By Selwyn Duke

Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times reports that the Supreme Court appears poised to uphold an individual’s right to bear arms.  As you may know, a landmark Second Amendment case has come before the court, as a lower court has ruled in favor of a security guard who was upset that he couldn’t keep his handgun in his home in the District of Columbia.

D.C. has been enforcing a complete ban on privately-owned handguns for many years.  Even more preposterous is that while the municipality allows rifles and shotguns, its law stipulates that they must be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.  This, of course, renders them completely useless for self-defense.  "Uh, yeah, hold on, Mr. Fagin, I just need to reassemble my shotgun.  You wouldn’t want to rob me before it was a fair fight, would you?"

I’ve also have a strong suspicion as to where this is going, as I understand liberal incrementalism well.  If mandating that guns must be locked up, disassembled or otherwise made unsuitable for self-defense becomes the norm, what do you think the next step will be?  The left will outlaw firearms, saying, "Well, you don’t really need them; I mean, you can’t use them for self-defense anyway."  Believe me, this very easily could happen.  Remember that the self-defense argument is the primary moral element in the case for Second Amendment rights; eliminate that, and gun ownership’s main raison d’être goes out the window.

Then there is the left’s standard misinterpretation of the Second Amendment.  The passage in question is:

"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."

Liberals like to say that this limits the right to bear arms to their use in conjunction with a militia. 

Nonsense.

Understand that a militia was a great number of able-bodied male citizens who came together for the common defense.  And the best way to ensure that the militia would be properly equipped was for the citizens to be armed.

Regardless, there is no question that the Founding Fathers intended to secure an individual right to firearm ownership. 

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