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The deceptions in the medical literature are not restricted to scientific issues. The insurmountable practical and constitutional impediments to gun bans are either offhandedly or deceptively [60] discounted. Neither practical matters, such as the massive expense and civil rights violations necessary to enforce gun bans, [61] nor historical matters, such as the racist and oppressive roots of gun control, [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] are discussed by medical politicians who advocate gun bans.
Besides unenforceability, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is an insurmountable impediment to gun bans. Gun prohibitionists mistakenly predicate that controls appropriate to a privilege, driving, are appropriate to an inherent, irrevocable, and constitutionally protected right. While certain state and federal gun controls may be constitutional, gun prohibitions are clearly unconstitutional. Gun controls may not be so onerous as to regulate the right into meaningless, virtual nonexistence.
Failure to recognize that the National Guard is a component of the US Army and not equivalent to the Second Amendment's "militia" [67] has allowed prohibition advocates to misconstrue the protections guaranteed to individual citizens by the Second Amendment. Considerable legal scholarship also finds protection of gun civil rights in "unenumerated rights" protected by the Ninth Amendment, [68] the natural right to self-protection, [69] and in the "privileges, immunities, equal protection" and "due process" guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. [70] [71]
Despite plausible misinterpretations by physicians [72] and Handgun Control Inc. [73] and other prohibitionist [74] attorneys about the function and definition of "militia,"
"The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age... and under 45 years of age." [75]
Notwithstanding prohibitionists' convoluted distortions about "the people," and constitutional case precedents, the US Supreme Court has explicitly protected an individual right to keep and bear arms, [76] [77] [78] [79] especially and explicitly protecting military-style weapons, "part of the ordinary military equipment...." [79] To claim that "the people" who have the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are actually the States and not the same "the people" who have First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendment protections requires some rather unlikely assumptions. Did the authors of the Bill of Rights use the term "the people" in the First Amendment to refer to individuals, then, 28 words later, use the term "the people" in the Second Amendment to refer to the States, then, 44 words later, use the term "the people" in the Fourth Amendment and four and five articles later, in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to refer to the individual?
The US Supreme Court has rejected such convoluted logic. In US v. Verdugo-Urquidez, [80] a Fourth Amendment case holding that the warrant requirement is inapplicable to the search of a home in a foreign country, the Supreme Court noted that "the people" who have the right to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to be secure in their papers and effects are one and the same "the people" who have the right to keep and bear arms.
The US Supreme Court has yet to use the Fourteenth Amendment to incorporate many Bill of Rights protections against the states, the Second Amendment protections among them. [70] [71] Using a "states' rights" prohibitionist argument that the Bill of Rights fails to protect the right to keep and bear arms from infringement by states, [73] [74] however, uses logic that, if similarly applied, would fail to protect freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to trial by a jury of peers, and other rights from state infringement. Prohibitionists take hypocritical refuge in a guns only interpretation of collective states' rights. The supportive authorities referenced above are quite convincing of the inherent and irrevocable right to self-protection against criminals, crazies, and tyrants. The right to keep and bear arms and ammunition is essential to that self-protection and has little, if anything, to do with duck hunting or other subjective "legitimate sporting uses" of guns.
These important civil rights matters will be discussed in detail in a forthcoming article.
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