Ed Rutledge for Lieutenant Governor

Gun Control and the 2^nd Amendment

05/01/10

The Right to have Guns by Lex Green

Samuel Adams talked about the three great rights, Life, Liberty and Property, "together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can." There is no question that defense of our Rights is itself a Right. Yet so many people are determined to remove our Rights and taking away our guns is the first step. In fact, any regulation of guns effectively removes deterrence from our arsenal of self defense weapons. Once the right to self defense is gone, we have no other rights.

How do we convince those who are determined to regulate guns that gun ownership is a right that should never be infringed? Let Supreme Court Justice Scalia address this for us through these two excerpts from D. C. v. Heller.

First: "Right of the People." The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a "right of the people." The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase "right of the people" two other times, in the First Amendment's Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment's Search-and-Seizure Clause… … these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not "collective" rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.

Second: "Shall not be infringed." The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right [to keep and bear arms] and declares only that it "shall not be infringed."

The concept of a right that pre-exists the Constitution is not new, but is important for all of us to understand. The Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights does not give us a right that can then be regulated. It only recognizes that right and mandates to Congress, for all time, that this right "shall not be infringed." The threat of force may attempt to deprive us of our guns, but as Samuel Adams states so well:

"… it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power … of men … to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights when the great end of civil government from the very nature of its institution is for the support, protection and defense of those very rights… the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."

Gun Control = Gun Violence by Ed Rutledge

The purpose of gun control is, presumably, to reduce gun violence. This is what our Democratic politicians in Chicago keep telling us, that we must make our streets safe again. And they have done their best to convince those of us in and around Chicago that we can only make our streets safe again by passing another gun control law, that there is some mysterious incantation that will magically make the guns "poof" disappear from the city. So while our politicians congratulate themselves whenever they pass yet another feel-good, do-nothing gun law, our rights are further infringed and kids keep getting shot.

What is forgotten, misunderstood, or ignored is that we do not have a gun problem so much as we have a gang problem. As long as our politicians continue to treat the symptom, gun violence, rather than the disease, a highly lucrative black market spawned by the "war on drugs," then we will continue to have gang violence, kids will continue to get shot on their way to school, and cries for more gun control will only get louder. If we keep doing the same thing, we will keep getting the same result.

But to be fair, the Republicans have played their part in this, too. Republicans see gun control laws simply as political maneuvering by Chicago Democrats in an effort to restrict the rights of peaceful gun owners. But this notion completely disregards the reasoning, misguided as it may be, behind Chicago's pursuit of gun control which, again, gets us right back to the street gangs and subsequent violence directly created by prohibition.

We need to open our eyes to the fact that prohibition, gangs, gun violence, and gun control laws are all inexorably linked – the first leads to the next as surely as dusk leads to night. In other words, as long as Republicans want prohibition, Democrats will want gun control. Please don't get me wrong – I do not endorse drug use. But neither do I endorse violence nor infringements on our rights and, as bad as drugs are for society, prohibition is even worse.

In their ineffectual efforts to protect us from ourselves, our politicians have created the worst of all worlds – drugs in the schools, inner city violence, infringements on our rights, and mountains of debt. There are even calls for the National Guard to begin patrolling Chicago streets! It is time to step back and look at the bigger picture. It is time to bring some common sense to this debate. It is time to rethink the status quo.

Comments are closed.