By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
An opinion contributor to The Hill has authored a 749-word short essay declaring that the long-standing argument by gun prohibitionists asserting that AR15 rifles are “weapons of war” has “backfired” on the people who want those and similar modern semiautomatic rifles banned.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in two consolidated cases challenging such bans, in Cook County, Illinois and the State of Connecticut, on Wednesday, Dec. 2. Both cases have been spearheaded by the Second Amendment Foundation, which has been leading the litigation charge against restrictive gun laws for several years.
According to opinion author Matthew Cavedon, director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice, “Small arms that an infantryman would historically have kept and borne are not marginal to the Second Amendment. Rather, they sit at its center. The amendment’s self-professed rationale for protecting the right to keep and bear arms is that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state.”
Yet, Cavedon contends, “Neither side recognizes that the Second Amendment’s reference to the ‘militia’ counts in favor of protecting AR-15s either way…The challengers emphasize self-defense, an individually focused concern, while the governments argue that AR-15s’ military character is a reason to ban them. But AR-15s are the sort of small arms historically suited for a militia.”
Further, Cavedon argues, “The Second Amendment’s Framers deemed an armed population a safeguard for a free society. The militia, writ large, would be ‘useful in repelling invasions and suppressing insurrections.’ It would discourage the establishment of ‘large standing armies’ that could threaten republican liberty. And if need be, a public ‘trained in arms and organized’ would be ‘better able to resist tyranny.’”
The combined cases headed to the high court in December are Viramontes v. Cook County (Illinois) and Grant v. Higgins (Connecticut). If the Court hands down an affirmative ruling, that modern semi-autos are protected by the Second Amendment, it will create headaches for states which have already adopted bans on the ownership and/or purchase and sale of such firearms. All of the affected states, about a dozen in all, are controlled by Democrats.
Cavedon focuses on another bit of history, which today’s anti-gunners—whose continued ratcheting-down on gun rights is viewed as tyranny by Second Amendment activists—dislike and even ridicule.
“This last aim,” he writes, “enabling resistance to tyranny, deserves particular emphasis. The ‘people’s militia’ could fight a tyrant and thus defend freedom. A militia controlled exclusively by the government could not. The Second Amendment guarantees an individual right for more than just individually focused purposes.”
Far too many gun control advocates have apparently—and conveniently—forgotten that the first shots of the American Revolution, fired at Lexington and Concord, were the reaction of Colonial militias to the attempt by British Army regulars to seize their arms and ammunition. These Massachusetts colonists were armed with essentially the same types of firearms carried by the military at the time: muzzle-loaded muskets or rifles; the “assault rifles” of the period, i.e. “weapons of war.”
