Ted Cruz and the Second Amendment

The rallying cry in the gun press is that we are only one Supreme Court Justice away from having our Second Amendment rights stripped away.  A statement I do not buy into fully, but certainly things would be a lot harder and a lot worse had it not been for Scalia on the Supreme Court.  Our 2nd rights are recognized by the Constitution, but it does not grant them.  Instead, our rights derive from God, and only God has the right to take them away.  But, an administration hell bent on getting rid of guns held by the public would use the lack of a 2nd Amendment to bully the more timid into giving up their guns, leaving the rest of us more vulnerable.

So, it is with those reservations that I read Daniel John Sobieski's article today at the American Thinker entitled How Scalia and Ted Cruz saved the 2nd Amendment. Ted Cruz? Well, yes as it turns out. Alan Gura was the lead attorney, and argued the Heller case before the Supreme Court, but Cruz,,,well, just let Sobieski and Cruz tell it:

What few people know -- and the media won’t remind them -- is that Ted Cruz was a prime mover in getting Heller, in which Scalia wrote the majority opinion, before the Court and decided in favor of gun rights, ruling that the right to keep and bear arms was an individual right and that the word “militia”, as the Founders intended, meant the “whole people” of the United States. If Heller had gone the other way, our gun rights would have been thrown on the ash heap of history. In January Cruz told CNN:

I represented 31 states in the Heller case, which upheld the individual right to keep and bear arms. You know what Barack Obama's position is? That there is no individual right to keep and bear arms whatsoever under the Constitution… Hillary Clinton, for example, has said she will put Supreme Court justices on the court who will overturn Heller. And if Heller is overturned… there were four justices who said that there is no individual right to keep and bear arms whatsoever, that it is only a collective right in the militia, which is fancy lawyer talk for a nonexistent right… [If] Hillary Clinton gets one more Supreme Court justice, what it would mean is, the Supreme Court would say you and I and every individual American have no constitutional right under the Second Amendment at all, and either the federal government or a state government could make it a crime to possess a firearm.

I don't blame Cruz for pointing out his role in getting Heller before the Supreme Court, nor in getting a ruling that favors the 3nd Amendment, but we must remember that none of the rights listed in the Bill or Rights is granted by the Constitution.  Instead, they merely recognize rights that already existed.32