Barak Obama and the Second Amendment

What is Barak Obama’s position on the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Is he for or against the right to own guns?

AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote:

Senator Obama, a former constitutional law instructor, said some scholars argue the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees gun ownerships only to militias, but he believes it grants individual gun rights.

“I think there is an individual right to bear arms, but it’s subject to commonsense regulation” like background checks, he said during a news conference.

Although Obama supports gun control, while campaigning in gun-friendly Idaho earlier this month, he said he does not intend to take away people’s guns.

At a news conference, he recently voiced support for the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, which is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court next month.

“The notion that somehow local jurisdictions can’t initiate gun safety laws to deal with gang bangers and random shootings on the street isn’t born out by our Constitution,” Obama said.

So what are we to make of Obama’s position on gun ownership? He may tell campaign audiences that he believes in the right to own guns if that is what they want to hear. In the name of security, his idea of commonsense regulation is making gun ownership completely illegal. That is what the Washington D.C. ban is. No resident if Washington D.C. may possess a gun in his or her homes.

Pickler shows us the big picture concerning his position on the second amendment. He is either actually believes the right to bear arms is not for every citizen or he does not really know what he believes. The latter is not excusable because he is a U.S. Senator who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and he was constitutional law professor for 10 years. The only logical conclusion is no absolute guarantee exists to American citizens to own guns. City officials argue that riding the city of gun eliminate their availability to criminals. The problem, however, is not with the majority of citizens who obey the law. The problem is with criminals who did not turn in their guns or more than likely purchase guns on the black market.

Some may agree with Obama and liberal city officials that banning gun ownership is the only way to rid the city of gun violence. They would be wrong.

John R. Lott Jr., a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and author of More Guns, Less Crime, argues that the city officials reasoning about eliminating the city from gun violence is flawed. He said after the law went into effect DC crime statistics shows gun violence increased not decreased.

“In the five years before Washington’s ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. But there is one fact that seems particularly hard to ignore. D.C.’s murder rate fluctuated after 1976 but has only once fallen below what it was in 1976 (that happened years later, in 1985). Does D.C. really want to argue that the gun ban reduced the murder rate?”

Lott also says crime rates soared in other cities like Chicago after guns were banned.

“Chicago has banned all handguns since 1982. Indeed, D.C. points to Chicago’s ban to support its own ban. But, the gun ban didn’t work at all when it came to reducing violence. Chicago’s murder rate fell from 27 to 22 per 100,000 in the five years before the law and then rose slightly to 23. The change is even more dramatic when compared to five neighboring Illinois counties: Chicago’s murder rate fell from being 8.1 times greater than its neighbors in 1977 to 5.5 times in 1982, and then went way up to 12 times greater in 1987.”

Larry Pratt says he asked Washington D.C. mayor, police officials, and other if they had any data showing the gun ban law was reducing gun related violence in the city. No official knew of any data nor could produce any statistics showing the 25 year old law worked.

Banning guns has been tried in many parts of the world with similar results. If the gun violence has not been significantly reduced or has risen as a result of the gun ban, why do public continue their pursuit to prohibit citizens from their constitutional right to protect themselves?

National Review Online columnist Daivd Kopel wrote a five-part series on the United Nation’s plan to rid the world of guns. The U.N. has made July 9 a holiday to celebrate Small Arms and Light Weapons Destruction Day. As Kopel notes,

“July 9 was not the first time that governments had lit bonfires to destroy resistance to the power of the government. Germany’s Josef Goebbels ordered all Jewish books to be burned in public on May 10, 1933. University towns were centers of Jewish Books Destruction Day.”

Kopel connects the dots to many other historical events and other repressive programs of the U.N. (To read his series that began on July 30, 2001, go here.)

When government officials know their unjust laws will likely result in violent dissent as happened in 1776, they first attempt to eliminate the means of resistance, namely guns. One of the reasons the Framers of the Constitution wrote the second amendment was to forever enable the people to repel another tyrannical government as well as foreign invasion.

Barak Obama, Senator from Illinois, is not the only Democrat candidate who thinks that common sense gun regulation mean conforming to the U.N.’s ban on guns. Let it not be said that the generational gap between liberal new school Obama and liberal old school Clinton is small; it is non-existent.