The Second Amendment

Recently our dismal Supreme Court--may five of them burn in Hell with broken backs--ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution granted individuals the right to bear arms. What interests me, though, is the fact that for many years leading liberal intellectuals argued that the founding fathers had passed the second amendment to make sure that militias, not individuals, could bear arms. (Not all of the left agreed. My closest Marxist friend, ready for the revolution, owned a submachinegun he used to fire off his back porch on the Fourth of July. When I attempted to fire my 1873 Winchester, he stopped me on the grounds that it might explode and endanger the children.)

The argument that Mason and Jefferson and Madison had written a Constitutional right for militias to bear arms but no parallel right for the cavalry to ride horses or for the navy to sail ships had long troubled me. In fact, all militias have the right to bear arms--it's part of the definition of a militia. The argument that the second amendment protects the rights of soldiers to carry guns makes no sense.

Here is what really happened. The founding fathers granted each of us the right to carry a sword or a one-shot musket. Looking ahead, they correctly envisioned the Sergeant Yorks and Audie Murphys of future wars, draftees who had learned to shoot accurately on their own time. It did not occur to Madison that some sociopath might invade a public school, hold hundreds of children prisoner and massacre many of them with a one-shot weapon. The times (and arms) have changed.

If we want to ban guns entirely, we will have to amend the Constitution. If we want to regulate guns (as we regulate cars), we might have to amend the Supreme Court.

--Gary Goss