Firearms advocate misses mark

Re “Unholster the 2nd Amendment,” Opinion, Nov. 14

The 2nd Amendment guarantees Americans the right to bear arms. But what exactly is meant by “arms”? The firearms of today far exceed in killing power the weapons known to the framers. And why limit our interpretation of the term to firearms? Does the amendment guarantee us the right to bear chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons? Why not? If part of the reason for the amendment is to ensure that the people retain the power to oppose an oppressive government, surely firearms are insufficient against today’s military.

If we agree that the people should be restricted in their right to bear weapons of mass destruction, then we are conceding that some limitations are permissible under the 2nd Amendment, and we need to define those limitations. Perhaps, looking only at original intent, we should say that the people’s right to bear muzzle-loading muskets cannot be infringed.

Morris Schorr

Woodland Hills

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Reverse the gun control debate: Repeal the blanket right to bear arms and let those who feel strongly enough fight to grant it in special circumstances.

Rodney Hoffman

Montecito Heights, Calif.

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Gun control advocates should take comfort from Robert Levy, who argues that the Supreme Court should affirm the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the district’s comprehensive gun ban violates the 2nd Amendment. If Levy, who is one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, uses the same reasoning before the Supreme Court, the D.C. circuit’s ruling surely will be reversed.

Levy acknowledges that, to affirm the lower court’s ruling, the Supreme Court would have to reexamine its 1939 ruling in United States vs. Miller that the 2nd Amendment protects the ownership only of weapons that bear “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” Levy says that the D.C. circuit’s ruling is “entirely compatible” with the ruling in Miller, but then argues that Miller got it wrong because the court “should not attempt to link each and every weapon to the militia.” The Supreme Court is unlikely to agree that a lower court ruling is “entirely compatible” with one of its own prior rulings if that compatibility depends on distorting the central holding of its prior ruling.

Peter Gelblum

Los Angeles