Say Anything Blog

A letter sent by Montana’s Secretary of State to the Washington Times:

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide D.C. v. Heller, the first case in more than 60 years in which the court will confront the meaning of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although Heller is about the constitutionality of the D.C. handgun ban, the court’s decision will have an impact far beyond the District (“Promises breached,” Op-Ed, Thursday).

The court must decide in Heller whether the Second Amendment secures a right for individuals to keep and bear arms or merely grants states the power to arm their militias, the National Guard. This latter view is called the “collective rights” theory.

A collective rights decision by the court would violate the contract by which Montana entered into statehood, called the Compact With the United States and archived at Article I of the Montana Constitution. When Montana and the United States entered into this bilateral contract in 1889, the U.S. approved the right to bear arms in the Montana Constitution, guaranteeing the right of “any person” to bear arms, clearly an individual right.

There was no assertion in 1889 that the Second Amendment was susceptible to a collective rights interpretation, and the parties to the contract understood the Second Amendment to be consistent with the declared Montana constitutional right of “any person” to bear arms.

As a bedrock principle of law, a contract must be honored so as to give effect to the intent of the contracting parties. A collective rights decision by the court in Heller would invoke an era of unilaterally revisable contracts by violating the statehood contract between the United States and Montana, and many other states.

Numerous Montana lawmakers have concurred in a resolution raising this contract-violation issue. It’s posted at progunleaders.org. The United States would do well to keep its contractual promise to the states that the Second Amendment secures an individual right now as it did upon execution of the statehood contract.

BRAD JOHNSON

Montana secretary of state

Helena, Mont.

As radical as it may seem to talk about secession in the modern era of American politics, it’s worth noting that Montana has a point.  The Constitution is a contract drawn up between the federal government and the various, sovereign state governments.  We’ve come a long distance away from that founding ideal of federalism what with the federal government using tortured court rulings and the power of the purse to regulate everything from labor regulations to traffic laws in the various states, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore states’ rights.

One of the conditions of Montana joining the United States was that the individual right to keep and bear arms be preserved.  If a federal court rules that there is no such right after all, even after such a right was asserted when Montana and other states joined the union, it would represent a fantastic and foolhardy departure from the original intent of our nation’s founding documents, not to mention the laws of many states in this union.