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Shooting fish in the barrel
 It's safe to assume a majority of the residents of Louisiana are pretty serious about the constitutional right to bear arms.
After all, the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees it.
Yet, that hasn't stopped the Left and like-minded governing bodies from Chicago to the District of Columbia and points elsewhere from approving local laws, or ordinances, that watered down an individual's right to keep and bear arms.
At every turn, those local laws were challenged in federal court. In two significant cases that surfaced in the past few years, District of Columbia v. Keller and McDonald v. Chicago, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Constitution, striking down those pesky gun-control laws, which clearly were written to disarm the citizenry.
A gun owner and an avid hunter, state Sen. Neil Riser knows the Supreme Court's somewhat conservative bent could shift to the Left fairly quickly and gun rights would come under siege over night. Think about it. All it takes is for one conservative jurist to retire or die, and President Obama would be in a position to appoint another liberal to the nation's highest court. Quicker than you say Merry Christmas, bastions of liberalism from coast to coast would ramp up gun-control measures, and in time, a Left-leaning Supreme Court would uphold them as constitutional. Mark my word.
That helps explain why the National Rifle Association has been methodically working its way across the country in search of state legislatures that might be willing to approve proposed constitutional amendments to safeguard an individual's right to own a firearm. In Louisiana, Riser is leading the way with a proposed constitutional amendment that would ensure our rights to own firearms are entrenched in the state Constitution.
In other words, if the Louisiana Legislature ever approved a bill to restrict or outlaw a state resident's right to own firearms, it would entail amending the state constitution to do it. We're more likely to witness pigs flying in Louisiana before the Legislature approved a bill to chop away at one's right to own a firearm, but why take a chance?
Obviously that's what Riser and the NRA are thinking, among other things.
The synopsis of Riser's measure, Senate Bill 303, says it is a "Constitutional amendment to require that any denial, infringement, or restriction on one's right to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, transfer, and use arms for defense of life and property be subject to a strict scrutiny standard by courts in determining any violation of the right."For the full story, subscribe to the The Concordia Sentinel's NEW E-Edition! |
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