English! Do You Speak it, M*#!)%*er?!?

Nick Gillespie brings up the question of state-to-state "reciprocity" in victim disarmament arrangements at Hit & Run.

The instant case involves a Tennessee woman, licensed to carry concealed in Tennessee, who made a good-faith effort to check her gun at the 9/11 Memorial in New York and got dragged off in handcuffs.

Here's where Gillespie goes off the rails:

Assuming New York's and the city's laws pass constitutional muster ...

But there's simply no reasonable argument that they do pass constitutional muster.

Other people have done grammatical breakdowns and other analyses of the US Constitution's Second Amendment, and I'm not claiming mine is original. But I do claim that it conforms to both the original intent of the amendment's authors, and to anything resembling a common sense reading.

To wit:

The money shot clause in the Second Amendment reads "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

That clause was not casually written. It is clearly and beyond any reasonable doubt universal in application to all levels of government.

If the framers had intended only to forbid the US Congress to pass "gun control" laws, they'd have phrased it the same way as they did in the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law ...").

If the framers had intended to leave open the question of whether gun rights inhere in "the people" or powers to regulate the keeping and bearing of arms devolved to "the states," they'd have done exactly that (just as they did in the Tenth Amendment).

The Second Amendment clearly recognizes the right to keep and bear arms as a right of "the people."

The Second Amendment clearly forbids any infringement of that right. Not just infringement from Washington. Not just infringement from Albany. Not just infringement from New York City Hall. Any infringement, period. With whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Nor do bizarre arguments that the US Constitution generally binds only the federal, and not the state, governments hold any water. Article I, Section 10 imposes a raft of restrictions on the states, and Article IV imposes a number of requirements on same.

Speaking of Article IV, if the US government took sections 2 ("The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States") and 4 ("The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government"), New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be busy making big rocks into little rocks at Fort Leavenworth -- or perhaps offering a bodily demonstration of pendulum action -- right now.

But what really bugs me to no end is that anyone writing for Reason needs to be told any of this.