Second Amendment and our basic rights

By Joe Turner

Several weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The decision was 5 to 4. Five justices supported the Second Amendment as written.

Four justices, as shown in their dissenting opinions, did not necessarily disagree with the Second Amendment but chose to let their personal prejudices influence their votes. This is not unusual. Personal opinion and social engineering will always be a part of any court’s decision-making progress.

The opinions of the four dissenting justices border on the absurd. They are asking us to believe that while the word “people” is in the Constitution 10 times, it means, well, the people in nine of those times and the National Guard in one place, in the Second Amendment. They have forgotten that when the Constitution was written, there was no regulated national militia or anything close to it other than loosely formed local citizen defense groups who owned their weapons and took them home at night. They want us to believe that even though the National Guard was not created by Congress until 1903, the framers somehow saw the future and referenced the National Guard in the Second Amendment. That argument is foolish.

A highly respected local law enforcement person who is a friend told me that his anti-gun opinions came from growing up where there were no guns, in Los Angeles. He had no experience with guns so he decided to be against guns. This seems to be yet another case of an authority making a decision with no experience to back up the decision. He is just like those four Supreme Court justices.

Note that it is the Second Amendment that gives us the right to own guns. This clearly shows that the framers had very high regard for the subject. In fact, they felt that only one other basic right — that of free speech and a free press — was more important.

Liberals, get over it and maybe go sit in trees somewhere. Americans do have the right to own and bear arms to defend themselves, for sporting purposes, and simply because we want to. After all, “simply because we want to” is at the core of being American.

Just down the road in Oakland, crime and murder are so commonplace that the death toll from crime often tops that of Iraq and Afghanistan put together. The violence is being done by criminals who will never obey laws or even common decency. No matter how many gun laws we pass, those criminals will ignore them.

But the rest of us do not commit crimes and certainly do not go about committing murders. Get off our backs.

(Turner lives in Napa.)

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009