The Real Gun Guys

An English twit mourns the Heller ruling

Commentary from a whiny elitist twit British subject living in America. Something which irks me too is his capitalization of the words militia and arms in the 2nd amendment. Apparently people having rights is something foreign to him.

Here’s an excerpt:

“You can live in a country for more than a dozen years. You can marry one of its citizens, and watch your son grow up to be one of its citizens. Yet on occasion, here in the United States, I still feel like an alien from the opposite end of the universe.

This week provided one of those moments, when the Supreme Court threw out the District of Columbia’s 32-year ban on handgun ownership, ruling in the process that the second amendment of the country’s constitution guaranteed the right of every American to possess firearms.

A statement of the blindingly obvious, you might think, given that the gun population of the US is not far short of its 300 million human one. But that did not prevent this affirmation of the status quo being trumpeted by leading newspapers, with headlines of the size normally reserved for terrorist attacks and presidential election results.

The majority and dissenting opinions in the 5-4 decision, and the shifts from the nine-man court’s previous pronouncements on the issue, have been parsed and dissected with the zeal classics masters from my schooldays used to apply to the finer points of Greek grammar. And, it must be said, not without reason.

The crux of the debate is in the language of the amendment, second of the 10 that form America’s bill of rights, that noblest of charters of basic human rights, but also perhaps the most picked-over body of words on the planet.

It reads as follows: “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.” Try disentangling that one, and its idiosyncratic use of commas that would have appalled my classics master had the text been written in the language of Demosthenes. How exactly are the thoughts of statesmen of the late 18th century to be divined and applied to gun control in the first decade of the 21st? Previously, the court has upheld ownership of firearms as a collective right – in the context of those citizen militias who 220 years ago were a safeguard against any attempt by Britain to regain the colonies that had the cheek to fight for, and win, their independence.”

He goes on to blame George Bush for SCOTUS ruling in favor of individual Rights and hopes that Barack Obama will be elected and change the makeup of the court so this won’t happen in the future.

No wonder we kicked their asses out of our country more than two hundred years ago!

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