The Anti-Gun Media - Lawyers

The Anti-Gun Media - Lawyers for John Walker Lindh - AKA "The American Taliban" - have tried to get his charges dismissed on First Amendment grounds (free association) - as well as Second Amendment reasons, mainly to do with Attorney General Ashcroft's stance that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not collective, right (in other words, because it applies to citizens, and not some tortured definition of "militia".

So why did the New York Times cite "problems" with only the Second Amendment, and not the first?

Jacob Sullum, in Reason, writes an excellent article on the re-emerging Second Amendment battle. A recent Fifth Federal Circuit decision began the process of reversing the "collective rights" interpretation that started with the badly-interpreted Miller decision in 1939. Between that, and Laurence Tribe's recent change of mind from collective to individual interpretation, look for this issue to be back on the front page soon.

Thank God for John Ashcroft.