Taking aim at the second amendment--again.

ITEM: The New Bedford Standard-Times reported on November 21: "New Bedford Mayor Scott W. Lang told state lawmakers yesterday that if they want to get serious about gun violence, they need to approve tougher laws and come up with more money. Mayor Lang appeared at a Public Safety Committee oversight hearing on youth gun violence.... 'In New Bedford, we regard guns as a weapon of mass destruction,' Mayor Lang told the committee. 'We think they are a weapon of mass destruction throughout our cities and towns throughout the United States.'"

The Massachusetts newspaper continued: "Sen. Jarrett Barrios, D-Cambridge, who co-chairs the committee, is gathering ideas for an omnibus gun-control bill that will be filed next year.... Dan Vice, a staff attorney with the Brady Campaign, which advocates for gun control, said Massachusetts needs to establish a statewide registry of legally owned guns.... 'The good news is Massachusetts has been a model for the nation, but much more can be done,' he said."

ITEM: The New York Times for November 22 commented: "America's confusion about the Second Amendment is now nearly total. An amendment that ensures a collective right to bear arms has been misread in one legislature after another--often in the face of strong public disapproval--as a law guaranteeing an individual's right to carry a weapon in public." Editorializing against legislation that would allow weapons to be carried in national parks, the Times concluded: "If Americans want to feel safer in their national parks, the proper solution is to increase park funding."

CORRECTION: All too many left-wing commentators today equate guns with evil, and are willing to toss aside the clear meaning of the Constitution to justify that point of view. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, knew better, saying of tyrants: "[They were] afraid to trust the people with arms," and praising "the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation." Of course, it's not just would-be tyrants who fear an armed citizenry: criminals avoid attacking those who can defend themselves. As many as 2.5 million crimes are prevented each year in the United States simply because citizens are armed, according to research by criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University.

Even prominent liberal Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz has reproached many of his ideological colleagues for trying to distort the Second Amendment. "Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming that it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard," said Dershowitz, "don't see the danger of the big picture." The Harvard professor added, "They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like."

A lot of the anti-gun zealots, as noted above, contend public safety is a function of how much tax money is thrown at a problem. Yet, does any honest observer think that the New York Times, for example, relies solely upon the taxpayer-supplied police, rather than armed guards, to protect its property? The arrogance of the New York Times is truly mind-boggling: it makes claims about the meaning of the Constitution that go against the historical record and doesn't even bother to try to validate these assertions. Facts matter, however.

A 93-page report released in 2004 by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel addressed the many contentions that have been raised in recent years by statists who don't trust an armed citizenry. The general point addressed was "whether the fight secured by the Second Amendment belongs only to the States, only to persons serving in state-organized militia units like the National Guard, or to individuals generally." The Justice study concluded:

   Our examination of the original
   meaning of the Amendment provides
   extensive reasons to conclude that
   the Second Amendment secures an
   individual right, and no persuasive
   basis for either the collective-right or
   quasi-collective-right views. The text
   of the Amendment's operative clause,
   setting out a "fight of the people to
   keep and bear Arms," is clear and
   is reinforced by the Constitution's
   structure. The Amendment's prefatory
   clause, properly understood, is
   fully consistent with this interpretation.
   The broader history of the
   Anglo-American fight of individuals
   to have and use arms, from England's
   Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification
   of the Second Amendment
   a hundred years later, leads to the
   same conclusion. Finally, the first
   hundred years of interpretations of
   the Amendment, and especially the
   commentaries and case law in the
   pre-Civil War period closest to the
   Amendment's ratification, confirm
   what the text and history of the Second
   Amendment require.

Calling a firearm a "weapon of mass destruction," as the mayor from Massachusetts did in the piece noted above, might be considered droll and wonderfully insightful in certain circles, but it is not a legitimate justification for abrogating the rights of Americans.

Discussing how the presence of armed citizens affects crime rates, in his book More Guns, Less Crime, then-University of Chicago Professor John Lott examined all the multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1995. The only policy that had a discernible effect on those shootings was when citizens were able to legally carry concealed weapons. Those states that had approved such "right to carry" laws experienced a decline in multiple-victim public shootings by an average of 84 percent.

Indeed, an analysis of the latest FBI crime statistics (for 2005) indicates that the states where there were no right-to-carry laws average 27.8 percent higher violent crime rates than states where citizens can legally carry firearms.

Obviously there are other variables involved, including the preponderance of urban areas in one state compared to another. Yet, is there any doubt that if the numbers were reversed that the haters of the right to keep and bear arms would say this was proof that "gun control" was effective against crime?

As it happens, however, criminals who ignore laws against, say, murder and armed robbery don't mind also flouting prohibitions against gun ownership. Since 1977, as the Washington Times noted not long ago, the District of Columbia has had some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. Yet, between 2000 and 2005, approximately 80 percent of the murders in D.C. were perpetrated with guns. "Overall homicide levels in the District," commented the Times, "are troublingly high and have not been helped by gun control. Which is no wonder: Violent criminals can wield guns confident that they will not get caught, and confident that law-abiding people will not have guns themselves."

Madison was indeed perceptive when he noted, in The Federalist Papers, No. 46, the vital difference between America and Europe, where "the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms" That is a lesson that we cannot afford to forget--for the sake of our security as well as our liberty.