Commentary: On restoration of our basic privileges and immunities

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Last weekend, I went on an outing with a conservative organization to a shooting range.

Perhaps there are better ways to spend the Sabbath than target practice with a group of beautiful, right-thinking, heavily-armed young women. But none come to mind just now.

The particular weapon that I brought to the event was a revolver manufactured in England, rather than the United States. Accordingly, it is not very accurate. With a Colt or a Smith & Wesson, on the other hand, I can hit a target respectably enough.

If you go on the Internet, it will say that English soldiers issued this particular gun in WWII would throw it away as soon as they came upon their first dead American or German, and take the corpse’s respective Colt or the Luger instead.

But it’s kind of a cool antique, and best of all, because it is an antique it lacks a government-mandated serial number and is totally unregistered.

And while the gun is inaccurate, the story of how I came into possession of it is rather fascinating.

Like a lot of folks who grew up poor during the Depression, my old man was something of a packrat. So, after he died back in the 1980s, my mother told my brother and me to go down in the basement and throw stuff out.

In the course of discarding decades worth of assorted useless items, we came upon a package, post-marked some time in the 1950s, but never opened. Upon opening it, we discovered the fore-referenced inaccurate English revolver.

My brother and I couldn’t decide what was more astounding: that the old man would buy a gun through the mail and then never bother to open the box for more than 30 years; or that, at one time, it was actually possible to just slide a check into an envelope and a munitions manufacturer would send you a revolver through the U.S. mail.

After all, the current Socialist police state we live in now is the only world my brother and I have ever known. Our progressive overlords won’t even let us buy unpasteurized milk in the Dairy State.

“One of these days,” my brother and I vowed when we discovered the revolver, “we are going to start restoring the many constitutional rights that have been lost during the Twentieth Century.”

We’ve made some progress. The Citizens United case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this term was at least a step in the right direction towards restoring the First Amendment; Heller was a nice little baby step for the Second; and Lopez and Morrison at least recognized that Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause wasn’t completely unfettered, even if the cases unfortunately stopped short of overruling Wickard v. Filburn.

But there’s much work to be done. We must still restore the right to liberty of contract once protected in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

And some day, we’ll once again be able to buy revolvers through the mail.