As the Nov. 8 election looms, alarms are finally being raised outside of the firearms community about a Hillary Clinton presidency and its potentially destructive impact on the Bill of Rights, with pieces in the Wall Street Journal and National Review that merit reading and sharing.
The WSJ piece, published Oct. 21, took Clinton to task for remarks about the Second Amendment and the 2008 Heller ruling during the last presidential debate. Headlined “Hillary’s New Constitution,” the piece noted that Clinton claimed to “support the Second Amendment” while also arguing for “reasonable regulations” as had been challenged and overturned by Heller.
Here’s what the WSJ piece reminded readers:
What Mrs. Clinton calls ‘reasonable’ was an outright ban on handguns. The D.C. law allowed the city’s police chief to award some temporary licenses—but not even the police officer plaintiff in the case could persuade the District to let him register a handgun to be kept at his home.
“Anyone who did lawfully possess a gun had to keep it unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times, ensuring it would be inoperable and perhaps useless for self-defense. As Antonin Scalia wrote for the Heller majority, ‘Few laws in the history of our Nation have come close to the severe restriction of the District’s handgun ban.’
“If Mrs. Clinton supports such gun restrictions, then she thinks an individual’s right to bear arms is meaningless. If the Justices she appoints agree with her, then they can gradually turn Heller into a shell of a right, restriction by restriction, even without overturning the precedent.”
The National Review article, published back on Oct. 6, reminded readers that “The Second Amendment is One Supreme Court Justice from Repeal.” That justice could be the replacement for the late Justice Scalia, author of the Heller ruling that Clinton finds so objectionable.
That article reminded readers that, “right now there are clearly four Supreme Court justices who are committed to the absurd view that the operative clause of the Second Amendment — ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed’ — doesn’t actually mean ‘the right of the people’ and therefore doesn’t encompass an individual right to own a weapon, even for self-defense.” The National Review piece went on to warn:
If Heller is overruled, then the regulatory state, in all its immense power, can launch a systematic, undemocratic effort to deter gun ownership even without true confiscation. The appeal of regulatory action is obvious. A Democratic president can use his or her left-wing bureaucracy to implement a host of regulations without an act of Congress and then veto any legislative effort to undo his or her reforms. It’s easy to imagine the regulatory possibilities — regulatory action against ammunition; public-employee rules creating “gun-free employment communities” that prohibit or greatly restrict private gun ownership by public employees; aggressive regulatory action against various types of ammunition; OSHA rules that require employers to restrict employees’ gun rights on ‘work safety’ grounds.”
Self-proclaimed “progressives” seem oh-so-eager to erode the Second Amendment, apparently believing that gun ownership is the mark of a modern Neanderthal. They count on other people with guns to protect them, but turn on those very same people – law enforcement – when they use those guns to actually shoot someone.
These same “progressives” are already turning in their ballots, using opinion poll results allegedly to discourage conservatives from voting, too. Conservatives, and especially gun owners, can be their own worst enemies at election time. Invariably eager to fight amongst themselves, they lose sight of the ball. In this case, the ball is a big bull’s eye and it is centered on the Second Amendment.
If one believes the WSJ and National Review, a Clinton victory Nov. 8 will mean a direct hit on that cornerstone tenet of the Bill of Rights.
