Candidate enters ongoing O-A News 2nd Amendment dispute

(This Letter to the Editor was submitted to the Opelika-Auburn News on 17 June 2006 in response to a number of published letters by a local sociology instructor, Mark Konty. Be sure to read the Clark campaign gun rights platform plank.)

Dear Editor,

For some time on this editorial page, Mark Konty has attempted to persuade readers that the 2nd Amendment to our federal Constitution protects not an individual right to keep and bear arms, but rather some collective right. Anyone can easily deduce that the government needn't amend the constitution to maintain its own arms and thus that the 2nd Amendment is either a ridiculous redundancy or is a recognition of an individual right.

I don't suppose that Mr. Konty will admit this, so I would simply say that I am glad that our inalienable right to keep and bear arms is also enshrined in Section 26 of our state constitution, and, I might add, in a manner that is far less open to creative interpretations such as Mr. Konty's. Alabama's Constitution of 1901 clearly states "That every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state." I trust that Mr. Konty would concede that this bit of the legal canon is explicit in its statement of an individual rather than collective right.

It is important to note in light of the discussion of freedom versus prohibition that our right to arms isn't the result of a pragmatic analysis, although many argue for the practicality of widely available firearms. Each individual has a natural right to defend himself (or herself), and the right to arms proceeds directly from that.

Mr. Konty may be a very able sophist, but I doubt that he will convice many that an individual should be prohibited from engaging in self-defense, and yet that senseless position undergirds his whole argument. To paraphrase former US Chief Justice John Marshall and others, "the power to regulate is the power to destroy." Why then should we ever consider allowing our government to regulate our means of self-defense?

Dick Clark
Candidate, Alabama House of Representatives, District 79
Chairman, Libertarian Party of Alabama