U.S. News & World Report article from Last Month

It's not that I'm slow to read. It's just that I stopped subscribing to mainstream media rags the very day I got an issue of Newsweek (a magazine I grew up with) that featured Saddam's capture on the cover, but only gave a page-long story, and a very lukewarm one at that.

If ever there were an evident lack of media support for our military and our efforts to bring order to Iraq, that was it.

My folks in N.C. asked me if I wanted them to renew the subscription. I said flat-out, "No."

At any rate, someone apparently was done with the March 6 issue of USN & WR, covering the Heller case. On the cover, for those of you who remember, was a prominently-displayed Beretta 92 and something about the new battle over guns in bold block print.

Naturally, it aroused my curiosity. So, I flipped through the articles featured.

They were all written by an Emma Schwartz. And the articles appearing in that issue can be found here, here, here, and here. Since that issue, she has written another article concerning the Heller case, appearing March 18, here.

In the March 6 issue, she seems to be rather confounded that most people saw 2A as an individual right. The tone of her articles seem to take on the assumption that the collective right view is the normal way to look at 2A. She even tries to say that Circuit Courts have often ruled in favor of the collective.

But that is simply not the case. Let us refer again to Guy Smith's Gun Facts 4.2:

St. George Tucker, any early legal commentator and authority of the original meaning of the constitution wrote in Blackstone’s Commentaries "… nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people”

The Second Amendment was listed in a Supreme Court ruling as an individual right.

The Supreme Court specifically reaffirmed that the right to keep and bear arms did not belong to the government.

In 22 of the 27 instances where the Supreme Court mentions the Second Amendment, they quote the rights clause and not the justification clause.

Now, you would figure that someone who graduated with honors in history would have been able to dig this stuff up. But, her degree was from California at Berkeley. She herself is from San Francisco. It adds up.

It would also explain the other assumptions she makes in her articles--the typical media angle of focusing on guns used in crime, while any meaningful discussion over the successful use of firearms in self-defense is very lacking. Painting the NRA in a negative light. Blaming the Bush administration for doing nothing about gun-control issues.

So, it's not all that hard to understand how someone who graduated from UCB in 2004 managed to land a job writing major articles for major news corporations almost straight out of school. The leftists take care of their own.

But getting back to her confusion over collective vs. individual right--the reality is, if it were indeed a collective right as opposed to an individual one, then I would not have been able to obtain the five firearms I have owned in my lifetime (3 bought during the Clinton years), nor my fathers before me. And there would have been no way 250 million firearms would be in private possession here in our country (this is her own quote of a Virginia gun-control group).

That explains the opinions on 2A that she came across, and the Supreme Court's leaning towards individual rights that she reports about in the March 18 article.

There is a world that functions outside your ideology, sweetie. It's a shame that someone who reports about this world can't see that.