Fitzgerald letter: Second Amendment
The Charles Bonner Guest Opinion you published on March 6 was one of the sillier pieces of fiction in print lately.
The author would have us believe the founders spoke about one “people” in the Second Amendment and some other “people” in numbers 1, 4, 9 and 10. Sorry, they were not that linguistically challenged. He then goes on to call NRA members ill-informed and perhaps stupid.
Were also those members of Supreme Court majorities in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), or Presser v. People of Illinois (1886), or D.C. v. Heller (2008) stupid? Were the members of congressional majorities stupid when they voted three times to specifically guarantee the individual right in legislation? Were distinguished professors of law like Wm. Van Alstyne (Duke), Akhil Amar (Yale), Alan Dershowitz (Harvard) and Don Kates stupid when they asserted the case for an individual right? Here is some “ill information” for the author: If there were no individual right, the court would simply refuse any such case on the basis that there was no standing. This “no individual right” view is a liberal invention of the 20th century.
Terry Fitzgerald, Boise
This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 5:52 PM with the headline "Fitzgerald letter: Second Amendment."