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This whole article is full of the lies, faulty reasoning, half-truths and the selective historical memory typical of liberals (especially the anti-gun variety thereof). Here's a short list of Manville's spew, and my comments:

I am more troubled by Ashcroft's selective defense of the Constitution. In the aftermath of September 11, when he seemed determined to apply elasticity to the entire the Bill of Rights--when he wanted, it seemed, to know everything about anyone in the US who hailed from a Middle Eastern country--he explicitly refused to find out if they owned guns. How this stood up, to standards of logic or consistency, was hard to fathom.

Perhaps no one interested in stopping terrorists was much interested in whether Middle Easterners or anyone else owned guns because 9/11 occurred without the use of a single firearm! In fact, had the pilots or some passengers had guns on board (the latter was allowed up to about 1970), perhaps these mass murders would never have occurred.

...our Constitution is composed primarily of negative rights: it is an enumeration of things the government cannot do, rather than prescriptions of what it must do. For this reason we have in our founding document no right to housing, no right to education, and (famously) no right to health care. We do have a right to "the common safety" but the extent to which it can be enforced is limited by the fact that guns, of all things, are the beneficiaries of a negative right.

Government has no rights, only powers. Individual people are the only legal entities that have rights. There is no such thing as a "negative right," even for people. The Constitution was set up by people who were interested in a government more efficient than that whicb existed under the Articles of Confederation, but not too much more so. These same men and those of their generation won a revolution against a powerful central government less than 10 years before, and they were deathly afraid of the power of a central government. Those who wrote the Constitution weren't about to purposely create a home-grown version of what they had just defeated at a great cost in blood and treasure.

The parallel here is obvious. If Marxism is frozen in 1859, then our debate on gun control may be stalled somewhere around 1790.

Since human nature has been frozen since about 35,000 BCE (and maybe long before that), I'll stick with the 1791 reading of the 2nd Amendment for a while. When human nature changes for the better, then I'll reconsider.

The Second Amendment enjoys a rather exalted place in American jurisprudence precisely because, it seems, no one can agree on what it means.

Everyone knows what it really means; it is just that elitist, big government liberals don't like it.

The Constitution, in other words, actually deters the evolution of democracy

Since we live in a representative republic, I think that this is a good thing. If you want a pure democracy, you're welcome to it, but excuse me if I pass. You see, in a pure democracy the mob (or the poll) rules. There is no purpose in writing down any law, as the next POS article by some no-name, brain-dead jack@$$ will sway enough people to change the law on a whim. By the way, the Founding Fathers recoiled at the very idea of democracy. Given their extensive knowledge of government and human nature, I'll continue to follow their lead.

...eliminating the idea, set forward by the Supreme Court in United States v. Miller, that the amendment is a guarantee only of "collective rights." The Miller decision says the amendment prevents the federal government from interfering with states' forming militias, but it does not prevent it from regulating individual ownership arms.

Here we go, yet again...like his fellow brain-addled libs, Manville just can't understand simple English - if, that is, he actually read the Miller case. Miller stands ONLY for the very narrow proposition that a short-barreled shotgun is not a "militia arm," and is, therefore, not protected by the 2nd Amendment. This (frankly erroneous) ruling was handed down only because the Supreme Court had no "judicial notice" that such a weapon would be useful for militia purposes, simply because of the strange facts of the case, to wit: Miller was dead when the case was heard, and had no attorney arguing against the government. Implied VERY strongly by this lousy case is that any weapon that IS suitable for militia use (such as semi-auto versions of real assault weapons, the actual assault weapons themselves, machine guns, etc.) would be explicitly protected by the 2nd. Yet, somehow, morons like this drool like hungry wolves at the mere thought of banning exactly those weapons. While such a stance defies logic, I am not surprised, as most liberals have a severe learning disability, not to mention a near total lack of morality.

But this brings us back to the original question: how appropriate is it for us to decide the question of weaponry using a two hundred year-old document? One doesn't often compare the problems of Constitutional law with those of Marxist economics, but the parallels are again strong. Marxism failed to accurately predict the impact that technology would have on the industrial world. The Founding Fathers, it could be said, failed to do the same with firearms. They never anticipated the Glock 9mm or the AK-47, so whatever the intended meaning of the Second Amendment, it also fails to account for the forces that shape public safety today.

Just as appropriate as is it for us to decide the question of free speech using a two hundred year-old document. No one 200 years ago could have forseen the invention or widespread use of the Internet, TV or radio, yet the 1st Amendment has (properly) acted as a check on government censorship of these forms of communication. In addition, public safety from criminals had nothing to do with the passage of the 2nd. It isn't about criminals, deer hunting, skeet shooting or anything else EXCEPT providing a final backstop against the imposition of a tyranny. It is about deterring would-be tyrants, and preserving the means by which actual tyrannies can be overthrown in the future, as the generation which came up with the 2nd itself did.

But the whole exercise does raise anew the question of why guns should be protected by a Constitutional right. Many of our rights, after all, are not enumerated in the Constitution--why guns? This returns us to the utilitarian argument: guns make the society safer.

Again, it ain't about protection from criminals. That benefit is mere icing on the cake, an after-dinner mint. The main course is the preservation of the means by which the individual citizens of the nation can prevent a tyranny or, if necessary, overthrow it.

But there is one more argument for the Second Amendment: it protects us from our own government, and is as such the first defense against encroaching tyranny. In the current atmosphere this is laughable, and I will give it only the bare treatment it deserves.

History is not kind to this argument. The armed citizen has a lamentable record against the armed regiment, and often it is the simple suggestion that citizens have arms that allows for the brutal repression of opposition groups. African-Americans, for example, did not win their civil rights through gunfights with the police.

I suggest that this ignoramous take out his history books and learn something that he was probably never exposed to in a public indoctrination center. The British at Lexington and Concord in 1775 would surely have disagreed with him, as would the British at the Battle of Saratoga. In 1943, a few dozen starving, untrained Jews armed with rusty and obsolete handguns and little ammunition managed to kill hundreds of well-trained, well-fed, well-equipped and battle-hardened German "supermen" who were trying to haul them off to the gas chambers. No, they didn't win, but their example shows that a little cunning and guts, combined with an operable weapon, allow for stunning results. Had a few million people in occupied Europe done the same, Hitler's Reich would have disappeared in a lot less than 12 years. I would suggest that the American experience in Vietnam and the Russian experience in Afghanistan also point to the effectiveness of armed individuals against organized armed forces. In contrast, the genocides perpetrated by the governments of Soviet Russia, Communist China, Communist Cambodia, Idi Amin's Uganda, Rwanda and Serbia against unarmed minorities (and the fact that no such genocide happened to an armed minority) strongly suggests that widespread ownership of firearms by the populace is a check on a goverment's power. Perhaps the reason that guns haven't already been banned in this country is the certain knowledge, on the part of those inclined to attempt such a thing, that their children would soon be orphaned by someone who can shoot straight and who has guts. Let's hope that this fear continues to be passed on to all would-be tyrants.