Continuing the response to my column of Oct. 3, about "random airport searches" of my bags even after they've cleared our now-standard metal detectors and X-ray machines, correspodent T.M. wrote in:
"We have all sorts of rights and obligations that are not listed in the Constitution. That is why we have elected representatives, laws, and courts. My right to travel in safety was created by the Federal government and is no less a real right that your right to carry a firearm. What about the right of the airline to protect its property? You seem to think carrying weapons on airplanes does not compromise safety. This is an idea most people would find hard to accept.
"It's pretty obvious that no Constitutional right is absolute. We have all heard the one about yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater. Do you accept any limits on the right to bear arms? I don't find it hard to draw a distinction between reasonable restrictions on my rights and oppressive limits to my freedom."
I replied:
In fact, T.M., every constitutional right is absolute, unless some modifying condition is included in its wording. The Fourth Amendment, for instance, does not ban searches; it merely says searches my occur only under a written warrant, issued upon presentation of probable cause to believe a crime has been committed. Therefore, you would be correct in stating "The Fourth Amendment's ban on government searches is not absolute."
The Second Amendment contains no such modifying language. Grammatically, the introductory clause, explaining why the founders preferred a populace armed with up-to-date military-style arms and capable of militia service, as a better guarantor of freedom than any standing army (such as, say, an armed "FBI," "ATF," or "DEA"), does not restrict the second. It does not say my right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed "unless some bureaucrat, operating in good faith, feels there is a reasonable risk to public safety." There is no place you could have possibly been convinced of such a dangerous absurdity but in a tax-funded government school.
Our "elected representatives, laws, and courts" are not authorized to discover for us "new obligations" not listed in the constitution. The Constitution limits government to such functions, duties, and powers as are (start ital)specifically enumerated(end ital) for them there.
Do you have a "right to travel in safety," which was "created by the Federal government"? Let's say you die in a hijacking on a commercial means of transportation. Can your family sue the federal government for failing to protect you? No, they cannot. The courts will acknowledge no such "right," nor any federal duty to protect it. This made-up "right" exists only in the evanescent speeches of politicians. It is very much "less real" than my right to carry a firearm.
Real rights are restrictions on government action. New, made-up "rights" can be spotted relatively easily, since they insidiously justify government coersion. There can be no "right" to free medical care, unless someone holds a gun to a doctor's head. The guarantee of a "right" for the disarmed to remain safe is even more chimerical.
It matters not at all that "many people may find it hard to accept" that I have a right to keep and bear arms on a common carrier, nor the notion that armed, law-abiding citizens make everyone safer, from freelance bandits as well as from genocidal governments. (An airline concerned with safety is certainly allowed to offer passengers color-coded frangible ammunition, capable of downing a hijacker without penetrating their pressure hulls.)
My right is not subject to any majority vote, any more than a majority could vote to seize the jewelry salesman's sample case and divvy its contents amongst themselves.
You say "We have all heard the one about yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater." But Mr. Justice Holmes wrote that (start ital)in dissent(end ital). It is not the law. I do indeed have a right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. What would (start ital)you(end ital) do if you were the only one who realized the theater was on fire?
The example is quite apt. If you yell "Fire!" inappropriately in a crowded theater, you might be charged with disturbing the peace ad incitement to riot. How often does such a deadly riot occur? I can't remember one in my lifetime.
Similarly, if you shoot someone inappropriately on an airplane, you would be equally likely to face prosecution. (The Second Amendment grants us only a right to "keep and bear" arms -- not to brandish a gun in order to get that darned stewardess to hurry up, nor to shoot anyone in cold blood.) How often did this happen, back before passengers were searched for weapons? Hardly ever, except when we were at war, overthrowing foreign governments and getting their nationals upset.
I call it "The Fred & Ethel Mertz Security System." This summer a 12-year-old cut through the fence at Logan International in Boston and flew to London without a ticket, let alone passing through any metal detector. (Feel safer now?)
It makes precisely as much sense to put millions of domestic airline passengers through all this just-for-show rigmarole to supposedly prevent anyone from having the (start ital)opportunity(end ital) to use a gun inappropriately, as it would for the government to hire thousands of nurses and assign them the duty of shooting a dose of curare or botulism toxin into the vocal chords of everyone entering a movie theater in this country, to prevent them from having the (start ital)ability(end ital) to yell "Fire!" during the movie ... even in that one case in 10,000 when yelling "Fire!" would be precisely the right thing to do.
Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is author of the new book, "Send in the Waco Killers," available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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