What the Second Amendment Means
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In the Oct. 2 editorial "The State of Guns," the argument is made that speech and assembly and therefore bearing arms are subject to limits.
Yet what can be clearer than the words that the editorial quoted earlier: "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
If the intention of the Second Amendment were to allow some infringements but not others, surely such exceptions would have been listed. That they were not, and given that we have a well-defined process for amending the Constitution, would seem to indicate that the proper course of action is not to attempt to redefine a "shall not" as a "shall sometimes" but rather to edit the document by means of constitutional amendment if we wish to say that some rights protected in the Bill of Rights can, in fact, be infringed in certain circumstances.
When we continue to ignore the amendment process in favor of stare decisis, judicial activism (from both left and right) and the concept of a "living document," we add to the increased politicization of the Supreme Court and its decisions while undermining the deliberate limitation on government power that the document so carefully defines.
LAWRENCE W. WATTHEY
Frederick
