by Rod D. Martin
March 9, 2007

In what is certainly the most important judicial victory for the Second Amendment in decades, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today struck down the 30-year-old D.C. gun ban, opening the door to a Supreme Court showdown and the overturning of similar unconstitutional laws from New York to California.

This extremely significant victory for the Bill of Rights is going to be well-celebrated across the country, but even many activists will not grasp the debt they owe to George W. Bush. I know. Because I’ve spoken on this across the nation, and met virtually no one who knows anything about it.

You see, in 2001, during the first year of the Bush Presidency, our hero directed the Justice Department to not only recognize an individual right to keep and bear arms — the plain language of the Second Amendment — but to argue court cases accordingly. This may not seem like a big deal. But it turns out that for forty years, the Justice Department — even under Ronald Reagan — had done the exact opposite, and no President had lifted a finger.

So today, we see clearly how a courageous President can make an enormous difference, even if it takes a while to work through our system. This was hardly the only thing Mr. Bush did in 2001: he took America out of the disastrous ABM Treaty (another thing even Reagan wouldn’t do) and began the deployment of real missile defenses. He quit treating terrorism as a law-enforcement matter and ran the Taliban out of power. He proposed, fought for and enacted the tax cuts which have created the phenomenal economic boom we’ve lived through for most of this decade. And he began appointing the conservative, honest judges who are slowly undoing decades of liberal by-the-seat-of-their-pants lawmaking from the bench.

It’s easy to take shots at this President. But he says what he means and does what he says. And we like that about him. Even when we disagree with him.

But we sure aren’t disagreeing with him today. Thank you President Bush.

More on this from Human Events.

And from former Human Events editor Rob Bluey.