Narrowing the Second Amendment

Jeff Soyer points us to an opinion in Hamblen v. USA recently issued by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The opinion includes:

"Whatever the individual right to keep and bear arms might entail, it does not authorize an unlicensed individual to possess unregistered machine guns for personal use."

Umm, excuse me, what? Where does the Constitution give the federal government the explicit authority over this? It doesn't. It does, however, recognize the individual right to bear arms.

The court's opinion betrays a colossal misunderstanding about the relationship between We the People and our government. The People do not start from zero liberty to which is added only by special dispensation. The government does not start from unlimited power which is only restricted by its own writ. In fact, the opposite is true.

If the Second Amendment doesn't prevent States from banning firearms, then the States are not bound by the other Amendments either. I don't think the Framers intended the Bill of Rights to apply only to residents of the District of Columbia and federally-administered territories.

By their nature (whether created or evolved) human beings (like all other creatures) have an inherent and unalienable right to effective self-defense. It is not immoral for a man to defend his family, property, or life, just as a cheetah would defend her cubs or her life. The most effective form of self-defense for man is a firearm. So, to deny a man the right to keep and bear arms is to deny him the right to effective self-defense.

So why does the leftist/statist seek to deny man his natural right to self-defense? Perhaps it is combination of hoplophobia, victimhood culture, and the promotion of total dependency on the state. When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

In ongoing cases such as NRA v. Chicago, the left wants SCOTUS to interpret the 1st Amendment (which explicitly mentions Congress) as also restricting the States, but to interpret the 2nd Amendment (which makes no such limitation) as only applying to Congress. Talk about not following the plain English of the Constitution's text...

It is truly a scary time in the United States when a Constitutionally-protected right (protected, but not granted, by the Constitution, that is) is only upheld by a 5-4 SCOTUS decision (see DC v. Heller).

Reason.com has a relevant article:

Laboratories of Repression
We don’t let the states "experiment" on the First Amendment. Should the Second Amendment receive any less respect?

If they can "experiment" with the 2nd Amendment, they can experiment with the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 13th, 15th, and 24th Amendments as well. Is Chicago permitted to "experiment" with establishing a religion or reintroducing slavery?

In any case, it's safe to say their experiment with gun control has failed.