Trump to anti-gun governors: 'Back off'

Opinion

By Bob Barr
Marietta Daily Journal
April 1st. 2020

For more than 150 years, gun laws in the United States were essential, as written in the Bill of Rights: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It was not until the second half of the 20th Century that gun control as we know it took hold. By that time, of course, the United States had survived a bloody civil war, expanded territorially from the eastern seaboard to the Arctic Circle, fought in and emerged victorious in two World Wars, and was the only superpower to stand against the expansionist communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Red China.

To say that the Second Amendment was instrumental in these iconic American stories is an understatement. Guns are intimately woven into the fabric of America’s unique, rugged individualism that has seen us survive numerous hardships in our country’s short existence; all without losing our quintessential grit and spirit of freedom. At least, it seems, until now.