Ammunition In The Fight For Guns

Gun control is the bread-and-butter issue of many liberal politicians and activists. After all, liberals love to capitalize on tragedy to promote their agenda, and gun control is the best way for them to do that. Every time a crime is committed with a firearm, Washington politicians line up for miles to clamor for more laws, more regulations, and more restrictions. Unfortunately for them, conservatives have the best political weapon of all on their side. We have the U.S. Constitution. Our Founding Fathers understood that the right to purchase, own, and carry a firearm is a fundamental right with dramatic implications for the lives of citizens like you and me.

This truth was especially real for the Founding Fathers, whose British predecessors used gun restriction to control the will of the citizenry. In fact, the very first battle of the War for Independence was fought by the colonists to stop the British from seizing their weapons. That is why our Founding Fathers gave us the Second Amendment, a clear guarantee for the individual right to bear arms. The text of the amendment clearly states that “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.” In the landmark DC v. Heller decision of 2008, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia beautifully expounded upon what this amendment is saying. He said “Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right…. We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.”

Justice Scalia was famous for cutting through the politics and spin in order to get to the heart of what the text of the Constitution clearly says. His majority opinion in the Heller case is arguably one of the finest of his entire judicial career. Scalia showed that no matter how hard they try, liberals cannot simply explain away the Second Amendment. As long as the Second Amendment and Scalia’s Heller decision stand, conservatives have all of the ammunition that they need to defend the right to bear arms.

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