Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, has written a piece over at Intellectual Conservative detailing how the “Bush Administration Pursues “Reasonable” Ban on Guns“:

On the one hand, the brief argues that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms that predated the creation of the U.S. government by the people. On the other hand, it concludes that any and all guns can be controlled or banned if a federal court finds that to be a reasonable restriction or ban.

The brief asserts, with no proof whatsoever, that there is an “unquestionable threat to public safety that unrestricted private firearm possession would entail . . ..” It is somewhat amazing that a brief in defense of the DC gun ban would say such a preposterous thing. It is the District of Columbia, with its gun ban, that usually has the highest murder rate of all U.S. jurisdictions. In high-gun-ownership jurisdictions such as neighboring Fairfax County, VA (with nearly twice the D.C. population), the murder rates are much lower. In Fairfax County it is more than 100 times less than the D.C. murder rate.

In some thirty pages of flip-flopping arguments, the Justice Department brief never once considered what the founders of the American republic might have meant by the phrase “shall not be infringed.” But the Clement brief did criticize the idea that the Second Amendment was a categorical prohibition on banning guns.