The Left-wing legacy media has become little more than a barking seal when it comes to the issue of guns in America and, in particular, Americans’ right to keep and bear them.

A Feb. 24 “op-ed” by New York Times contributors Abner Mikva, a former federal judge, U.S. lawmaker, University of Chicago law professor, and former legal counsel (one of many) to President Bill Clinton; and Lawrence Rosenthal, a former U.S. district attorney and current law professor at Chapman University in Orange California, argued, once again, that no matter what the Second Amendment says, it is time to register all guns and license all gun owners because background checks aren’t good enough.

More importantly, the authors suggested that forcing such registration would not violate the spirit, intent and letter of the Second Amendment.

According to the NYT op-ed, Breitbart News reported, the pair argued that there are too many ways to get around background checks, so, a “more effective system would require everyone who owns or acquires a gun to register it.”

A second “effective system” would be to require all persons who register their firearms [(the federal government, of course) to be licensed as well.

“The licensing requirement would allegedly force every would-be gun owner to prove he or she could ‘use a gun responsibly,’” Breitbart News’ Awr Hawkins wrote. “It would be like a background check that tries to guess the future.”

And the result of all of this government involvement would be:

Registration records could create a comprehensive database of all guns and their owners. During a criminal investigation, when a gun was recovered from a person who was not its registered owner, that person would face serious penalties. But so, too, would the registered owner if he had failed to report that the weapon was no longer in his possession.

The pair also offer more of the same, tired, and demonstrably failed recommendations: Micro-stamping ammunition and ballistic fingerprinting of guns, neither of which works.

Hawkins goes on to make the point that one thing all of these new requirements would do is make owning a gun much more expensive, thereby denying poor Americans the opportunity to utilize a constitutional right. That in itself constitutes precisely the type of infringement the Second Amendment clearly prevents, as noted below:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

These two scholars, no doubt accomplished men, are both liberal Democrats, and it is difficult to find a liberal Democrat who hasn’t found a gun law or restriction they didn’t like.

Why does that matter? Because it is coloring their opinion of an amendment that, based on historical writings by the founding fathers at the time the Constitution was being debated and ratified, was clearly meant to be an individual right, and not one subject to government approval through a restrictive licensing and registration process.

As noted by the Cornell University Law School, which explained the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in which the court ruled the Second Amendment provided an individual, not a state, right:

In a 5-4 decision, the Court, meticulously detailing the history and tradition of the Second Amendment at the time of the Constitutional Convention, proclaimed that the Second Amendment established an individual right for U.S. citizens to possess firearms…

What’s more, neither of these academics appear to be Second Amendment scholars. According to his Chapman University bio, Rosenthal has taught “Civil Rights, First Amendment Law, Constitutional Argument, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Local Government Law.”

Now, there is nothing in the First Amendment that says freedom of speech, religion and expression should be subject to government regulation, registration and licensing, either, but would Rosenthal support that, to curb the use of criminal speech?

Not likely.

In reality, the never-ending push by Left-wing politicos and academics isn’t really an issue of “public safety” or “black market gun sales” or “gun show loopholes” like they claim, because the crime statistics just don’t bear out those arguments. In fact, gun crime overall has been plunging for years. Either wittingly or unwittingly, opponents of the Second Amendment are advocating complete citizen disarmament before an all-powerful central government that we’re supposed to trust enough to defend the rest of our freedoms and liberties.

None of this matters to gun grabbers though, even those disguised as rational academics with some legal credentials writing in newspapers with a distinct anti-gun bias.

Sources:

BreitBart.com

Law.Cornell.edu

NYTimes.com