Parker v. D.C.: If I Could Speak To The Supreme Court . . .
By John Longenecker (07/19/07)
The District Of Columbia, moved so by an appellate court decision against its thirty-year-long gun ban, has elected to file with the Supreme Court. I wish I could address the Supreme Court.
In arguing that weapons applies only to militias, the District fails to understand that Militia as defined by United States Code applies to civilians as much as it does military. Civilians were the first Militia. See U.S. Code Title 10 here where we still are Militia. [Link: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode10/usc_sec_10_00000311----000-.html
It is also important to note they did not mean National Guard in those days: National Guard was not conceived and organized for another 130 years.
But that’s only the beginning.
If it please the Court, I would cite five authorities emanating from writings of the Founders in Original Intent and decisions since the nation’s inception.
1. The Founders had revolted against, above all else, abuses of the law, and in writings, in debate and ratifications, they wrote words of art that abuse of due process be forbidden. This is especially evident in the second amendment: first, the modern question of whether the right is collective or individual is without meaning, because the second amendment was not written for citizens, but written for government – that is, written directly to government, like most of the Constitution is.
Second, the second amendment was not written about guns, per se, but about abuse of the law. The Founders did not need to imagine weapons of the future – they did not view weapons as a threat to the new nation, but an asset. They had just defeated the Crown and its cruelty in abuse of its own law; the second amendment was written to forbid future self-dealing abuses of due process as an ever-present threat in any age, any era, any government. (Any government does not mean sovereign states outside the U.S., but all levels of government within the U.S., including federal government, states, counties and cities.) Declaring the citizen as supreme authority, the Founders knew that citizen authority must be backed by lethal force, and forever. To perfect the concept that any regulation, interference or infringement of this force is unreasonable, the amendment which protects that force is made absolute in the words of art, ‘shall not be infringed’.
2. But rather than any Government Troops versus Citizens shoot-outs, violent crime as an instrument of demagoguery is used to sway the public to disarm, and in so doing, to surrender the force which backs its authority. The net effect of this is, of course, higher numbers of injured victims of crime where constituents fear a fate of prosecution more than thuggery, and this becomes self-fulfilling for the demagogue who claims that crime is intractable. It is not. For those communities, gun control is the exquisite abuse of state or local government power, the kind foreseen and forbidden by the Founders.
3. The second amendment can also lift burdens of government, always a worthwhile endeavor, as opposed to the ever-increasing official desire for the taking up of burdens in demagoguery. Unanswered with citizen authority, crime makes more work, more unreasonable law, more hirings, more purchases, restricting reasonable resistance in order to grow crime in order to grow government. More government burden.
4. Since the inception of an organized police force in the United States, it has never been a duty of law enforcement to protect individuals. From the earliest rulings to the most recent – Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005, U.S. Supreme Court – the rulings have been the same: no constitutional right to police protection.
This leaves a tremendous void in the logic of disarming citizens who face grave danger alone by the hundreds of thousands each year in crimes which never even used a gun.
What about 300 million guns in the hands of 80 million citizens? In America, about 29,000 persons are shot to death each year according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (mostly crime-on-crime shootings), and that same report demonstrates that armed citizens in fact de-escalate violent crime on the order of more than 2.5 million times each year.
Why such a disparity? It is 86 to 1.
Because guns are not the major commonality among all violence. By the numbers of all violent crime, violence in grave danger or great bodlly harm is easily perpetrated without a gun – in beatings, multiple assailants, knifings, strongarm assaults, rapes, robberies gone bad, and abductions. Regulation of guns does not foil crime, it enhances it. 2.5 million gun defenses each year to de-escalate violence is not guns against guns, but armed citizens on the record 2.5 million times a year of de-escalating all manner of violent acts from completion.
5. Public policy and interest. EMS teaches CPR, First-aid and the Heimlich Maneuver to citizens because Advanced Life Support cannot always arrive with a life-saving response time. This is also true of law enforcement. Citizen intervention has been held to be in established public policy and interest. Our system recognizes the average reasonable person doctrine, the presumption of intent in reasonable apprehension of grave danger, the doctrine of standing in the shoes of the victim, citizen authority, citizen arrest, assisting law enforcement, volunteerism and other doctrines, reflecting a spirit of helpfulness and self-rule which must not be discouraged or punished. In time of violence, no one – no police or policy – can take the place of the citizen as the first line of defense. Armed citizens are the most reasonable and responsible of all.
It is this marriage of liberty and personal responsibility which together outshine the hysterical forecasts and hyperbole of gun control and intentional interference by even the slightest gun regulation. The genius of Original Intent Independence and its responsibility are together illegally obscured and frustrated purely because of Liberty's ability to shine as the ultimate authority as it was intended in a nation of self-rule. Crime cannot any longer be used as a tool for the ambitious who cite violence as a cause to disarm that ultimate authority.
No body of Government at any level has any legal authority to interfere with the force which backs citizen supreme authority, but it can affirm it in respecting Original Intent of the Founders who knew abuse of due process in any time, any era, any government.
John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns, available worldwide. See http://www.TransferOfWealth.net/
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