[url]http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,37955,00.html[/url]
"I think all women oughta carry a cell phone and a three-fifty-seven. Loaded."
So declares a woman interviewed by The New Republic's Michelle Cottle.
That statement seems to sum up the post-Sept. 11 attitude toward gun control. Things were already tough for the gun-control movement. Convinced that Al Gore's strong anti-gun stance had cost the Democratic Party the 2000 election, the Democratic Leadership Council had already called for a softer line on gun control. Bill Clinton and former White House spokesman Joe Lockhart had pronounced Gore's stance a mistake. Meanwhile, product-liability suits brought against gun manufacturers were failing miserably in courts from New York to California.
These, however, were all tactical defeats. The gun-control movement could still boast the loyalty of most of the media; favorable treatment from the courts on Second Amendment cases; the strong support of women; and a new book by a celebrated historian that claimed guns weren't important to the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Most important of all, the movement resonated with the Rosie O' Donnell culture of "niceness" that assumed that the best way to avoid harm was to be harmless.
But now all of this has changed. Though gun-control groups have tried to capitalize on the Sept. 11 attacks, those attempts have misfired. Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center tried to claim that Barrett Firearms had sold .50 caliber sniper rifles to Usama bin Laden. Not many in the media bought this, which was a good thing since it turned out that those rifles had actually been sold to the United States Government.
Even lamer was the claim that the Sept. 11 attacks were an argument for closing the (nonexistent) "gun show loophole." This claim, made first in a Brady Campaign press release and then in a suspiciously similar op-ed bearing the byline of former Clinton Administration official Eric Holder, just plain flopped. Nobody could be persuaded that Usama bin Laden’s boys would have trouble laying their hands on an AK-47, regardless of what rules govern gun shows.
The much-touted book by Michael Bellesiles, Arming America—which claimed the framers of the Constitution must not have intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to own guns because private gun ownership was exceedingly rare at the time — also lost most of its resonance when legal historians and reporters at the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, and National Review concluded that it was based on false, and possibly fraudulent, evidence.
Bellesiles’ employer, Emory University, says that a prima facie case of academic misconduct has been made out, and is requiring him to explain himself.
Nor have the courts been much help. On Oct. 16, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit released its opinion in the case of United States v. Emerson , holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun. The opinion is long, scholarly, and careful in its dissection of flawed reasoning in earlier decisions by other courts.
As a result, according to Michael Barone, "It will now be very hard–I would say impossible–for any intellectually honest judge to rule that the Second Amendment means nothing."