By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Buried near the end of a Jan. 22 Seattle Times report on gun control bills now being considered by the Washington state legislature is a paragraph which explains why Evergreen State gun owners are facing a daunting battle this year.
“Following the House hearing (on several gun control bills),” the newspaper reported, “the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a nonprofit that ‘works to save lives and eliminate the harms caused by gun violence,’ held a news conference alongside Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, Sen. Manka Dhingra, D-Redmond, and Sen. Javier Valdez, D-Seattle.”
Grassroots activists dispute the description of the Alliance. They suggest this billionaire-backed group based in Seattle works to eliminate guns and the Second Amendment, and they’ve got majority Democrats doing their bidding in Olympia, the state capital.
Many of the people in the audience during the Jan. 21 hearing were wearing orange T-shirts signaling their affiliation with Moms Demand Action, a subsidiary of the billionaire-backed Everytown for Gun Safety. Among anti-gunners, there is the stubborn belief that the Second Amendment only protects the authority of states to maintain an organized militia.
Now there is a lengthy essay in Reason which explains in depth how wrong that impression is, by looking closely at the Second Amendment’s “curious grammatical structure” and its “stilted syntax” to conclude the amendment protects a fundamental individual right.
Authored by writer and editor Jay Stooksberry in Colorado, the 1,600-plus word Reason article explains the “prefatory clause” which mentions the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, is provided to give a good reason for the amendment’s “operative clause,” which is why “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
Stooksberry writes, “Thus, with these adjoining phrases, the operative clause—though interrupted by a comma splitting the subject and predicate—explicitly and solely prohibits government infringement of the right to keep and bear arms.”
Judging from many of the observations on social media from Evergreen State Second Amendment activists reacting to this year’s package of restrictive gun control proposals, every bill now under consideration qualifies as an infringement.
The Reason article explains how “Scholars divide the Second Amendment into two clauses: the prefatory and the operative clauses. Each serves a different purpose. The prefatory clause—the subordinate opening about a well-regulated militia being necessary for security—provides the amendment’s historical and cultural context. Meanwhile, the operative clause—the final half prohibiting infringement—unequivocally asserts the natural right of gun ownership. If the Second Amendment were a meal, the prefatory clause would be the appetizer, and the operative clause the main course.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the gun prohibition camp stubbornly clings to the antiquated—and discredited—contention the Second Amendment does not mean what it clearly states, that the right to keep and bear arms is one belonging to “the people,” which translates to individuals, not some collective. They vehemently disagree with, or simply ignore, the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Heller which defined the Second Amendment as protective of an individual right. Subsequent high court decisions in McDonald (2010) and Bruen (2022) upheld and reinforced the individual right position.
