Full Metal Racket

Here, Jane Galt, a.k.a. Asymmetrical Information's Megan McArdle, goes digging for comedy gold in Matthew Yglesias' comments section from a post of last week regarding the Parker v. District of Columbia. She finds a couple of doozies to hoist, including one from a commenter claiming that the Second Amendment was written to protect "the right of the People" to join the military. Although some years ago I would have appreciated the unintended humor, these days, well...not so much.

I don't know if it's because of 9/11, or the impatience with foolishness that results from growing older, or some other reason that has yet to occur to me, but I'm completely over the gun control debate. Everybody should be over it because the debate is finished, and we have an obvious winner.

I recall reading a Molly Ivins (RIP) column years ago in which she sneered at gun rights arguments for citing "canned quotes of the founders" to buttress the position that the Second Amendment protects individuals' rights—you know, just like the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights do. Molly lived in my town, and I was always hoping I'd bump into her one day so I could ask her for the canned quotes of the Founders that supported her argument. It would have been a rhetorical question of course, because the fact is there are none. That's none, as in zero. The simple fact is there is no evidence whatsoever that would indicate any of the Founders would have tolerated (much less supported) any government prohibition of firearms. The bizarre "militia rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment that the prohibitionists have been trying to make play all these years folds at the slightest touch on historical, legal, and even grammatical grounds.

And then there's our experience with right to carry laws. The anti-gun establishment argued forcefully that such laws would bring the violence of the OK Corral to our streets. But most of the states legalized concealed carry anyway, and the exact opposite of the prohibitionist predictions occurred: states with legal concealed carry experienced significant reductions in crime, including gun crime, in both absolute terms and relative to the handful of states where concealed carry remains illegal. Unfortunately for the gun control movement, their entire rationale for gun control was predicated on appeals to crime control and public safety, and thus their arguments have lost all possible credibility.

When we then add to the list the fact that gun prohibitionist have imagined no enforcement regime other than the same failed method the government employs to ban cocaine, the circle of refutation is complete. Arguments for gun control fail in every respect: the link-between-guns-and-crime argument, the Constitutional argument, and the enforcement argument. What arguments they have left, even if granted, are only barely capable of temporarily muddying the waters.

It's time to stick a fork in gun control, folks, it's done. It's so done it's not even funny anymore, or at least not to me. Now that O'Connor is gone, I predict that within the next few years the United States Supreme Court will "incorporate" the Second Amendment (by interpreting it based on the due process and equality clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment) as being an individual right inviolable by any level of government.

Anyway, I think we've had our fun, and now it's time for gun rights supporters to declare victory and advance the debate. We should quit humoring those gun opponents whom are too stuborn to admit defeat by arguing with them, but should instead dismiss them with a brief, perfunctory referral to Article V of the US Constitution. If they don't like the right to bear arms, then they can try to amend the Constitution themselves like good little Americans.