Are you embarrassed by the reasons why we have the right to keep and bear firearms? Democrats think you are and, in this, they could not be more right.
That is why last week’s mass-murder shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College has led to the same tired political act we witness each time a gun tragedy or atrocity occurs: The shooting is politicized by the Left to advance gun restrictions; the timely and false suggestion is made that gun crime is on the rise (it has actually decreased dramatically in the last generation); regulatory proposals are advanced that would have had little or no chance of preventing the just-occurred shootings; gun-rights advocates point out the flaws in both the proposals and the premise that guns cause more violence than they create; and we have a stalemate in the gun policy debate while ignoring mental illness (the wayward policies on which contribute more to mass-shootings than does the availability of firearms).
Why are we debating policy? After all, gun rights are explicit in the Second Amendment. In general, there is not supposed to be much policy debate where our fundamental rights are concerned. We would not, for example, abide a suggestion that we reconsider whether the government may break into your home and poke around for evidence without a warrant. That is not to say there may not be logical reasons to allow a police officer to act unilaterally on a strong hunch; it is to say that a constitutional right is supposed to be a guarantee – something the government has to respect, not something the citizen has to justify.
So why is that not the case with guns?
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