gun ban

Forgive me if I take a holiday from some of the liberal and progressive hysteria over the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a firearm. But, then, I am a Westerner and a gun owner.

The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government and specifying some of the rights of individuals (indeed, some of the Framers opposed the Bill of Rights because they feared individual rights would be seen as limited to those amendments). If the Framers intended to discuss state militias, the Bill of Rights seems an odd place to do it. It’s meaningful that the amendment is No. 2 behind that wellspring of recognizing individual rights, the First Amendment. One could see how the Framers said, the people have these rights, and here’s how will they be ensured of protecting them.

Remember, these men rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world, and many believed the people should always have the unalienable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government or leave a voluntary union of sovereign states. The Whiskey Rebellion and, most cataclysmically, the Civil War, settled some of those issues. Others were left to the courts.

Yet the ambiguity of the amendment has long been contested. And extreme measures on both sides brought matters to a head, and make the future even more contentious.