To the editor:
One must first learn the proper way to interpret our Constitution before advocating for gun control using executive orders, legislation banning certain types of weapons and placing excessive taxes on the sale of weapons.
The founders of the Constitution made sure the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, also known as the Bill of Rights, were not negotiable and were recognized as “God-given” rights guaranteed to all the people of the United States.
When the Constitution uses the phrases, “Congress shall make no laws,” “Shall not infringe,” etc., they were identified as inalienable rights under the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson cautioned us to “carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, all inferior courts and some state legislatures have “squeezed out” or invented many meanings against what the Constitution intended!
The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that 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.”
Defining militia is the biggest problem, but if you follow Thomas Jefferson’s recommendations, the word is easily defined as “all the people of the individual free states that make up the United States.”
I see nothing in our Constitution that gives Congress, Article 1, the President, Executive Branch, Article 2, the Supreme Court, Article 3, states or local governments any authority to make laws that infringe on this amendment.
It doesn’t matter what year it is; what matters is that the Constitution, with all of its articles and amendments, must be interpreted the way the founders of our Constitution intended.
Our current leaders on both sides of the aisle and the Supreme Court are not following the Constitution. They continue to squeeze out or invent a meaning against the Constitution.
This is why our country is in so much turmoil and fragmented. Our U.S. history is full of examples where our leaders invented or squeezed out their meaning of our Constitution. Separation of church and state is one example. Nowhere in the Constitution does it suggest there must be a “separation of church and state.”
The founders of the Constitution didn’t want God out of the process of governing the people; they wanted a country free of a government-established religion, as England had in their Church of England.
George Washington, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams all wrote about “guarding the virtue and freedom of our Constitution.” John Adams stated, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Our elected officials must strictly adhere to all of the provisions and guaranteed rights of the people within the Constitution.
George Langston
Greenfield
