Gun Control - take 1

Gun Control

The debate on Gun control is more about citizen control than control of a piece of wood and metal. Simply put, fingers pull triggers, triggers don’t pull fingers. If we focus on arresting and punishing the “fingers” that pull triggers illegally, instead of illegally banning firearms ( i.e. “triggers” ) we will have much safer communities. Conservatives seek to control the criminals that use firearms in the commission of a crime, the left wants to reduce or eliminate the private ownership of firearms, in hopes that this reduces crime. Statistics consistently show though, that more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens equals less crime.

Every Communist and Totalitarian government known to mankind in the last hundred years had a hard core Gun Control policy, banning citizens from owning firearms. They promised law and order if citizens just relinquished their firearms, but the scenario that played out was that an unarmed populace was very easy to control, and unable to resist the real intents of these regimes. Why would we even think of following their lead as freedom loving Americans ?

Ronald Reagan said: “The gun has been called the great equalizer, meaning that a small person with a gun is equal to a large person, but it is a great equalizer in another way, too. It insures that the people are the equal of their government whenever that government forgets that it is servant and not master of the governed. When the British forgot that concept, they got a revolution. And, as a result, we Americans got a Constitution; a Constitution that, as those who wrote it were determined, would keep men free. If we give up part of that Constitution we give up part of our freedom and increase the chance that we will lose it all. I am not ready to take that risk. I believe that the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms must not be infringed upon if liberty in America is to survive.”

This debate is very current as the Supreme Court is now scheduled to decide whether the District of Columbia can legally ban their citizens from owning handguns. This is a case that will provide the most in-depth examination of the constitutional right to "keep and bear arms" in nearly 70 years. In March of this year, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for DC struck down DC’s restriction on gun ownership, finding that they are violating the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment either prohibits the government from infringing on the individual rights of citizens to keep and bear arms, or it restricts the government from infringing on the rights of the states to maintain armed militias.

I just was watching the Nightly News discuss this very case tonight, and they declared that the intent of the second amendment was quite unclear when it was made part of the Constitution. Unclear to these newscasters perhaps, but to the founding fathers of America, who wrote the Second Amendment, the meaning was abundantly clear.

Thomas Jefferson noted, "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."

The principal author of the federalist papers, James Madison, wrote in No. 46, "The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any...."

Alexander Hamilton was equally unambiguous on the importance of arms to a republic, writing in Federalist No. 28, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense...."

Justice Joseph Story, appointed to the Supreme Court by James Madison, wrote, "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."

In other words, the right of the people to bear arms is the most essential of the rights enumerated in our Constitution, because it ensures the preservation of all other rights.