The 28th Amendment

[FWiedner]

The Fundamental Right of Self Defense: The 28th Amendment

Written by Raymond Kraft

I have been doing a little transcendental meditation on the subject of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, the one that says “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."

Yet many people among us claim the right to infringe this right of the people.

And while meditating my way through the pages of the May issue of America’s First Freedom, the Second Amendment magazine from the NRA, and the excellent ChronWatch article by Matthew Holmes (29 April 2005) entitled When 23,000 Gun Laws Are Not Enough, a little enlightenment overtook me, as I like to think it does now and then, and I deduced that it is time to resolve the burning question of what “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” really means once and for all, and at a national, constitutional level.

First, most of the 23,000 gun laws, give or take a few, that the various State legislatures have passed in the name of “gun control,” and the pending Illinois HB2414 that proposes to ban the ownership and possession of all semi-automatic weapons by private citizens in Illinois seem - to me - to be ultres vires acts of the States, reaching beyond their power and authority, for only the United States Courts, and not the individual state legislatures and judges, have jurisdiction to construe the meaning and intent of the Constitution, and only the United States Congress has the power to amend it (although, of course, any amendment must be afterward ratified by the states).  I.e., the interpretation of the Constitution in general, and the Second Amendment in particular, is a Federal issue.

The states, as I see it, do not have the Constitutional authority or jurisdiction to determine the meaning of the Constitution, or to amend it, yet every state law that attempts to infringe the Constitutional right of the people to keep and bear arms is an attempt to define, interpret, construe, limit, and amend the Second Amendment.

Read the entire article at:

http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=14372

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