“This could be a defining moment for gun control … Whether
concealed-carry laws and the like have held down crime rates remains a
hotly debated subject … As this … debate evolves, it appears that
the Supreme Court may finally get a case in which to weigh in on the
Constitutional question of the right to bear arms.”

The Second Amendment may finally get its day in court
Editorial Board
OpinionJournal
The Wall Street Journal
April 21, 2007
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110009971>;

That the Virginia Tech massacre did not occasion a widespread round of
political hand-wringing over gun control is, as one newspaper put it, a
silent testimony to how far the gun-control debate has shifted in the
past decade and a half.

Yes, the usual suspects have attempted to use the murder spree on campus
as evidence of the danger of guns in America. But as unlikely a
combination of leaders from Harry Reid to George Bush has been as one in
warning we should avoid a “rush to judgment” in the wake of the killings.

That’s progress of a sort, even if the Democrats’ abandonment of the
issue flows more from political calculation than principle. Political
calculation, after all, is based on something beyond mere politics. The
Democratic Party may have decided that gun control became a political
liability in the 1994 and 2000 elections, but that doesn’t go far toward
explaining why that is so.

First, as we noted earlier this week, what happened in Blacksburg was
evidence more than anything of the fact that there are sick and evil
people in the world willing to do harm to others for no earthly reason.
Pushing much beyond that point is political opportunism.

But over the past decade and a half, evidence of another sort has been
accumulating. Violent-crime rates peaked in 1991, according to the
Justice Department, and have fallen steeply since. Over the same period,
gun-control laws in many states have been relaxed. Correlation does not
equal causation, but it does make it difficult to argue that greater
legal access to guns drives up levels of violent crime.

Whether concealed-carry laws and the like have held down crime rates
remains a hotly debated subject. Certainly, more aggressive and
effective policing, especially in big cities, has been a major force in
driving down crime. One irony of this is that law-enforcement types have
long been a major pro-gun-control force, even though it would seem that
how their job is defined and performed has much more to do with crime
levels than whether guns are available legally.

When violent-crime rates were rising, as they did steadily from the
mid-1960s through the 1980s, it was easy to get political traction with
calls to “do something” about gun control. This was true whether legally
available guns had anything to do with those crime rates. But with crime
rates falling even as legal gun access expanded, the argument has lost
much of its plausibility, and so its force.

Which isn’t to say no one makes the argument any more. The nearly
uniform reaction in Europe to the Virginia Tech shootings has been to
pin it on America’s gun culture. Related to this is the charge that
America is prevented from taking sensible steps to prevent gun violence
by the invidious influence of groups such as the National Rifle
Association. Quite apart from the fact that this implies American
politicians and voters alike are dupes of the “gun lobby,” it ignores
the evidence, noted above, that violent crime and legal gun access
either have nothing to do with one another or are, if anything,
inversely correlated.

As this political debate evolves, it appears that the Supreme Court may
finally get a case in which to weigh in on the Constitutional question
of the right to bear arms. Last month, Judge Laurence Silberman on the
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of plaintiffs who claimed
that their Second Amendment rights were violated by Washington’s strict
gun-control laws. The Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment
case in decades, but federal appeals courts have generally taken a very
restricted view of citizens’ rights under the Second Amendment. The D.C.
Circuit’s 2-1 decision sets up a direct conflict with other circuits,
and could wind up at the Supreme Court.

This could be a defining moment for gun control, as Judge Silberman’s
ruling unequivocally declares that “the right to keep and bear arms”
under the Second Amendment belongs to individuals and not, as some have
argued, only to National Guardsmen or members of government-organized
“militias.” “The phrase ‘the right of the people,’” Judge Silberman
wrote, “. . . leads us to conclude that the right in question is
individual.” He added: “The wording . . . also indicates that the right
to keep and bear arms was not created by government, but rather
preserved by it.” In all, the decision is as clear a statement of the
right to keep and bear arms as one could want. The mayor of D.C. has
requested a rehearing of the case by the full D.C. Circuit. If that is
denied, or if the full court sides with Judge Silberman, the next stop
would be the Supremes.

A Supreme Court decision on what the Second Amendment means could
transform the gun-control debate in this country. For now, the
relatively muted political response to the Virginia Tech killings may be
taken as a sign that, on this issue at least, our politics have become a
little less reactive and a little more rational.

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !