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Obama's Gun Dance
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| Parent(s) |
Race
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| Contributor | Scott³ |
| Last Edited | Scott³ Apr 07, 2008 06:08pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Tuesday, April 8, 2008 12:05:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Article by Robert Novak.
"Barack Obama, who informs campaign audiences that he taught constitutional law for 10 years, might be expected to weigh in on the historic Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are pondering whether the 1976 District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting personal gun ownership in the nation's capital is constitutional. But Sen. Obama has not stated his position.
Obama, disagreeing with the D.C. government and gun control advocates, declares the Second Amendment's "right of the people to keep and bear arms" applies to individuals, not just the "well-regulated militia" cited in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local "common sense" restrictions on firearms. Does the Draconian prohibition for Washington, D.C., fit that description? My attempts to get an answer have proved unavailing. The front-running Democratic presidential candidate is doing the gun dance.
That is a dance of many Democrats, revealed by my private conversations with the party's strategists. As urban liberals, they reject constitutional protection for gun owners. As campaign managers, they want to avoid re-enacting the fate of many Democratic candidates who lost elections because of gun control advocacy. The party's House leadership last year pulled off the floor a bill for a District of Columbia congressional seat in order to save Democratic members from having to vote on a Republican amendment against the D.C. gun law.
Hillary Clinton has extolled the Second Amendment, though not as far as Obama. Campaigning at Iowa's Cornell College Dec. 5, he asserted that the Second Amendment "is an individual right and not just a right of the militia." He repeated that formulation along the primary trail, declaring at a Milwaukee press conference before the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary: "I believe the Second Amendment means something. ... There is an individual right to bear arms." |
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