership and thus the keeping and bearing of arms is an individual right. Justice Scalia is right, because he and the other conservative justices are wise and learned justices who respect the Constitution, but not the four who voted for the gun band. Justice Kenndy, again, was the swing vote, opening and closing on our rights. The question is what took so long? Since when can a power of a free people, as a group, a militia, not be the right of an individual militia man and be taken all the way to the Supreme Court to decide in a majority ruling? In an Obama dominated court, will this individual right be so easily canceled by a simple majority of unelcted bureaucrats in robes?
The preamble to the Constition begins with "We the People of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice..." Though it does not state every person, the individual is explicit, as he is in the Second Amendment. The people and the individual have the right to keep and bear arms in order to self-drill himself and themselves in the use of weapons as part of the militia which, as its author George Mason said, "is the whole of the people" wherein the individual is still explicitly included in a right that was first protected in the Virginia Bill of Rights.
Now the Justices say gun control may be reasonable. But what is reasonable when it comes to the Federal government? If it took this long to confirm the clearly stated individual right in the Second Amendment, because of a distortion of semantics, leads me to ask the following question. How can the Federal govenment be trusted with anything reasonable? Hamilton allowed that no one could predict how the Congress would go about such control of guns as to safety in Federalist Paper 29. Still, he and the other founders so concerned with individual liberty would not tolerate the constant assaults on this unalienable right by Congress and the courts. The government has proved itself untrustworthy of that stewardship. At least the members of the House and Senate are nominally elected by us. However, safety does not mean infringing the individual's rights to the encroaching will of the Federal government.
We, the American people, have the ongoing duty to safeguard our right to guns and to protet ourselves against our own government. Why else would Hamilton say, in Federalist Paper 29, in regard to the proposed army "that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow citizens (italics added)....the best possible security against it, if it should exist." An armed citizenship is always the best counter balance to an ever expanding government. The courts have no right, as unelected and unanswerable lawmakers, to even consider gun contol of any kind, or as arbiters of the self-evident and inalienalbe right to the keeping and bearing of arms by the individual citizens of America. That right, the People and America all existed before the creation of the Fedral government and the Federal courts by the Constitution and will never be subsumed to them.