Free Republic

We have talked a lot about the liberal assault on our right as American citizens to keep and bear arms for the defense of ourselves, our families, our communities, and our Constitution, but it is a mistake to think of a disarmed population as their desired end-state. No, that’s merely the first step toward the subjugation of the Normals. What they want is not only for us to be disarmed, but to be silenced.They are not going to stop with the Second Amendment. Next, they are going to move to finish off the First Amendment.They don’t want you to speak...

But the attention to the Second Amendment is misplaced. What neither side in the gun debate seems to realize is that at the moment, when it comes to the sort of restrictions that lie within the zone of possibility, the Second Amendment is neither an obstacle nor a protection. It’s an irrelevance. Federal laws regulating guns have been around for a long time, including age requirements for gun owners, a prohibition on felons and a mandatory background check for purchases from a licensed dealer. These rules predated the Supreme Court’s momentous 2008 decision striking down the District of Columbia’s complete...

A Virginia lawmaker who drew gasps from his colleagues when he brandished a borrowed AK-47 during an anti-gun speech Thursday was found guilty in 2002 of committing a vicious 1999 assault, was sanctioned for legal misconduct while prosecuting a rape case, spent six months in jail for contempt of a federal court, and saw his law license revoked in 2003. Democratic Delegate Joseph Morrissey brought the rifle to the floor of the House of Delegates to demonstrate how easy it is to carry firearms in Virginia. Republican Delegate Todd Gilbert interrupted Morrissey’s speech to ask him to remove his finger...

The Supreme Court decision overturning the District's handgun ban won't trigger an open season for guns, Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Friday, because D.C. law still bans all semiautomatic weapons — such as the common 9 mm pistols used by police and the military. Continues...=============================================================== Have gun, less crime In response to the startling discovery by the Supreme Court Thursday that the 2nd Amendment exists, Obama at first tried to fake support for the decision, then showed his staggering mastery of clueless-ness with: "What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne." The Supremes struck down the District...

A nice day's work at the Supreme Court ought to be enough to sober the conservatives who look forward to spending election day sulking because they're unable to fall in love with John McCain. Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion, a tribute to the Constitution's clear and plain language upholding the Second Amendment, demonstrates amply that the importance of justices of the Supreme Court is equaled only by the importance of the man who appoints them. Though trusting any pol is necessarily a leap of faith, Mr. McCain makes more reassuring noises about that presidential responsibility than the man standing in...

In the very first sentence of yesterday's landmark Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, a constitutionalist jurisprudence to protect the Second Amendment emerges. The right to bear arms as the Founders inscribed it in the Bill of Rights "protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia," proclaims the ruling. Thus does this 5-4 watershed address frontally the many decades of dispute on a most basic constitutional question. Does the Second Amendment protect an individual right to bear arms, or a collective one? It is an individual right, the court ruled. The District's...