From Charles Cooke’s piece on National Review Online:
“Carol Bowne is dead — murdered in cold blood on her own property by a violent criminal who would not be restrained by good intentions. But there is no smoking gun, because she lived and died in New Jersey.
“”Bowne was a 39-year-old hairdresser from Berlin Township who had become increasingly nervous about her ex-boyfriend. Convinced that he intended to do her physical harm, she took out a restraining order, had security cameras installed at her home, and purchased an alarm system. She also hoped to buy a firearm for her defense. On April 21 of this year, she began the glacial process of obtaining a New Jersey permit to purchase a gun.
“She never heard back. She never will. Per the Courier-Post, Bowne ‘was stabbed to death in the driveway of her Patton Avenue home on Wednesday night.’
“Defending his tardiness, the local police chief explained that the application process usually takes more than two months, and that when Bowne died, his team was still waiting for her fingerprints to be processed. Perhaps so. But this should serve as no acceptable excuse. By state law, New Jersey is required to get back to permit petitioners within 30 days. It didn’t.”
One little but extremely important element of the Second Amendment is a tiny word that many people overlook. It is the little word “people.” “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The significance of this little word is highlighted by the wording of the 10th amendment:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The point here is that the 10th Amendment is not just about states’ rights. The point is there are certain powers that are so fundamental, so foundational, so elemental, that they do not in fact belong to the States but belong instead to the people themselves.
In other words, rights that belong “to the people” are so elemental that not only is the federal government prohibited from taking them away, but the individual states are too. Why? Because they are rights that belong to the people. They are rights that “we the people” did not delegate to government at any level, state or federal.
The right to be armed for the purposes of self-defense is one of those rights. According to the Second Amendment, it is not the right of the STATES to arm themselves in their own defense that is protected; it is the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms that is protected.
Again, this right is so basic that states are barred from interfering with this right just as the feds are.
This means New Jersey had absolutely no constitutional right to deny Ms. Bowne her right to carry a gun for her own protection. The Constitution guarantees the right of EVERYBODY in EVERY state not only to possess weapons (“keep”) but to carry them around (“bear”). The only “permit” an American ought to be required to show to carry a weapon is a copy of the Second Amendment.
New Jersey denied this woman her constitutional right to self-protection. And she is dead as a result.
“All Carol Bowne asked was that she be permitted to exercise her right to protect herself in her own home; instead, she ended up bleeding to death in her driveway, as the paper-pushers and know-it-alls decided whether they would deign to indulge her request, and her killer sped away, without fear of retaliation or injury.”
Guns don’t kill people, gun control laws do.
