We all know that the Second Amendment is under attack. In fact, our right to keep and bear arms has been slowly whittled away over the centuries so that it is but a hollow remnant of what it used to be. As Founding Father Tench Coxe once stated, “Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American.” And indeed, most people not named Joe Biden understood that private ownership even of artillery has always been legal.
Yet Congress has taken numerous steps over the years to disarm Americans, and courts have largely acquiesced in the evisceration of the Second Amendment. Among the most egregious overreaches were the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) and the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA).
The NFA received its only substantial challenge in 1939 in the Supreme Court case United States v. Miller (1939), in which the Court ruled that only weapons that have a reasonable relationship to the effectiveness of a well-regulated militia are free from regulation. At issue was the possession of a short-barreled shotgun, a weapon which the Court judged was not part of ordinary military equipment.
Of course, tens of thousands of short-barreled shotguns had been used to great effect in the trenches during the Great War, thus going to show that truth and facts have nothing whatsoever to do with judicial decisions. Complicating matters was the fact that Miller and his defense team didn’t show up to the Court, as Miller was in hiding after having testified against his criminal compatriots. And as luck would have it, he was shot to death before the case was even decided.
In the decades since, the Court’s insistence that only military-grade weapons are protected under the Second Amendment has morphed into a belief that military-grade weapons have no business being in the hands of the citizenry, and that only guns with a “sporting purpose” are protected, thanks in no small part to the sporting purposes clause of the GCA. This understanding of the Second Amendment is what motivates the many “assault weapons” bans that are being proposed around the country today.
In response to encroachments on the Second Amendment, many states have adopted measures to try to protect their citizens’ Second Amendment rights. Some of these have taken the form of exempting firearms built within a state from federal oversight. Others have forbidden state officials from enforcing federal firearms laws. The latter is what Missouri did with its Second Amendment Preservation Act, which a federal judge just ruled is unconstitutional.
If you come at it from the position of logic and reason, you might find that head-scratching. How can a law that purports to uphold the Second Amendment be unconstitutional? How can a state law that exercises the state’s police powers be deemed unconstitutional under federal law, as the federal government doesn’t have police powers? How can a federal judge use the Supremacy Clause to rule a state law unconstitutional when the state law merely points out that the federal laws it prohibits state officials from enforcing are themselves unconstitutional? As was stated in the ratification of the Constitution in Pennsylvania, “the power of the Constitution predominates. Anything, therefore, that shall be enacted by Congress contrary thereto, will not have the force of law.”
When you hear that the federal judge was an Obama appointee, everything begins to make sense. As with many leftist judges today, his conclusion is preordained, and his arguments are merely made to fit his conclusion. Of course, that’s not unusual when it comes to court decisions, but that’s why it’s more important than ever to call it out whenever it occurs.
The left pays lip service to the Constitution when it serves its own ends, and tramples on it when it’s inconvenient. Conservatives today need to stand up more than ever to protect our Constitutional rights, otherwise legislatures and judges will continue to roughshod over the rights that have kept us free.