Via David Codrea at The War On Guns, yet again, comes this:
Nearly all courts have also held that the Second Amendment is a collective right, rather than a personal right. Therefore, despite the Second Amendment collective right to bear arms, the FAA has the authority to prohibit firearms on launch and reentry vehicles for safety and security purposes.
This, of course, was AFTER President Bush's first Attorney General, John Ashcroft, took the right and proper position that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms, despite what "nearly all courts have...held." It's quite disheartening, indeed, as is what Kim du Toit had to say about Mr. Codrea's opinion:
My personal opinion is that this is a storm in a teacup, and Codrea needs to take a Valium or something. But it still worries me that this collective rights nonsense still has currency anywhere outside the GFWs at the Brady Bunch and the Violence Policy Center.
I've been reading Kim du Toit's writings for a long time now, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for introducing me to the world of the gun bloggers, planting the seed for my re-awakening vis-a-vis the joy of shooting and all things gun-related, and helping me see things a different way with his insights on different aspects of American culture. That said, I don't find this kind of talk helpful at all. I'm pretty sure he'd agree that if there's anyone who needs to take a Valium, it's the ignoramuses at the Brady Center and elsewhere who do their best Chicken Little impersonations every time a politician proposes something that would expand protections on our natural right of self-defense. Take a Valium? No, no, no. We all need to wake up, and be a little afraid, and be quite angry -- righteously furious, even -- that an administration that so openly courted the gun owner vote would turn around and use the very same specious, dangerous reasoning the anti-gun bigots use to advocate denial of our rights to ram through something like disarming all spaceship passengers. "FAA has the authority to prohibit firearms..."?
No they don't. They just took it, via a nakedly insidious power grab, and in the process double-crossed us all.
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