Schools, Guns, and Tyranny

  In these days when being a victim has
become trendy and politically correct,
the genuine article can still be found.
Matt Billington, a 17-year-old junior at
Filer, Idaho, High School, is a case in
point. Billington lives on a farm in a west-
ern state where guns are as important a
tool as a hay rake, a tractor, or a plow.
Billington uses his father's .22-caliber pis-
tol to hunt squirrels and rockchucks after
school on the farm where he works.
Rockchucks can be a substantial factor in
crop destruction.
    But when Billington forgot to remove
the pistol from his vehicle before he went
to school -- in spite of the fact that the
gun was unloaded, had not been taken out
of the vehicle, and there was no ammuni-
tion for it in the vehicle -- he was arrested
by a school "resource" officer, based on a
tip from another student who had under-
gone a school indoctrination campaign
about the "evils" of firearms possession.
Billington's father had entrusted the gun
to him, but federal law views firearms
possession on school property as a menace
to a well- (federally) regulated educational
system. Thus, a well-behaved American
farm kid suddenly faced the triple wrath
of federal, state, and local bureaucracies.

Government v. Constitution
    Billington faced suspension from his
entire senior year in high school under a
federal law entitled the "Gun Free Schools
Act of 1994." Officials readily admit that
Billington was never a disciplinary prob-
lem, but was an asset to the school. Nev-
ertheless, he became an unfortunate and
inadvertent victim of the statist mindset
which holds that government can cure
anything and the federal government can
do it best. That is the explanation prof-
fered to the public by the statists, but the
motivation runs deeper, toward other
agendas.
    While guns have long been a favorite
target of federal control, control of per-
sonal liberty is the ultimate goal. In this
case, the mechanics are complex. In the
statist mindset and in the drone-like devo-
tion of bureaucrats to federal regulations,
one kid in school, or a dozen, would make
for an easy sacrifice on the altar of liberty
destroyed. It is not that Matt Billington's
situation was a surprise which caught the
enforcers off guard. It was only a matter
of time until some youngster made the
mistake. The federal act was crafted as a
snare for the unwary -- especially for
school kids who have not lived long
enough to experience bureaucratic buffet-
ing and braising and thereby develop the
life skills necessary to live in an over-
regulated society.
    The framers of the Constitution were
painfully aware of the dangers inherent in
any concentration of power in the hands
of a single sovereign. They had fought a
war for independence to rid themselves of
the yoke of King George III. The comer-
stone of the newly created government
was a division of sovereignty between the
federal government and the states. Federal
sovereignty was carved out of the sover-
eignties of the several states, with the
states retaining the bulk of power. Madi-
son expressed the idea in The Federalist,
//45: "The powers delegated by the pro-
posed Constitution to the federal govern-
ment are few and defined. Those which
are to remain in the State governments are
numerous and indefinite."
    Where the two overlap, the federal gov-
ernment is supreme. The authority to con-
trol crime and preserve civil order are
matters of state sovereignty and responsi-
bility; the federal government has only a
secondary duty and responsibility in this
area when a state, acting through its legis-
lature or its governor, seeks federal assis-
tance for protection against domestic
violence under Article IV, Section 4, of
the Constitution.
    The Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 is
not the result of the exercise of any power
granted to Congress under the Constitu-
tion. Neither is any provision made in the
Constitution for federal involvement in
education, a topic which has been re-
spected as an exclusively state prerogative
until recent decades.
    Not only does Congress lack authority
to enact the Gun Free Schools Act, the act
flies in the face of the Second Amend-
ment, which prohibits such a statute. The
Supreme Court and lesser courts have rou-
tinely and regularly ignored its plain, clear
language in granting to the people the
right to keep and bear arms, in favor of a
strained and unnatural interpretation
which finds that the right is only one to
arm the National Guard, or a regularly
constituted (government sponsored and
controlled) militia.
    The absurdity of this interpretation is
discovered by considering the meaning of
the term "right." States and the federal
government are sovereigns, which, by
their very nature, are power centers; they
have powers and duties. They neither
have nor need rights. Rights are protec-
tions afforded by law to individual citi-
zens against abuses by the sovereigns and
by their fellow citizens. When the Second
Amendment established the right to keep
and bear arms, it was totally unnecessary
to apply it to sovereigns and their agents
-- the militia or the National Guard -- be-
cause it is a previously established pre-
rogative and power inherent in those state
sovereigns. The obvious conclusion is that
the right belongs to some other entity: the
people -- clearly identified in the text of
the Second Amendment.
    By this point there should be no linger-
ing doubts about the application of the
amendment. However, one final point de-
stroys the notion that the Second Amend-
ment applies to agents of the sovereigns.
Under Article I, Section 8 of the Consti-
tution, Congress is given the power to
"provide for organizing, arming, and dis-
ciplining the militia...." (Emphasis added.)
If any credibility is given to the prevail-
ing judicial view that the Second Amend-
ment guarantees only the right of the
National Guard/militia to keep and bear
arms, an absurdity results: The original
form of the Constitution empowered Con-
gress to arm the militia, but the militia
(under the Supreme Court view) lacked
the authority to accept, to keep, and to
bear those arms until the Second Amend-
ment was ratified.

Focus on Personal Rights
    The history of the drafting of the Con-
stitution supports the conclusion that the
Second Amendment is a personal and in-
dividual right. When the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, which had
deliberated in secret, finally made its work
public property, the document met mixed re-
views as the country polarized into the
Federalist and anti-Federalist camps. One
of the major concerns which the
anti-Federalists shared with many others in
the population was the lack of specific guar-
antees of personal rights and liberties in
the text of the proposed Constitution.
    The debates raged in the press and in
the ratification conventions in the several
states. Since ratification was uncertain,
prominent Federalists promised that if the
document were ratified, the first Congress
would propose amendments to guarantee
personal liberties. These amendments
were popularly known as the Bill of
Rights, and the Second Amendment is
among them. Never was there any discus-
sion during the consideration of these
amendments of a need to provide addi-
tional powers to any level of government,
nor to allow the militia to keep and bear
the arms which the federal government
was already authorized to provide to
them. The whole focus of the debates was
on personal, individual liberties.
   How, then, does the Supreme Court
reach an interpretation of the Second
Amendment which is clearly at odds with
the written text of the provision? The an-
swer is that the High Court does not re-
ally seek to apply the clear meaning of the
Constitution. Rather, it reads the docu-
ment in the light of the personal prefer-
ences and prejudices of the members of
the Court. Its interpretation sticks because
Congress has not used its power under Ar-
ticle III, Section 2 to limit the High
Court's appellate jurisdiction.
    The Gun Free Schools Act of 1994 has
no constitutional foundations to support it.
Its predecessor, the Gun-Free School
Zones Act of 1990, was an attempt to
criminalize anyone (not just a student)
possessing a firearm within 1,000 feet of
a school. This was too much even for the
present Supreme Court, which found it
unconstitutional in a split decision. The
decision was not based on the Second
Amendment (which the Court refuses to
enforce), but on the Constitution's com-
merce clause (the constitutional power of
Congress to regulate interstate commerce).
The Court found that the power of Con-
gress to regulate interstate commerce did
not extend to the prohibitions of the 1990
act because there was no commerce tak-
ing place when a citizen was arrested and
tried for possessing a gun within the gun-
free zone around a school. The dissenters
on the Court, however, opined that there
was a basis for using the commerce clause
to support creation of the act because stu-
dents would grow up to leave school, en-
ter the work force, and thereby touch or
affect interstate commerce. The amazing
thing about the case is that the Supreme
Court has for years found just about ev-
erything to touch interstate commerce.
Since the commerce clause appears not to
supply power to Congress to enact the
1994 act, a subterfuge was needed.

Funding and Control
    Instead of accepting the Supreme
Court's decision that the 1990 act was un-
constitutional, Congress decided, in writ-
ing the 1994 act, to accomplish the same
unconstitutional purpose without using
the commerce clause. To do it, a devious
process was applied, using the largess of
the federal treasury as a carrot and stick en-
ticement, bait on which state and local gov-
ernments are eager to engorge themselves.
    The Gun Free Schools Act of 1994
mandates that each state which receives
federal funds for education must have a
law requiring local educational agencies
to expel from school for one year any stu-
dent who is determined to have brought a
firearm to school. Provision is made for
the chief administering officer of the lo-
cal educational agency to modify the ex-
pulsion requirement on a case-by-case
basis. The Idaho legislature dutifully en-
acted a statute which mimics the federal
law, and the Filer school district adopted
its own policy, a policy which failed to
add the language allowing amelioration of
the sentence on a case-by-case basis.
    Why are states so eager to dance to
Congress' tune? The reason is simple:
The most addictive substance in modern
America is not crack, heroin, alcohol,
methamphetamines, or cocaine, but fed-
eral funding. The addiction is all the more
insidious because state agencies and the
general public which receive the funding
refuse to admit the addiction. Federal
funding has become so pervasive that de-
pendence upon it has erased from the pub-
lic mind any notion of questioning its
constitutionality.
    After getting the public and the state
and local governments addicted to regu-
lar injections from the federal treasury,
the federal government can add regula-
tory control as a condition for continued
funding -- another small step toward
having the states themselves become
pawns by doing the fed's bidding while
simultaneously destroying their own sover-
eignty. In the process, states have become
political prostitutes, willing to perform
any act demanded of them by Congress
and the federal agencies, as long as they
are permitted to engorge at the federal
trough.

Judicial Usurpation
    Idaho has a provision in its state consti-
tution which guarantees to its citizens the
right to keep and bear arms. While the
Idaho Supreme Court has spoken of
legislative authority to regulate the right, it
has never emasculated the provision as the
U.S. Supreme Court has done with the
Second Amendment. There is always a
danger lurking behind a judicial determination
that a right is subject to legislative
regulation since it can be regulated to the
point of removing the protection which
the right was enumerated to guarantee.
Still, the existence of the right of the
public to keep and bear arms in the constitu-
tions of the states can provide a measure
of protection where state law does not
conflict with the proper exercise of a
federal power.
     The Twin Falls Times-News quoted the
Filer school district attorney as saying of
the school board: "If anything, they were
angry with the boy, even for his inadvert-
ence .... Anybody would have made the
mistake, but it was a very serious mis-
take." Note the mindset: The anger is not
at Congress for mandating things which
are beyond its prescribed powers, but at a
17-year-old boy with the temerity to con-
travene, inadvertently, a policy and pro-
gram which keeps federal money flowing
into the school district. ·

          -- GEORGE DETWEILER

THE NEW AMERICAN / SEPTEMBER 15, 1997