PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE “The People” narrowly prevail, 5-4 By Mark Alexander “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 United States Constitution Yesterday, in a narrow 5-4 vote (Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Kennedy), the Supreme Court reaffirmed, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that the people’s inherent right to keep and bear arms is plainly enumerated in our Constitution. The Court ruled that the Second Amendment ensures an individual right, that DC could not ban handguns, and that operable guns may be maintained in the homes of law-abiding DC residents. However, the ruling still leaves open the question of whether the Bill of Rights has legal precedence over state and municipal firearm restrictions. As UCLA Law School professor and constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh points out, “The Heller decision only involved the Second Amendment’s effects on federal laws (including laws of federal enclaves, such as DC). Whether the Constitution limits state and local gun bans—which is to say, whether the Second Amendment is ‘incorporated’ against states and their subdivisions by the Fourteenth Amendment—will have to be decided in a future case.” Thus, 15 minutes after the Heller decision was announced, the Illinois State Rifle Association announced its suit against the city of Chicago, which has gun restrictions similar to those overruled in the District of Columbia, in order to establish that precedent. Similar suits will no doubt follow in other states. In a masterful feat of doubletalk, Barack Hussein Obama, who erroneously asserts, “The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can’t initiate gun laws isn’t borne out by our Constitution,” claims the Supreme Court agreed with his interpretation. Mind you, this is the same Barack Obama who recently said, “I have never favored an all-out ban on handguns,” even while denying the plain truth that his signature appears on a questionnaire indicating that he does favor such a ban; the same Barack Obama who recently said during a 16 April debate when asked by Charlie Gibson whether the DC gun ban is consistent with the Constitution, “Well, Charlie, I confess I obviously haven’t listened to the briefs and looked at all the evidence.” Would Obama make the same argument about local jurisdictions regulating issues like segregation? Does he suggest, by extension then, that our national Constitution can be amended by judicial dictates and local ordinances? I can’t help but ponder how future 2A cases would fare if the Obama/Clinton ticket wins in November and then stacks the courts with judicial activists who subscribe to their adulterated view of a “Living Constitution.” There is no more important constitutional issue regarding the liberty of our Republic than that of defending the plain language and original intent of our Second Amendment. As James Madison, our Constitution’s principal author, wrote in the Federalist Papers (No. 46), “The ultimate authority... resides in the people alone... 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 to the point, Justice Joseph Story, appointed to the Supreme Court by Madison, wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833), “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.” Continued...
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