A lot of Americans who believe in the right to own guns were very disappointed this weekend. On Friday, the Bush administration’s Justice Department entered into the fray over the District of Columbia’s 1976 handgun ban by filing a brief to the Supreme Court that effectively supports the ban. The administration pays lip service to the notion that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership as an “individual right,” but their brief leaves the term essentially meaningless.Quotes by the two sides’ lawyers say it all. The District’s acting attorney general, Peter Nickles, happily noted that the Justice Department’s brief was a “somewhat surprising and very favorable development.” Alan Gura, the attorney who will be representing those challenging the ban before the Supreme Court, accused the Bush administration of “basically siding with the District of Columbia” and said that “This is definitely hostile to our position.” As the lead to an article in the Los Angeles Times said Sunday, “gun-control advocates never expected to get a boost from the Bush administration.”As probably the most prominent Second Amendment law professor in the country privately confided in me, “If the Supreme Court accepts the solicitor general’s interpretation, the chances of getting the D.C. gun ban struck down are bleak.”

National Review

Bush is like Mr. Magoo creating a disaster to everyone around him. This ruling will be one of the most landmark cases in our nation’s history. It will basically determine what the Second Amendment means and Bush is siding with the gun control advocates. But the damage may not be contained to the just Second Amendment.

The biggest problem is the standard used for evaluating the constitutionality of regulations. The DOJ is asking that a different, much weaker standard be used for the Second Amendment than the courts demands for other “individual rights” such as speech, unreasonable searches and seizures, imprisonment without trial, and drawing and quartering people.

If one accepts the notion that gun ownership is an individual right, what does “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” mean? What would the drafters of the Bill of Rights have had to write if they really meant the right “shall not be infringed”? Does the phrase “the right of the people” provide a different level of protection in the Second Amendment than in the First and Fourth?

But the total elimination of gun control is not under consideration by the Supreme Court. The question is what constitutes “reasonable” regulation. The DOJ brief argues that if the DC government says gun control is important for public safety, it should be allowed by the courts. What the appeals court argued is that gun regulations not only need to be reasonable, they need to withstand “strict scrutiny” — a test that ensures the regulations are narrowly tailored to achieve the desired goal.

Perhaps the Justice Department’s position isn’t too surprising. Like any other government agency, it has a hard time giving up its authority. The Justice Department’s bias can been seen in that it finds it necessary to raise the specter of machine guns 10 times when evaluating a law that bans handguns. Nor does the brief even acknowledge that after the ban, D.C.’s murder rate only once fell below what it was in 1976.

Worried about the possibility that a Supreme Court decision supporting the Second Amendment as an individual right could “cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation,” the Department of Justice felt it necessary to head off any restrictions on government power right at the beginning.

So there you have it. The real man behind the mask. Bush screwed us on fiscal policy.  He’s screwed us on protecting our nation’s borders.  He’s screwed us on foreign policy and now he is snipping the very roots of our Constitutional rights. It is the Second Amendment that allows all others to be enforced.

Bush is no different than his predecessor. Both Bush and Clinton lie and use people for what they want. Bush used evangelicals to get reelected in 2004 with his pandering marriage amendment and those of the eight states that had their own on the ballots. As we see now, he also used Second Amendment supporters and gun control advocates are gleaming over it.

You very rarely hear the Democrats campaigning on gun control and the reason for that is because it is a politically poisonous issue for them. Many southern Democrat voters and those in rural areas are strong gun rights supporters and an anti-gun policy would isolate them from the party and the Democrats would lose many of their votes. Thankfully for them, Bush has just opened the door for that. Since Bush has now said that restrictions like D.C.’s are acceptable, look for more to pop up.

I have truly begun to question in the past year whether or not we made the right choice in reelecting this man in 2004. I can’t help to wonder that we may have been better off electing Kerry and watching him fall flat on his face, giving us a chance to put in a real Republican in 2008. I bet we’d still have Congress too.

Lott nailed the reason for this right on the head too. It’s all about keeping the power.