Sorry, Ezra.

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Dave from Dallas writes:

Ezra Klein, a lefty pundit for the Washington Post, Newsweek and MSNBC, recently opined that the constitution was vague and hard to understand because it was more than 100 years old.

The silliness of the “antiquated” argument notwithstanding (I’m sure he can read the 160 year old  Communist Manifesto just fine), he was clearly trying to justify a dismissal of the importance of the Constitution in the context of modern government.

In the hours that followed, Klein took several opportunities to walk his statement back in various ways, apparently so impacted by the tenor of the public response that it was necessary for him to admit out loud that the constitution was “binding”.  (Yes, Ezra, it is.)

So he did, and went on to explain to us that judicial interpretations, themselves motivated largely (in his view) by leftward or rightward bias, were the way the Constitution is understood in today’s law and government, and thus in his view the constitution means whatever someone with authority wants it to mean.

He brought up the Second Amendment as a part of that explanation, pointing out that some judges have interpreted “a well regulated militia” to mean the United States Military, and not citizen soldiers, thus invalidating the citizen’s individual right to carry a gun.

He is right that some judges have arrived at this finding, I think, although I am not a law scholar.  But because I was off to the Ft. Worth Gun Show on New Years Day and gun rights were on my mind, I began pondering Klein’s proffered second amendment interpretation– that it only applies to soldiers– an interpretation which Klein obviously himself supports.

The amendment reads, “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.”

And I noticed some things right away.

First, “the right.. shall not be infringed” means (in historical context and in contextual reference to other founding documents) “the pre-existing right…  shall not be infringed by this new government we’re creating”.

The right predated the government and morally trumps it.

Second, “the people”, in our founding documents, never means anything other than “the citizens”.  The Declaration of Independence says the rights of the citizen are paramount, and when a government gets the habit of violating them it is not just the right but the duty of the citizen to throw off government and make a new one.  The people’s rights as individuals are the primary concern of any limitations the founding fathers placed upon government.

So the first part of the amendment, “a well regulated militia”, cannot be said to limit the definition of “the people” in the second part to “only uniformed soldiers or police”.

A militia, historically, is a drilled, prepared, armed citizenry, able to spring into action as an army when the need arises.  That is what “well regulated” meant in the 18th century– it works like a tuned machine, it is well ordered.  (It’s also what they meant by “regulating interstate commerce” in the commerce clause– not to make a lot of laws governing interstate commerce, but to make it smooth, efficient, easy, “regular” between the states.  Today the word is used in that way only to describe bowel movements, whose similarity to government is a topic for another day.)

But let us assume the left and Ezra are onto something, that the founders really meant SOLDIERS when they defined “the people” in the Second Amendment.

The DoD means the “militia” is no longer needed, Says Ezra (and the judges he is loosely citing), and the “soldiers” are the new “people”.

And so now we must ask ourselves if these “people”, the soldiers, in fact have the right to keep and bear arms, and whether that right is safe from infringement by their government as the amendment insists it is, as Ezra Klein claims the founders meant.

The answer is plainly NO.

You see, the soldiers have only a DUTY, to carry weapons when ordered to do so, to put them down when ordered to do THAT, to obey a huge number of weapon-oriented rules and regulations from field manuals, officers and the UCMJ.  Limitations, restrictions, INFRINGEMENTS on these particular “people’s” right to bear arms are hurled at them every day as a matter of military life.

If the leftist interpretation of the second amendment was valid, no military order for a soldier to go unarmed would be constitutional.

If soldiers had the unalienable right to bear arms, Hasan would have been shot down immediately instead of killing and wounding dozens of people at Ft. Hood.  His victims could not shoot back.  They were soldiers on base, Second Amendment rights infringed, not permitted to carry weapons.

Sorry, Ezra.  The evidence shows our government does not treat soldiers as the new “people” with the unalienable right to bear arms which the rest of us do not have.  It in fact treats almost all of us the same way, infringing on that right constantly and chattering endlessly about ways to infringe upon it even further.  This, in my view, is predictable, was predicted by our founders, and is the very reason they set aside this right in a specific amendment.

We are fortunate that the Constitution is quite clear, Klein’s protestations notwithstanding.  It is not confusion that renders it irrelevant, it’s our complacency in the face of the left’s efforts to rid themselves of its restrictions on their tyrannical impulses.

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