2nd Amendment and Foreign States

By Brian Palmer  - Courtesy of Slate.com

Do any foreign states guarantee the right to keep and bear arms like we do in the United States?

Yes. Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala all enshrine the right to pack heat in their constitutions. Guatemala's Article 38 is the only one that's as broad as our Second Amendment (it guarantees "the right of possession of arms for personal use"). Article 10 of the Mexican constitution and Article 268-1 of Haiti's constitution limit the right to the confines of the home and allow the government to pass laws significantly restricting ownership. Mexicans, for example, are supposed to get a permit, renewable every year, from the military, and all firearms must be registered. (The law is widely ignored. Only 4,300 licenses have been issued for Mexico's 105 million people.) Handguns must be .380 caliber or less, shotguns can't be greater than 12 gauge, and rifles must be .30 caliber or smaller.

A constitutional provision doesn't necessarily guarantee easy access to firearms or a country full of gun enthusiasts. While the United States has 90 guns per 100 people­ the highest ownership rate in the world­ Mexico has just 15, placing it 22 among the 59 countries for which data is available.

2nd Amendment -- Ignoring the "Will of the People"

By John Lott

President Obama keeps pushing for gun control. "I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar,” President Obama told Sarah Brady, the former president of the Brady Campaign, this past spring.

His push as been quiet but relentless.

Just this past week Obama signaled that he was going to just ignore two new parts of the 2012 Omnibus Spending bill. Although he signed the spending bill into law, he simultaneously issued a so-called "signing statement," a note that presidents have started attaching to legislation stating how they interpret the law they are signing or whether they believe part of it is unconstitutional.

Obama’s statement claimed that Congress couldn’t put restrictions on how he wanted to spend to fund lobbying for gun control and the National Institute of Health studies of gun control.

But why should the federal government use taxpayer dollars to pay for lobbying?

The 2nd Amendment’s Forgotten Clause

By Jim Pontillo

For those who lament America’s cultural evolution toward secular society devoid the moral absolutes that served our Founding Fathers and guided them with providential authority to set to parchment the most “progressive” government the world had seen, our national degeneration is viewed with sadness.

We find ourselves trying to reconcile cultural reality with factual reality where morality would suggest they both are congruent, and yet, increasingly we find truth has become more a component of personal whim than one of real life circumstance.

As a person who has spent his life in the business of manufacturing, where compensation is intimately connected to real output and production of goods, it is difficult to comprehend the esoteric idea that value and worth is somehow a nebulous concept that politicians can debate over. To exasperate this inability to comprehend, my company serves an industry which caters to the down to earth blue-collar man who more often than not is making his living as I do, by producing some product or service of value that he/she must sell in an open and free market.

“Customers” of our wares are often disparaged by the political class and by the main stream media as “dim”, “stupid”, “simplistic”, and my personal favorite, “red-neck”, where only such people of lowly station would be interested in obtaining and possessing such an artifact.

My firm manufactures handguns.

Happy 220th Birthday, Second Amendment!

On December 15th, 1791, 220 years ago, The United States of America adopted the 2nd Amendment along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.

Early American settlers viewed the right to arms and/or the right to bear arms and/or state militias as important for one or more of these purposes:

 - deterring undemocratic government;

- repelling invasion;

- suppressing insurrection;

- facilitating a natural right of self-defense;

- participating in law enforcement;

- enabling the people to organize a militia system.