The courts, parents, kids and guns
Vin Suprynowicz at the Las Vegas Review-Journal
A Nevada judge enforces the lock-up-your-guns law he thinks the legislature should have written to punish a man whose twelve-year-old son shot himself. Vin stoops to statistics, but also remembers his principles.
At no point do these vital amendments say, "Unless there are minor children in the house," or, "Unless some low-level local judge so orders as part of a divorce settlement."
If government now attempts to use the presence of children in the home to infringe their parents' right to keep and bear arms, then perhaps -- just as the courts have found it necessary to throw out forced confessions in order to end police coercion, despite their "practicality" -- we as jurors and voters must find laws attempting to bar 13-year-olds or 17-year-olds from "bearing arms" just as unconstitutional as we would find a law barring women from owning guns.
Do we give up our constitutional rights when we conceive children? Do those children belong to the state, whose officers can then blackmail us into "voluntarily" waiving some of our vital, constitutional rights in exchange for their provisional promise not to take our children away from us, this time? "On balance I think it's more important to protect our children," says District Attorney David Roger.
Whose children? Mr. Roger is not merely some guidance counselor. Does he mean "the state's children"?
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