(Trading tables at the Gun Show)
 
Merlin is the man at Rabbit Ridge Enterprises. He is a vast presence in an orange t-shirt with eyes set deep in his plump cheeks and no neck at all between his head and broad beefy shoulders. He has a businesslike approach to the constitution. His enterprise happens to be the sale of firearms in Virginia.
 
It also was the reason that the Bluesmobile was creeping into the sprawling empty blacktop of the Dulles Expo Center looking for a gray Pontiac, last model, almost the last of the once famous breed.
 
Merlin’s business is what puts him square in the sights, so to speak, of the NYPD, which is convinced that the lax Virginia guns laws- particularly those at gun shows- is what is fueling the gang violence and murder in the Big Apple.
 
Well, I am here to tell you that the “gun show loophole” is much overrated.
 
The Second Amendment had several versions in the hand-written copies of the Bill of Rights that were passed by the Congress and ratified by the several states. They vary only in slight capitalization and punctuation differences, so the one passed by Congress is held to be definitive, and it reads:
 
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
 
It seems pretty straightforward; though people of good intention have been arguing about it for a couple centuries. It makes sense, if you consider that the amendment was crafted of two disparate thoughts linked by the fact that there was no standing army in North America, and the citizenry was expected to own and provide the weapons to provide for the common defense when summoned.
 
It would also appear, though I am skating on thin legal ice here, that the 10th amendment to the Constitution was intended to drive a spike into the fears of the central authority that had so recently been defeated at Yorktown. It hammers down the explicit language in the earlier nine amendments: “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.”
 
Again, people of good will can argue about “living documents,” imaginary specific rights and the awesome expansion of Federal power. By now the litany is vast and inescapable.
 
Chicago Congressman (and former Black Panther) Bobby Rush periodically introduces a bill that would essentially put the Federal government in charge of an even vaster bureaucracy of gun control than it already has. You would think that the Panthers would have been enthusiastic supporters of the Second Amendment, but Rep. Rush has wound up on the side of enhanced state authority.
 
It makes people crazy out there in Red America, and I see hysterical notes about jack-booted Feds crashing into law-abiding homes all the time. The legislation never has found a co-sponsor, and languishes in Committee each time it appears.
 
My position, for what it is worth, is that the law ought to be what the basic documents say: my rights shall not be infringed, and that any powers not specifically delegated to the Congress are reserved to the state I live in, or to me, personally.
 
I think there is perfect clarity in that, but we all live in the place that we do, an generations of chiselers, do-gooders and lunatics have been gnawing away at the original framework like termites.
 
It is all on its head. Who delegated to the government the right to look into our bedrooms, or say what a woman might or might not do with her body?
 
I am not going to launch off on one of those tirades this morning, though it is tempting. Bobby Rush’s gun control bill capitalizes on the murder of a young honor-roll student by a thug on a bus. It is tragic, of course, but everything about the crime- possession of the gun, the shooting, everything- was already illegal under existing laws. More and stricter rules wouldn’t change any of it.
 
There are people in gun control organizations who maintain that somehow the Second amendment is about hunters or something, and on the other side the National Rifle Association will fight for the individual right to own crew-served weapons.
 
Even in this free-wheeling gun-rights state of Virginia, the powers down in Richmond have decided what that means is that I cannot purchase more than one gun per calendar quarter, and that I must pass a review of suitability by the State Patrol to ensure that I have no criminal or psychiatric impediment to the legal ownership thereto.
 
I guess I am OK with that, and would even be OK with an outright prohibition of guns in private hands, if there was any rational assurance that the various thugs and whacks would be disarmed first.
 
Say what you will about the Administration. It is clear early on that they made a conscious decision not to engage the NRA while the economy and health care and climate change and Wall Street regulation were all on the table.
 
The suspicion is that it was only a tactical decision is what has kept gun sales so brisk, and why I happened to stop at the Dulles Expo Center to talk to Merlin last week, and why, after a suitable and frustrating delay in the “instant check,” the gray Pontiac was rolling toward me across the blacktop under equally gray skies, and Merlin was rolling down the driver’s side window.
 
We’ll have to get to that part tomorrow.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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