April 03, 2012
With the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer who was legally carrying a 9-millimeter handgun, the familiar wail has arisen from our cultural and media elite:
America has too many guns!
“Open carry” and “concealed carry” laws should be repealed.
Florida’s “Stand-your-ground” law, replicated in two dozen states, threatens to turn America into the Tombstone of Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp. This is insane!
The United Nations agrees. This year, the world body takes up the global control of firearms, including small arms in the hands of citizens.
According to Sen. Rand Paul, the U.N. “Small Arms Treaty” will almost surely mandate tougher licensing requirements to own a gun, require the confiscation and destruction of unauthorized civilian firearms, call for a ban on the trade, sale and private ownership of semi-automatic weapons, and create an international gun registry.
No more Colt .45s in the top drawer or M-1 rifles in the closet.
Memo to the U.N.: Lots of luck.
Forty-five Republican and 12 Democratic senators have declared their opposition to any such U.N. treaty, which means it is dead in the water the moment it is launched from Turtle Bay.
For when it comes to Second Amendment rights, Middle America has spoken—at the ballot box and the gun store. And Congress, most state legislatures and the federal courts have all come down on the side of the Silent Majority.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court struck down one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, assuring district citizens of their right to keep a gun in the home.
U.S. Judge Benson E. Legg just struck down the section of Maryland’s gun law that left it to local authorities to decide if a citizen could carry a gun outside his house.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, mentioned as a running mate for Mitt Romney, just signed a law striking down a 20-year ban that kept residents from buying more than one pistol per month. In Virginia’s legislature in 1993, McDonnell had voted in favor of the one-gun-per-month rule.
The new law ignited New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who calls Virginia “the No. 1 out-of-state source of crime guns in New York and one of the top suppliers of crime guns nationally.”
Two New York cops have been shot this year, one fatally, with guns from Virginia.
