Dana Mathewson

This is a good article from Fox News correspondent Judge Andrew Napolitano. There may be a bit of inaccuracy here and there when he says "the President did this or said that," but he's accurate in his Constitutional arguments.

Last weekend's mass murders in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have produced a flood of words about everything from gun control to mental illness to white nationalism. Most of those words have addressed the right to keep and bear arms as if it were a gift from the government. It isn't.

The Supreme Court has twice ruled in the past 11 years that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual pre-political liberty. That is the highest category of liberty recognized in the law. It is akin to the freedoms of thought, speech and personality.

That means that the court has recognized that the framers of the Constitution did not bestow this right upon us. Rather, they recognized its preexistence as an extension of our natural human right to self-defense and they forbade government – state and federal – from infringing upon it.

It would be exquisitely unfair, profoundly unconstitutional and historically un-American for the rights of law-abiding folks – "surrender that rifle you own legally and use safely because some other folks have used that same type of weapon criminally" – to be impaired in the name of public safety.

It would also be irrational. A person willing to kill innocents and be killed by the police while doing so surely would have no qualms about violating a state or federal law that prohibited the general ownership of the weapon he was about to use.

With all of this as background, and the country anguishing over the mass deaths of innocents, the feds and the states face a choice between a knee-jerk but popular restriction of some form of gun ownership and the rational and sound realization that more guns in the hands of those properly trained means less crime and more safety.

We know this because in the first Supreme Court opinion upholding the individual right to keep and bear arms, the court addressed what kind of arms the Second Amendment protects. The court ruled that the Second Amendment protects individual ownership of weapons one can carry that are of the same degree of sophistication as the bad guys have – or the government has.

The government? Yes, the government. That's so because the Second Amendment was not written to protect the right to shoot deer. It was written to protect the right to shoot at tyrants and their agents when they have stolen liberty or property from the people.

I don't think the judge particularly likes the president, but he does like the Constitution, and that's all that matters here. I highly recommend this article. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/judge-andrew-napolitano-a-few-words-about-guns-and-personal-liberty  This doesn't mean we can roll over and go to sleep, expecting the Constitution to protect us; we need to actively protect the Constitution, because the Left is hell-bent on destroying it.

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