The Wild Side for Nov. 4, 2012
The reason you seldom read anything about the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights here over the past many years is that there’s no debate about the amendment’s meaning.
Not to me.
There are words about a “well regulated militia” and words that, for gun owners, carry the most weight, the words that secures for our country’s citizens, the “right to keep and bear arms.”
Tuesday we go to the polls. We know the biggest issue, but down the list will be an amendment to our State Constitution. It deals with a proposal to make it more difficult to enact state laws that approach an attempt to abridge the Second Amendment. In short, this amendment mandates the State Supreme Court to take the state’s most demanding look at any law that tries to limit a Louisiana citizen’s right to keep and bear arms.
There must be proponents, otherwise this proposed amendment to the State Constitution wouldn’t be there.
Opponents declare there are too many amendments in our state’s plan for government. Still other opponents declare the wording in the amendment that would make it easier for state legislators to enact laws that would help anti gun-rights folks take our guns away.
Except that every time somebody mentions the Second Amendment and tries to create a stir, this item on the ballot appears to be another tempest in a teapot.
For me, the debate took there paragraphs: Even though there have been challenges to our Second Amendment rights, upstanding Louisiana folks can own and use firearms today.
Something tells me that our state laws aren’t broken when it comes to our Second Amendment rights, and we don’t need another amendment to our State Constitution to guarantee that right.
Along those lines
Within days of our every-four-year national elections somebody comes up with a note about the Second Amendment. After checking out these rounded-out numbers, it appears accurate and came after the hunting seasons started in four northern states.
Included were hunting license sales in Wisconsin (600,000), Pennsylvania (750,000), Michigan (700,000) and West Virginia (250,000) and the writer assumed that all licenses holders were gun owners.
The point was that these four states’ hunters classified as “men under arms” would make them the largest army in the world, that Wisconsin alone would have more “men under arms” than the armies of France, Germany or Iran.
It more than points out something I’ve believed since my Army days, that our hunters, our gun owners, make us the safest country in the world. Sure we’re a target for weapons of mass destruction, but to overtake a country, you have to put people on the ground. That’s why we have infantry divisions in the U.S. Army and Marines for the U.S. Navy.
If you include hunters/gun owners in the other 46 states, imagine what a threat that poses for any foreign power considering an invasion or our shores.