For Non Gun Owners: D.C. v. Heller and 2A In A Nutshell

By John Longenecker

I was so very pleased to join Bob Parks on his radio show last night, Outside The Wire, November 13th. We talked about gun bans and what personal weapons are all about. Thanks again for having me, Bob.

The Supreme Court Of the United States may soon decide whether to hear District Of Columbia v. Heller [formerly known as Parker v. District of Columbia], a case about gun bans and frustration of a civil right in high crime areas. In these areas, the right is needed most, and in these areas, it is vexed and frustrated the most. How does blocking a civil right operate in the public interest?

D.C. v. Heller, if the Supremes elect to hear the case, can have a profound impact on the country's gun control policy, and thus an effect on individual liberty. Gun bans do not work, and where the Second Amendment is affirmed, crime doesn't seem to be a problem. You might say that government burden has been lifted a bit, as - even with more than 2 million gun owners carrying their weapon - none of the dire predictions of shootings has come true, and armed citizens are demonstrated to play an important role in crime control.

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In this country, there are about 300 million guns in the hands of some 80 million gun owners, and most of the shootings are criminal in nature. Out of 11,000 annual shooting deaths, nearly all are criminal shootings, while armed citizens use their gun to de-escalate a crime more than 2.5 million times every year, almost exclusively without even firing their weapon. [Source: www.FBI.gov, Uniform Crime Report.] Understand that with 11,000 criminal shootings each year, these are 2.5 million non-shootings. What doctors, activists and officials point to in trauma is not responsible or irresponsible gun use, but Crime. What they are seeing is not carelessness of gun owners and it is not enough to call it Violence - it is Crime. It is one-sided aggression. What they will never see is the 2.5 million acts of crime which are stopped by an armed citizen. As I said, right-to-carry states don't seem to have the same high-violence, high-crime problem nor the government burden. Some forty states seem to like it that way.

But what is 2A really all about for the Citizen? National Guard? Private ownership? How does 1776 thinking relate to 2008 household? This is old hat for liberty nuts, but probably new to the non-gun owners families.

Let's review in what the Supremes will do what they do best: interpret the Constitution, which means the thinking of Original Intent of the Founders.

In a nutshell, the Founding Fathers, in defeating the Crown of England, defeated abuses of due process, and in founding the new nation, in preventing this from ever happening again, they declared the Citizen as Supreme Authority, Point #1. it's worked well until around 1968.

Through education content, media, entertainment and outright activism, this Authority is being buried deeper and deeper from public view. For instance, many Americans do not know that their police have no duty to protect them. [Castle Rock v. Gonzales, U.S. Supreme Court, 2005: No constitutional right to police protection.] For some heads of household, this comes as a big surprise.

Point #2 is that 2A was not written for you and me, it was written for officials, like most of the Document. It recognizes a small bundle of rights as pre-existing and creator-given, and a wide scope of limits on officials. Like all our rights, they are not collective, but individual.

Point #3 is that the Founders did not imagine weapons of the future to be a threat to the new nation - what they did fear as a threat was future abuses of due process as likely to recur in any age, in any administration including state or local, so they said in their debates, in their writings and in the final ratification that the citizen authority of the future must be backed by lethal force, and for all time, or the new nation would perish at any time.

Armed citizens are in the public interest for many reasons, and vexing and disarming citizens is against the public interest whatever the reason. The 11,000 homicides by criminals is not nearly reason enough to disarm the 2.5 million who de-escalate crime for themselves and on behalf of their communities. These are non-police de-escalations turned in to the FBI every year by police around the country. How many are not even reported?

2A is as absolute as the Emancipation Proclamation is. In this country, you cannot own and trade in human beings, not even a little. Neither can one legally write laws which disarm the supreme authority of the nation, not even a little. Notwithstanding another amendment to repeal it, 2A is absolute because it backs citizen authority forever, and without another amendment, until that very hour, there can be no such thing as a sensible gun law to interfere with that authority. The exciting thing about the appeals court is that the court agrees with this. Gun bans are illegal, and i'll bet the Appeals Court knows why. Does the average citizen know why?

Point #4 is that Militia of 1776 must be what guides today's interpretation of 2A, which is that Militia meant the Everyman. The National Guard did not come into existence for another 130 years after the signing of the Constitution - they couldn't have meant that.

We must be guided by the Original Intent of the Founders and their perspective in what they defeated and how they wanted to prevent its recurring in the new nation: their solution was to prevent future abuses of the law by declaring the citizen as supreme authority and to back that authority with force. The Original Intent of the Founders was not for only their time, but for survival of the nation for all time.

Today, the exquisite example of abuse of due process is in the use of Crime as an excuse to further and further disarm all via gun control policy, and this cannot stand. Any effort to disarm Americans is to disarm the supreme authority of the nation, which is the People, not public servant executives. Gun control policy is adverse to public interest because it obfuscates citizen authority to act when facing grave danger alone, and cultivates dependency on those executives for increased government burden.

Independence in supreme authority impeaches gun control policy and dependency on agencies, which has acted only to the detriment of the American people.

John Longenecker is President and CEO of Good For The Country Foundation, a patriotic non-profit organization.