The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is known for being extremely liberal. And it should come as no surprise that many of the Ninth Circuit districts are in the state of California.
In fact, when I was in the police academy years ago I had to take many legal classes to learn the law. I remember the lawyer teaching these classes calling the Ninth Circuit “the circuit where all the idiot decisions get made.”
One of those decisions was made years ago. The Ninth Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment did not grant an individual the right to bear arms. Thankfully, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that it does.
But here’s the reason I tell you about the Ninth Circuit:
As the Court majority ruled that individuals did not have a right to bear arms, here is what one of the judges wrote in dissent.
“All too many of the other great tragedies of history – Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few – were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late.
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Well, there’s not much to say after that. The judge said it brilliantly. I enjoy shooting just as much as anyone, but I don’t forget the real reason I have firearms. And after reading the Judge’s words it still amazes me there are people in this country who are anti-gun and who think “it could never happen here.”
Maybe the next time you run across one of these people you should give them a copy of the Judge’s words… or you should tell them to thank you because it’s your guns and mine that keeps intact their freedom to spout their opposing views.
