She says it better then I can

[ericire12]

Not to be missed is her judgement that the left opposed gun ownership simply because so many people on the right support it.

One Vote Away From Tyranny

By KAREN LEE TORRE


It is truly amazing that for hundreds of years, and up until last week, the question of whether Americans have a constitutional right to own a handgun remained unanswered.

Whatever, now we have it.

The pronouncement in McDonald v. City of Chicago is not only a great relief but among the most historically important things the Supreme Court has ever done to protect the citizenry from tyrants, whether in the form of a house invader, a mugger, a mayor or a state legislature.

Many things have been said about gun-ban proponents: They are ignorant of or turn a blind eye to history. They ignore explicit constitutional guarantees in favor of a judicial ordering of societal rights and restrictions based on fleeting policy considerations. The policy arguments they do make are inane, based as they often are on contrived facts and outcome-driven “studies” (junk social science).

I believe all that is largely true.

But another observation I heard seems particularly convincing: It’s not so much that gun-ban proponents dislike guns; it is that they dislike the people who like guns.

I have moved to conclude that liberals’ positions on such legal issues are intellectually skin-deep for a simple reason: Whatever they perceive as coming from the American “right,” they oppose in knee-jerk fashion; the legal argument is figured out later.

The largely “left-right” alignment on the Second Amendment is evident from both the fact that Democrats are the most frequent shepherds of gun control legislation, and the familiar 5-4 break of the justices in McDonald and its 2008 precursor – Heller v. D.C. For a host of historical reasons, I think it a peculiar mal-alignment.

In complaining that the majority justices did not “seem to appreciate the full scope of gun violence in America,” Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley voiced the dangerous liberal notion that nine unelected and unaccountable justices should decide constitutional issues based on what they think is good social policy for 300 million Americans who cannot vote them out of office.

Quite aside from Daley’s painful display of ignorance about the proper role of the Court is the sheer silliness of the irrelevant policy argument his camp advanced to the unappreciative justices, who decided the case based on constitutional text rather than how many people are shooting each other in Chicago these days.

And of course we had to endure the liberals’ obnoxious foreign law arguments.

If liberals insist on a social policy and “foreign law” approach to deciding Americans’ constitutional rights, fine, let’s talk policy and foreign experience.

What was among the Nazi party’s first social policy initiatives upon assuming power? Gun control.

Hitler enjoyed popular support upon taking office; his gun control initiative was instead forward thinking – designed to impede a future popular revolt against his government.

The more pressing policy imperative—disarming the nation’s Jewish population.

All Jewish people were required immediately to turn in any guns they possessed. Of course later on, Americans were among those who helped smuggle guns into Germany for use by Jewish people and their allies in the resistance. (With that not-too-distant history, the number of American-Jewish people who embrace the gun control agenda confounds me).

Similarly, during Reconstruction, the good social policy had it that free blacks must be disarmed, even of the very weapons they bore in war in defense of the Confederacy.

Ironically, Daley sought to disarm the African-American plaintiff, Otis McDonald, who sought to protect himself from violent thugs in his neighborhood.

The “full scope of gun violence” about which Daley complained took place in Chicago during the period of time that it had the total gun ban in place.

A nine-year-old is capable of deducing what won’t penetrate the liberals’ thick heads: Gun bans do not achieve their purported objective because criminals (by definition) do not obey gun laws.

They are no more effective than Prohibition was in ending use and access to alcohol.

Four justices on our Supreme Court would have permitted local governments throughout the nation to take guns away from the American people.

We were one justice away from being deprived of one of the most fundamental, critical rights and means of protection that we have, the very exercise of which led to the founding of the United States.

Thank goodness this ruling came before President Barack Obama gained an opportunity to place a fifth liberal on that court.

And if that doesn’t teach us about the consequence of elections, I don’t know what will. •

Karen Lee Torre, a New Haven trial lawyer, litigates civil rights issues in the federal courts. Her e-mail address is thimbleislands@sbcglobal.net.

KAREN LEE TORRE - RANGER