Court guns down history. (Correction, Please!).

ITEM: "A federal appeals court, upholding California's assault-weapons ban, decided that the Second Amendment does not guarantee individuals the right to bear arms," reported an AP dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle for December 6th. "The decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the amendment's right to bear arms is intended to maintain effective state militias and is not an individual right. 'The historical record makes it equally plain that the amendment was not adopted in order to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership or possession,' Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote."

CORRECTION: This decision conflicts with established jurisprudence and any common-sense reading of the Second Amendment. Moreover, Judge Reinhardt's version of history is just plain wrong.

The Second Amendment does acknowledge an individual right, as even liberal academics such as Harvard's Lawrence Tribe have admitted. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, certainly realized this. Americans have, said Madison, "the advantage of being armed-funlike citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

If anyone entertained any notion that the Second Amendment would protect a collective right for state militias during the period "in which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified," points out Stephen Halbrook in That Every Man Be Armed, "it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century," for no known writing from that period presents such a thesis. "The phrase 'the people' meant the same thing in the Second Amendment as it did in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments--that is, each and every free person."

Reinhardt, however, considers the Constitution to be malleable, something to be bent to suit the moment. He admitted as much at George Washington University's School of Law in 1996: "Liberal judges believe in a generous or expansive interpretation of the Bill of Rights." "We believe," he said, that "as society develops and evolves, its understanding of constitutional principles also grows." Nevertheless, the Constitution, the one he swore to uphold, is the embodiment of law, not fabricated fancies, even those of San Francisco judges.