A hunter takes aim in the snowy Black Hills. S.D. Tourism photo.

The Right to Bear Arms

Jan 2, 2013

By Ken Blanchard
 

I don’t hunt. It’s not that I have any objections, moral or otherwise, to hunting. A friend of mine who is a vegetarian for health reasons once informed a waiter that he didn’t eat anything with a face. I eat things with faces. There are three reasons I don’t hunt. One is that several of my friends hunt and, much as I love these guys, when they are abroad with firearms my instinct is to stay home and clean up the basement. Another reason is that I just don’t have any desire to kill animals. Finally, I am just plain scared of guns.

When I was a kid, pretty much every TV show I watched involved people getting shot on a regular basis. The violence was about as realistic as a roadrunner cartoon. The good guys got shot plenty, but always recovered in time for the next episode. The bad guys sometimes died, but they died without bleeding. Gun shots sounded like firecrackers.

Then I finally fired a real honest-to-Charlton-Heston shotgun outside the liquor store where I worked. The kick was powerful. What it did to the barrel I aimed at would be a crime if barrels had lawyers. It didn’t sound like a firecracker. It sounded like a bomb. That was reality. While I am grateful for the experience, I did not acquire a taste for it.

I have friends who like and own guns and friends who would abolish gun rights quicker than Wild Bill pulled the trigger, if only they could. They can’t. In the first place, there is an insurmountable obstacle to abolition in the Constitution. As the Supreme Court recently recognized, the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says. The right of the people to keep and bear arms, like the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, is protected against government interference.

Some gun control advocates have imagined indirect ways of banning guns, such as prohibiting the sale of ammunition or laying prohibitive taxes on guns. Sorry, but constitutional rights do not allow for back door limitations. Just as you can’t prohibit the New York Times from advocating gun control, you can’t tax their ink to accomplish the same thing.

A second reason that gun rights can’t be abolished is that they are far too deeply embedded in American culture. Any attempt to prohibit handguns, let alone rifles, would trigger massive resistance. The mere possibility that real gun control might be on the horizon now has resulted in a spike in gun sales. I passed by a local gun shop several times recently and business was booming. This might be because it was almost Christmas, and it might be because the President promised real action on gun control.

I don’t like guns but I like a lot of people who do. I also like to see things the way they are. Guns and gun rights are not going away. 

Editor's Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.