The anti-gun advocates whose perception that the Second Amendment guarantees a "collective right" or a "right of states to form militias" rather than an individual right, is a totally inaccurate Twentieth-Century invention.  If anyone entertained this belief in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1797 states such a thesis.

Over 120 law review articles have addressed the Second Amendment since 1980.  The overwhelming majority affirm that it guarantees a right of individual firearm owners.  With hardly any exceptions, the few articles to the contrary have been written by gun control advocates, mostly by people in the pay of the anti-gun lobby.

Those foolish people who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it is not an individal right or that it is too much of a public safety hazard, failed to see the danger in what they are doing.  They're courting disaster by encouraging others to do the same thing to eliminate portions of the Constition they don't want or agree with.

The Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, was added to the Constitution as a charter of basic human rights the federal government could not infringe under any circumstances.  It was not about government rights.  It is the responsibility of the government to protect those rights.  The Constitution is a mechanism designed to restrict and constrain the power of the federal government.  Our three branch government system is engineered to ensure that expansion of power of any branch, and even two branches together, can be restrained by the remaining one.

The National Guard formed in 1903 is, according to the anti-gunners, the modern equivalent of the state militia.  It should be noted here that the arms, records, and ultimate control of the National Guard today lie with the federal government, so that it clearly is not the "militia" protected from the federal government as envisioned by our founding fathers.  If the National Guard had existed in Revolutionary times, King George probably would have activated it under an emergency war act, thereby placing it under his control and ending the Revolutionary War before it could begin.

The Bill of Rights doesn't grant rights to the people.  Instead the Bill of Rights is a list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that explains what it means to be a free and independent people and the rights necessary to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people.  That is why no reputable legal scholar even argues the states' - rights position, for to do so is to claim one of the ten amendments comprising theBill of Rights exists to delegate the government power rather than recognize individuals rights.

This was acknowledged in the recent Parker v. Distict of Columbia decision that supports the individal right to own firearms instead of only protecting a collective right of the states to maintain militias.  It was the first time in the nation's history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds.

Enjoy the 4th of July.

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