A Too-Narrow Victory

I’ve never wanted to write for a daily newspaper, but there are times I wish I could write about the news in this column and have it in the hands of readers while it still is "news." The June 26th ruling by the Supreme Court in the case of the District of Columbia v. Heller is a good example. The ruling was issued two days after the August issue went to press, so here I am writing about the ruling a few days after it was released, and knowing you won’t be reading this until the September issue appears.

But such is the nature of the periodicalpublishing business. In any case, as we all know, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment does indeed grant the right of the individual to keep and bear arms’which is clearly what the Founding Fathers intended. I almost wrote about what would have been the "upcoming" Supreme Court ruling last month in the August issue.

What I would have said’if I hadn’t been overcome by a superstitious fear of "jinxing" the ruling’was that the decision the court would announce when it issued its ruling was a foregone conclusion. Given the nature of the 10 amendments that make up the Bill of Rights’amendments that spell out the rights of the individual to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and so on’t here’s no way the court could have ruled otherwise.

Only an idiot (like the members of The Brady Bunch) could adopt the ludicrous position that nine of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights apply to rights granted to the individual, but one’t he Second Amendment’applies to a right granted to the states (to form a militia). Which brings me to my point: The Supreme Court decision that determined that the Second Amendment guarantees the individual’ s right to keep and bear arms was the result of a five-to-four vote!

That means, my friends, that there are four idiots on the U. S. Supreme Court. Another way of putting it: We were only one idiot away from an absurd decision that would have had far-reaching and potentially devastating ramifications for our industry, our country, and the personal freedoms of all Americans.

It seems to me that the system of checks and balances that the Founding Fathers set up works reasonably well between the Executive and the Legislative branches of our government to keep our democracy on course and our freedoms intact. The greatest danger we face is the power wielded by the Judicial branch to modify or "improve" the Founding Fathers’ vision to suit the personal agendas of the justices.

And that’s why our Presidential elections are so important’not so much for who the president is or what he believes in, but for who he appoints to the Supreme Court. I hope we as Americans keep that in mind when we vote in November. Editor Keith Lawrence Technical