In an opinion piece in the Washington Post and an article in the Seattle PI (via Uncle) about a brief filed in the Heller case the following argument is made; The Federal government should allow local control. The local know what is best for their society, and what is needed to reduce crime with the type of people they have in their cities and states. Apparently this argument generates considerable traction. I, on the other hand, am shocked that anyone could subscribe to such a concept.
What happens in my mind is that the word “ni**er” or a variation thereof is substituted for variations of the words gun, and gun-owner in all their arguments. And the 13th Amendment is substituted for the 2nd Amendment and the argument is reevaluated. The wording of both is absolute in both. If you are to argue that “reasonable restrictions of firearms” is acceptable then you must also argue that “reasonable involuntary servitude” is acceptable.
As an exercise do that on your own with the following paragraphs from the WaPo piece. Imagine the year is 1866 just after the 13th amendment was ratified:
In Heller, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the District’s ban on handguns on the grounds that any law banning any single type of “arms” is, necessarily, a violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. We believe this is wrong.
[…]
There are hundreds of state and local gun control laws. Each of those measures was enacted by local elected officials in response to local needs and desires. And each of those local governments is called on to balance people’s desire to possess weapons for self-defense against the obligation to protect public safety.
In the District — where handgun violence is particularly acute — our elected mayor and council struck this balance by prohibiting handguns in the home but permitting rifles and shotguns. Congress could have overturned this decision, but it did not.
People in other parts of the country might have struck this balance differently. In fact, many jurisdictions have permitted handguns when the District’s elected officials have not.
But the question is not what is the right policy for the District but who should make that policy. The standard the Supreme Court should apply in the pending gun case is whether the District’s gun law is reasonable. And “reasonable” means that the law is a reasonable public safety response to the city’s handgun violence and protects residents’ right to possess other types of arms for self-defense.
The plaintiffs in Heller would prefer a gun control law different from the one enacted by the D.C. Council. But the Supreme Court should not defer to the plaintiffs and use the Second Amendment as a vehicle for federal courts to micromanage gun laws in this country.
Instead, as Justice Anthony Kennedy said in a case we quoted in our brief, local legislatures should be allowed to devise “various solutions” to local problems “where the best solution is far from clear.” That is what our mayor and council did. The Supreme Court should uphold their decision.
These bigots would do well to remember this quote:
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
Alan Dershowitz
Quoted in Dan Gifford
The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason
62 TENN. L. REV. 759 (1995)
But then I can’t help but sometimes think my comparison to the 13th Amendment won’t get that much traction with the socialists even when it is presented to them. The socialists do want to treat the 13th Amendment as they do the 2nd. The only difference between 1865 and now is that the socialist want government to own all the slaves instead of individuals. The elimination of the 2nd Amendment is just a bump on the road to their true goal. As the slave owners of 150 years ago knew, you can’t allow your slaves access to weapons or you would have a revolt on your hands.
Update: Similar exercises are available for the reader in the Solicitor General’s brief in D.C. v. Heller. An example is this snippet:
As the court of appeals correctly held, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms, including for private purposes unrelated to militia operations. But like other constitutional rights, that individual right is subject to reasonable restrictions, must be applied in light of context and history, and does not provide any protections to individuals who have never been understood to be within the Amendment’s protections.