The Aug. 9 Salt Lake Tribune article “GOP challenger: ‘Red flag’ laws are not the solution to gun violence” about Mary Burkett, who seeks Rep. Chris Stewart’s seat, indicates that both individuals hold views of gun rights that the courts never adopted in the 1700s, 1800s or 1900s.
Yet Burkett goes further: "Red flag laws restrict our rights and our rights come from God. Period."
Any attempts to harmonize her view with reality raises numerous questions:
1. Our 1787 Constitutional Convention spanned 116 days. Five days before it ended, a Bill of Rights was proposed and unanimously voted down. If the founders had such strong devotion to individual rights, why did they vote it down?
2. Why did Chief Justice John Marshall declare, in Barron versus Baltimore (1833), that the Bill of Rights limited only the national government and imposed no limitations on state and municipal governments? Didn't that make it clear that individuals enjoyed rights only at the pleasure of their state?
3. The Supreme Court, in United States versus Cruikshank (1876), stated that the Second Amendment "has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government." Why were states allowed to restrict a "God given right" ?
4. Why were former slave states able to maintain legislation well into the 1900s that prohibited Negro citizens from owning guns and even a Bowie knife? Why were such laws upheld if there was an individual right to gun ownership?
History makes clear that the vast majority of our individual rights were not God given. They were created after 1900 by courts using libertarian jurisprudence and the 14th amendment to diminish state rights.
Rick Edwin Jones, West Haven
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