Follow the Law

I've been holding back for a long time, readers and friends. This subject makes me angrier than any other and raises my blood pressure, which, at my age, I can ill afford. However, now that we're well into the process of seating another Supreme Court Justice -- one who declares that she upholds the law as originally written -- it is long past time to apply a little of this originalism, this textualism, where the Second Amendment is concerned.

The District of Columbia v. Heller was hailed far and wide as a landmark Supreme Court case because it allegedly established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and carry weapons. It was, in fact, a terrible decision that invented a Constitutional government power, out of whole cloth (as critics insist Roe vs. Wade invented the right to an abortion), to interpret and regulate the individual's right to keep and bear arms -- which means that it is no right at all, but a privilege generously granted by the state. No such power exists. No such power can possibly exist, given the recent violent experiences and the frame of mind of the Founding Fathers.

These men had just fought a long, bloody revolutionary war against the most powerful empire in the history of the world, a revolutionary war that they had astonished everyone -- including themselves -- by winning. The ludicrous contradiction written into current law, demanding that the government must first give you its permission to acquire the means to protect yourself from the government, is stark insanity. ....