How far has America fallen when the DOJ’s Civil Rights division files an amicus brief with the Supreme Court supporting the Second Amendment against Illinois, and that filing is unusual? How can it be that the DOJ defending a fundamental, unalienable, express constitutional right should be rare, so rare as to be surprising, even astonishing?
If Democrats and their media propaganda arm are to be believed, Donald Trump is a dictator bent on destroying “our democracy.” Ironically, they’re right. He is determined to destroy “our—their—democracy,” which is a tyranny of the majority. That’s why Dems are so desperate to keep every illegal in the country. They want that 50.0000001%, which in a democracy rules. In “our democracy” the majority can deprive the minority of property, rights, liberty, even life. Thus did Biden’s Handler’s Forestry Service try to imprison South Dakota ranchers Charles and Heather Maude over a fence built before they were born. Under “our democracy” they would have gone to jail for ten years leaving their children without their parents. Under our constitutional, representative republic, the charges were dropped.
Such is the tyranny of Donald Trump who ordered his Administration to protect the Second Amendment rights of Americans. “Our Democracy,” like all would-be tyrants, wants to disarm all Americans. Trump, the dictator, wants American’s Second Amendment rights protected.
The issue in this case is Illinois’ violation of the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision by banning “assault weapons,” primarily AR-15s, the most popular rifle in America, and “high capacity” magazines—actually, standard capacity magazines. Thus are Illinois’ Democrat rulers part of “our democracy” rather than America’s representative republic.
Graphic: X Screenshot, DOJ, Public Domain
The DOJ’s argument is persuasive. Its primary points:
*The act violated the Second Amendment by banning AR-15s and other firearms that are in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful reasons.
*Text, history, and precedent confirm that a legislature may not ban a class of weapons on the ground that they weapons are “militaristic.”
*The act violates the Second Amendment by banning the possession of magazines and other firearm attachments that are in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful reasons.
These arguments rely on Bruen, which established that any attempt to regulate guns must rely on the text and history of the Second Amendment. It also affirmed the “common use” standard. One may argue about the wisdom and utility of that standard, but for the time being, it’s the law and the guns and accessories banned by Illinois and other blue states clearly fall within “common use.”
The brief notes:
Three years ago, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision meant to break a habit developed by some States of treating the Second Amendment as “a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other” constitutional rights.
Regrettably, not every State got the message. Just a few months after Bruen, Illinois outlawed some of the most commonly used rifles and magazines in America via a so-called “assault weapons” ban. In doing so, Illinois violated the Supreme Court’s clear directive that States cannot prohibit arms that are “in common use” by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.
This is the heart of the argument:
In this case, the key question under the Second Amendment’s text is whether the banned semiautomatic firearms are “Arms.”
Many of them—including AR-15s—are. The term “Arms,” as used in the Second Amendment, describes the category of weapons that an individual would wear, bear, or carry for offensive or defensive action in case of conflict with other people. Thus, the Second Amendment “extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms.” And it protects not “only those arms in existence in the 18th century,” but also “those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.
It's an important distinction. Anti-liberty/gun cracktivists commonly argue that had the Founders—who they revile—known about AR-15s, they would never have written the Second Amendment, which they also argue doesn’t give individual Americans the right to keep and bear any arms. Joe Biden constantly claimed colonial Americans could not own cannon. His claim was so ridiculous even the Democrat media repeatedly exposed the lie.
In fact, colonial Americans, for the most part, were expected to muster for militia duty with their privately owned arms, including cannon. The writings of the Founders make clear they were not preserving the right to keep and bear arms subject to any particular type of arm. They would have been delighted to have had AR-15s or their select fire military cousins. For them, and for us in our representative republic, the issue is not the gun but the principle that free men have the unalienable right to keep and bear arms. Technology changes; the principles of liberty do not.
At long last, our government understands that.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.