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". the would-be gun grabber . . "

The charge is repeated again. Yet:

"Slouching Towards Gomorrah" and found this passage at p. 167, after Bork denounces gun control as "frivolous":

Gun control proposals are nothing more than a modern liberal suggestion that government, which is unable to protect its citizens, make sure those citizens cannot defend themselves.

One can believe gun control is "frivolous" and yet not believe in the validity of court nullification of gun control laws. The way I can resolve his apparently contradictory statements regarding gun control (without making the cop-out suggestion that he changed his mind back and forth) is to suppose he believed gun control was unwise policy, but did not believe in the court's authority to overturn such bad policy... that kind of thinking is very consistent with his general philosophy.

Back up a page, ST.

Page 166: ``the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm. The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.''

So which is it?

You need to get your facts straight. I recommend this article for your perusal. Bork is anti-Second Amendment, I suggest you stop trying to tell us otherwise. Will you admit you were wrong ?

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Borking the Second Amendment
by Samuel Francis

It has been quite a few years since the world last heard of Robert Bork, but back in 1987 his name was a household -- indeed, a national headline -- word. Judge Bork, of course was one of Ronald Reagan's nominees to the Supreme Court, a nominee whom the liberal Democrats who then controlled the Senate defeated in a particularly ugly and often insulting confirmation battle.

So ugly and insulting was the war waged against Judge Bork by the left that his conservative champions tried to coin a new word, to ``bork'' someone, meaning to stop a person's candidacy for office by systematically smearing him. To this day Judge Bork remains the number one guru of the conservative view of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, it may also be his last day as the guru-in-chief of constitutional issues. In his most recent book, Sloughing toward Gomorrah, Judge Bork manages to carry out a bit of borking on his own -- not on a person but rather on the Constitution itself, and in particular on the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment, the bete noire of the gun gestapo, states that ``a well regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'' It is the core of the constitutional argument against gun control, long held to secure the right of individuals to own (buy, sell, keep, and carry) firearms. Judge Bork, however, doesn't think so.

Discussing the carnage of violent crime, Judge Bork rejects gun control as an effective means of reducing it. ``Gun control,'' he writes, ``shifts the equation in favor of the criminal,'' and he's right, as he often is. But when he gets on to the constitutionality of gun control, he's simply wrong, as he usually isn't.

In a footnote on page 166, Judge Bork writes that:

``the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm. The Second Amendment was designed to allow states to defend themselves against a possibly tyrannical national government. Now that the federal government has stealth bombers and nuclear weapons, it is hard to imagine what people would need to keep in the garage to serve that purpose.''

Judge Bork is in fact wrong in both logic and facts. As to logic, even if the Supreme Court had ruled as he claims, that doesn't settle the issue of constitutionality. The Supreme Court can be wrong, and indeed Judge Bork is a hero to conservatives precisely because he often criticizes the Supreme Court's rulings. By implying that Supreme Court rulings are authoritative if not infallible, he contradicts most of what he has argued throughout his juristic career.

But second, as to facts, he is also wrong that the court ``has consistently ruled that there is no individual right to own a firearm.'' The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, a standard reference work on the court and its rulings that really is authoritative, states that one of the main nineteenth century cases, Presser v. Illiois (1886), ``declared that the Second Amendment only protected individuals from federal not state infringement.''

As for twentieth century cases, the main one is a 1939 ruling in United States v. Miller, in which the court held unanimously that ``the Second Amendment protected the citizen's right to own weapons that were ordinary militia weapons.'' That excluded sawed-off shotguns, but left us a pretty heavy arsenal in their place. As to the ``collective right'' that the amendment supposedly expresses, the view that only the people collectively, not as individuals, have a right to keep and bear arms, the Oxford reference book concludes that ``history gives very little support for that view.''

That's more than what Judge Bork offers in support of his view, and as for his claim that government possession of bombers and nukes makes whatever weaponry you have stashed in your garage useless, tell that to the Afghan resistance, the Nicaraguan contras, and indeed the Vietcong, the Sandinistas, and a dozen other guerrilla groups that have laid their local leviathans low with weapons no more advanced than what we can keep in the carport.

For all Judge Bork's juristic learning and thinking, he missed the constitutional boat on what may in the near future be the most important constitutional issue before the court. Maybe the Democrats who kept him off the high bench were on to something, because, if the court does rule on the meaning of the Second Amendment, it will be a good thing that Robert Bork isn't there.

http://www.users.fast.net/~behanna/bork.html