Back in April, columnist Robert Novak noted that Barack Obama was performing a "dance" on the topic of gun rights:
Obama, disagreeing with the D.C. government and gun control advocates, declares that the Second Amendment's "right of the people to keep and bear arms" applies to individuals, not just the "well regulated militia" in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts that this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local "common sense" restrictions on firearms.
The government of the District of Columbia is defending a gun ban before the Supreme Court, with a decision expected this month. The National Rifle Association Web site has a list of those "common sense" restrictions Obama has favored. One of them caught the eye of blogger David Hardy:
Barack Obama supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park, which would eliminate almost every gun store in America.
The reference is to a post by David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy, which quotes from a Chicago Defender article of Dec. 13, 1999:
He's proposing that all federally licensed gun dealers sell firearms in a storefront and not from their homes while banning their business from being within five miles of a school or a park.
Five miles? As Hardy notes, the effect of this would be to "eliminate almost every gun store in America." Alan Korwin, a Phoenix-based gun-rights advocate, has a series of maps of his hometown, showing areas that are "gun-free school zones" under a federal law that bans possession of firearms within 1,000 feet of a school. Phoenix is a sprawling city; to show the effect of such restrictions on an older, denser town, Korwin also has a map of downtown Cleveland, which shows dense concentrations of 2,000-foot-diameter circles.
The proposal Obama endorsed in 1999 would have banned gun stores within five miles, or 26,400 feet, of a school. Imagine the same maps with each of those circles 10 miles across. Gun stores would be permitted only in the most remote rural areas--and only if there is also no park within five miles.
The Defender article also reported that Obama proposed "to make it a felony for a gun owner whose firearm was stolen from his residence which causes harm to another person if that weapon was not securely stored in that home." This sentence is clumsily worded, but it seems to be saying that if someone breaks into your house, steals your gun, and uses it to rob a liquor store, Obama would send you to prison for failing to store it "securely."
To be sure, these are positions Obama took as a state legislator. It is unlikely that he would stand by them today, and even unlikelier that Congress would enact them. But it does lead one to think that Obama's instinct is to trash, rather than protect, the Constitution.
Once the Supremes hand down their ruling Obama's reaction will be interesting. Will he be gleeful should the Supremes make the wrong choice and uphold D.C.'s gun ban? Will his response be muted and subdued should the gun ban be struck down? His language, both verbal and body, will tell us a lot about how he would govern (if his past doesn't already tell us that).
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