Flashback:
May 7, 2001:
Bush Backs Individual’s Right to Guns
Administration Reverses 2nd Amendment Interpretation
The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/guns_020507.html W A S H I N G T O N, May 7 — The Bush administration has told the Supreme Court for the first time that it believes the Constitution protects an individual's right to possess guns, reversing the government's longstanding interpretation of the Second Amendment.
The current position of the United States ... is that the Second Amendment more broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to possess and bear their own firearms," Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote in two court filings this week.
That right, however, is "subject to reasonable restrictions designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse."
Olson, the administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, was reflecting the view of Attorney General John Ashcroft that the Second Amendment confers the right to "keep and bear arms" to private citizens, and not merely to the "well-regulated militia" mentioned in the amendment's text.
John Ashcroft that the Second Amendment confers the right to "keep and bear arms" to private citizens, Actually, it enumerates the Right. The Bill of Rights "confers" nothing.
That right, however, is "subject to reasonable restrictions designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse."
What does this have to do with the AWB ban?
There is nothing in it to prevent possession by "unfit persons" (do the other Bill of Rights not apply to these same 'unfit persons'?), or to ban firearms "suited to criminal misuse" since semiauto rifles with bayonet lugs aren't used very often in crimes.
And even if they were, so what?
The 2nd amendment doesn't state "The Right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed unless a few nuts use a particular firearm to commit crimes. Then it's okay for Congress to ban that gun"