“A well regulated militia, being necessary to
the security of a free state, the right of the people
to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
— Second Amendment, U.S. Constitution

“[W]e conclude that the Second Amendment
secures an individual right to bear arms.”
— Memorandum opinion,
Bush Justice Department, 2003

by Rod D. Martin
May 18, 2006

What’s the most fundamental of all human rights?

The right to life, of course.

Without it, all other rights are meaningless — after all, if you’re dead, you clearly can’t exercise any of them.

Now, if it means anything at all, the right to life must confer the right to preserve one’s own life. And if the right to self-preservation has meaning, it must include the right to procure the means with which to defend one’s life and liberty.

All of which is to say, the right to life necessitates the right to self-defense, and thus gun ownership.

Liberals would have us believe this is some nutty notion of the “far right” — meaning anyone more conservative than Hillary Clinton — but history disagrees. The Anglo-American right of individual firearms ownership can be traced at least to Britain’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89. And our Founding Fathers — who proclaimed an “unalienable” right to life — also enshrined a right to keep and bear arms in their Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

This was not a call for national guard units. Legal scholars of the time agreed that the “militia” was all of the community’s able-bodied men, in or out of uniform. It was from that broad pool — not official units — that they built the Continental Army. Perhaps more basic still, it was the average man in Boonesboro — not a non-existent state trooper — who had to fend off Indians, wolves and the French.

Guns were essential. They still are.

For over a century after the Constitution’s ratification, there was an overwhelming judicial consensus that the Second Amendment affirmed the individual right to firearms ownership, just as the Founders intended. It is only in modern times that this understanding has slipped away, under assault from liberals who’ve obviously never been raped or mugged.

But in one of the great untold stories of our time, George W. Bush is turning back that assault.

In 2003, Bush’s Justice Department reversed forty years of official policy — through Republican and Democrat administrations alike — claiming the Second Amendment protects only the National Guard. For the first time in almost half a century, your government officially defends your right to gun ownership before federal courts.

The President also signed a national Right-to-Carry law for law enforcement officers and an agreement with 17 major sportsmen’s groups to improve hunting and fishing access to Federal lands.

And on October 31 last year, Bush signed the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act”, ending the ridiculous, made-up “right” to sue honest gun manufacturers and retailers for the actions of violent thugs.

As in his defense of the unborn, George Bush has proven to be a tremendous champion of our essential right to life.

Yet the sad news remains that, in state after state, decades of far-left extremism have severely restricted this liberty.

Liberals claim that more guns mean more crime. But this is the exact opposite of the truth. Indeed, the cities with the strictest gun laws have the most gun crime, their rates soaring after enactment of their laws. The same thing happened in Britain and Australia following their national gun bans, while countries like Switzerland — where everyone owns a machine gun — have virtually no crime at all.

This makes perfect sense. Criminals don’t need gun shops. And once armed, where would criminals (or terrorists) rather rape and pillage: in a disarmed city, or where their victims might shoot back?

The truth is, violent crime continues to plummet in states which allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons; and contrary to leftist claims that most murders are committed by average folks who just happen to have a gun, 90% of adult murderers already have criminal records when they kill.

Yet to this day, the de facto stance of the national Democrat Party is the same as in the days of Woodstock: rights for gun-toting criminals, none for law-abiding citizens.

And now, this July 4th in New York City, those same liberals, in concert with the world’s terrorist states and dictatorships, mean to enact a UN treaty banning individual firearms ownership worldwide.

President Bush stated clearly in his first term that America would never allow the United Nations impose regulations that would violate the Second Amendment. But never is a long time, and a Democrat Senate majority or a President Hillary would pretty strongly disagree.

This is one of the biggest reasons we have a Republican Congress and White House.

And it’s one more good reason we should work like the dickens to keep it that way.