Category: Second Amendment rights

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Second Amendment rights too much government

Drawing Gunfire

Thank goodness the CIA didn’t investigate my preschool drawings. I went wild with pencil and pen, drawing such mayhem that surely my parents should have been hauled into a klieg-lit interrogation room.

But they weren’t. Such dystopian dynamics had to wait a few decades and befall 4-year-old Nevaeh Sansone and her father, Jessie Sansone, of Kitchener, Ontario.

At school, Nevaeh drew a picture of her father holding a pistol. What was her father doing with the gun? Reportedly, little Nevaeh informed adults, and I use that term loosely, her dad was “getting the bad guys and monsters.”

No wonder, then, that when Jesse Sansone came to pick up Nevaeh and his other kids at school, he was picked up, instead, by police.

The child’s concerned teacher had tattled to school officials, who then contacted Family and Children’s Services, who brought in the, uh, big guns — who arrested and strip-searched the child’s father.

Waterloo Regional Police Inspector Kevin Thaler informed reporters that Nevaeh and her siblings told police where in the house the gun was stored and that the children had accessed it.

“It is a four-year-old that we’re taking the information from,” Thaler explained, “but the fact is that this disclosure was very descriptive and very alarming to the officers investigating this.”

He elaborated: “The kids were scared.”

Yeah, I’ll bet they were.

After several hours of harassing the children, humiliating the father and scaring the pregnant mother, the cops figured out that the gun was a toy. According to the father, it was “completely transparent. It doesn’t even resemble a real gun, at all.”

Fake gun. Real panic. Foolish, fear-ridden officialdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights

Keep Firing

Now that the Supreme Court agrees that there’s a Second Amendment, the one about how the right to keep and bear arms shan’t be infringed, lower courts are feeling free to load this constitutional ammo as well.

Ohio’s Supreme Court just ruled 5-2 against Cleveland’s requirement for registering handguns and against a ban on assault weapons, upholding a state law banning onerous gun control.

The losing side argues that the Ohio law violates the home rule rights of municipalities. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson says, “Our inability to enforce laws that are right for our city flies in the face of home rule and takes power away from the people at the local level.”

If some mugger with a gun is lurching at you in a dark alley, and you’ve got no gun — or if some armed lunatic is shooting into a crowd, and you’ve got no gun — you may wish you had one. And probably would not find consoling the thought, “Well, at least these local victim-disarmament laws are ‘right for the town.’”

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s anti-victim-disarmament law “does not unconstitutionally infringe on municipal home rule authority.”

Yes. If constitutional protections of individual rights could be countermanded at will, not only the 2nd and 14th Amendments but also all other explicit and implicit constitutional protections of our rights would be dead letters whenever any burg says so.

But there can’t be a constitutional right to ignore constitutional rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights

Yet He Broke No Laws

David Codrea, a gun rights columnist for Examiner.com, was alerted by a reader to the plight of Brian Aitkin, in a New Jersey jail “for seven years for owning legal guns.”

Codrea looked into it. And, unfortunately, it seems that Mr. Aitkin has indeed been incarcerated for the crime of . . . well, of driving from one place to another in a perfectly legal manner.

Aitkin’s real sin? Bad luck. The bad luck to be stopped on the road by police ignorant of or indifferent to the law. And the bad luck to have a judge knowledgeable about but indifferent to the law, and unwilling to tell jurors about it.

Also unluckily, his jurors reluctantly went along with the vicious charade even though they weren’t getting straight answers.

Atkins was moving from Colorado to New Jersey with firearms in his possession, and which he had purchased after passing relevant background checks. The firearms were disassembled and locked in his trunk in accordance with New Jersey state law. Atkins had even contacted the New Jersey State Police to make sure of his compliance. Alas, as reported at BrianDAtkin.com, “The jury returned from deliberation three times practically begging the judge to tell them the law that protects an individual’s rights to transport firearms — [but] the judge outright refused to tell them!”

There’s much more to learn about this disturbing case. Codrea has the links. And no corrupt judge can stop you from clicking on them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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judiciary Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Advance for Rights

Next to the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment might well be the most momentous Amendment to the Constitution. Here’s the most interesting chunk of it:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Before this amendment, adopted after the Civil War (mainly to keep white southerners from tyrannizing ex-slaves), the Bill of Rights had applied to individuals only against the federal government. After it, states were required to follow the Bill of Rights, too.

This week, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, five of nine members of the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own guns against prohibitive regulation by states. In Heller, two years ago, the Supreme Court had applied the Second Amendment to individuals only against federal government regulation.

McDonald is a major advance for gun ownership rights. But the most interesting thing about the case is Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate concurrence. Four of the Justices decided that the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause applied. Thomas argued, instead, that it is the “privileges and immunities” clause that matters.

Why care? Well, “privileges and immunities” is just a fancy way of saying “rights.”

That’s why we have courts. To protect our rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights

The Idiotic Extremes of Prohibitionist Tyranny

Tyrants don’t like an armed populace. The extent tyrannies will go to make sure citizens are disarmed can boggle the mind.

Take England. Please.

In Great Britain, private gun ownership is now illegal. This is not just a policy of trying to reduce concealed carrying of firearms — it’s a complete and utter prohibition, with no leniency.

Consider the recent case of 27-year-old Paul Clarke, a former soldier. He spied a garbage bag in the wrong place, went to look, and found a shotgun with ammo inside. He new guns were illegal, so he made an appointment with the local Chief Superintendent, and took it to the police station in the morning.

He was then arrested and imprisoned for possessing a firearm. He didn’t know that the law was so stringent as to make even touching a firearm, with the intention of giving it to the police, a no-no. But he was prosecuted and convicted for doing just that. By the time you hear/read this, he’ll have been sentenced.  I’m hoping the judge is lenient. The five years minimum, which is how the law reads, is idiotic in the extreme.

The law is more than just dumb, it’s tyrannical. There’s no excuse for such nonsense.

Free Paul Clarke! And weep for Britain, where some say liberty was born. Liberty sure seems dead there now — as is common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights

Infringed Upon

Call me a literalist. If I see a sign saying “Keep Off the Grass,” I assume that instruction applies to you, and me, and everybody but the lawn’s gardener.

If my dog Bugsy is on leash, I’ll keep him off the lawn, too.

Same for the Bill of Rights. Even the notoriously controversial Second Amendment seems fairly clear: “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.”

What part of “shall not be infringed” is hard to understand?

I just received a fascinating short article from the Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, Oregon, by Karla Kay Edwards. Ms. Edwards writes about current court cases regarding gun regulation. She explains that “in June 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies directly to an individual’s right to bear arms. However, the decision did not clarify whether states and other government entities can limit those rights.”

She states it well. But, still, oddly. Don’t you find it a tad strange that rights listed in the Constitution as not to “be infringed” can, in the next breath, be spoken of as limitable?

Ms Edwards believes that such issues should be decided by the courts. I agree. But I’d prefer it if legislatures would simply not infringe on our rights in the first place.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.