So there was a meeting over the weekend in Rogers of a group redundantly calling itself Conservative Arkansas.
The subject was guns, guns and more guns. Well, ammunition, too.
Asa Hutchinson, probably our next governor, came by to practice preaching to a choir.
Had there been cake, it would have been taken by freshman state Rep. Bob Ballinger of Hindsville (Madison County). He actually is a licensed lawyer in spite of what he said and in spite of what he is getting ready to do.
What he is getting ready to do is sponsor a Civil War-era bill, or at least a 1957-era one. It will presume to assert that any additional gun restrictions coming from the federal government — whether laws, executive orders or regulations — will be null and void in Arkansas.
That’s on account, the bill will say, of such federal actions being unconstitutional due to the fact that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is absolute.
Never mind the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause, which says federal law supersedes state law. Never mind the outcome of the Civil War. Never mind the outcome of school integration resistance at Central High.
And never mind that Antonin Scalia, the mostly famously conservative justice on our U.S. Supreme Court, plainly said the right to bear arms isn’t absolute.
He wrote that, just as the First Amendment doesn’t mean you can say anything anytime, the Second Amendment doesn’t mean you can harbor any kind of weapon for any purpose.
These states’ rights bills have sprung up in a few primitive frontier regions, like Wyoming, where the House has passed a version.
And here is Ballinger’s quote from the gun rally to which I refer: “I don’t think the folks in New York and California understand that we are not giving up our firearms. So I think, partly for their own safety, they need to understand our bill.”
He meant this forthcoming one to have Arkansas break federal law.
When an elected official in my state talks publicly about violent insurrection against the United States of America, of taking up arms against a country I love, then I will call him to account.
So I got Ballinger on the phone, and he said he made the comment “in jest” and that it got a good laugh and that he is a “bad politician” for not understanding that you can’t joke like that with the press around.
But he insisted that he meant what he said in arguing that the Second Amendment simply does not permit the federal government to restrict firearms — by style or performance capacity or anything else — within a state.
If several states will enact such laws, Ballinger advised, then maybe the federal government would be deterred. Saving that, he said, maybe resisting states could find comfort in their numbers, as well as in the joining of their legal minds in the inevitable litigation.
Let’s be clear on what Ballinger opposes in this notion of official civil disobedience by our state: Any kind of federal magazine-capacity restrictions on guns. Any kind of federal limitation on semiautomatic weapons. Any kind of increased and centralized federal gun registration.
As to my argument that such an anachronistic attempt at state pre-emption of federal law would be futile on account of being unconstitutional, Ballinger said it wouldn’t be unconstitutional until it was litigated.
That's the same argument anti-abortionists are using: Their fetal-heartbeat bill may be unconstitutional under current case law, they acknowledge. But then they say let’s run her up the flagpole and see if we can’t get the U.S. Supreme Court to take our case and change our law.
That’s a little bit of anarchy, and a little of that goes a long way.
We need to respect the law more than that if our country is to function efficiently as a nation of laws. Our new case law ought to arise from legitimate disputes about applications of rulings, not from intentional violations to invite litigation.
Let’s say I get the wild notion that our Supreme Court rulings aren’t sufficiently permissive to my freedom to libel you, which I believe to be inherent in an absolute right of free press.
So why don’t I haul off and write intentionally malicious and damaging lies about you to invite litigation that might reach the Supreme Court?
I don’t because it would violate civil law. It would invite sanction. And it would be wrong, just as any absolute right you might assert to possess a hydrogen bomb or a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile — or a high-capacity magazine on a military weapon — would be wrong.
Even Ballinger acknowledged to me that we might inevitably get into discussions about the extent of reasonableness of weapons, though he insisted that would be purely hypothetical at this point.
So he doesn’t believe that the right to bear arms is necessarily absolute after all. There might be some allowable hypothetical restriction somewhere in his imagination, apparently.
Even so, his argument seems to be that only a state, not the federal government, could legally restrict even imagined weaponry.
Let’s say Texas allows personal hydrogen bombs. Well, let’s assume that it would — Texas being Texas. What would we be expected to do in Arkansas? Sit still for our own incineration?
Actually, any state nestled so vulnerably between Texas and Mississippi needs the protection of superseding uniformity of federal law, don’t you think?
Alas, I cannot let Ballinger get away without telling you that he asserted to me that he and modern-day gun defenders — by standing for their natural rights against bad laws — are more like Rosa Parks and the Little Rock Nine than Orval Faubus or George Wallace.
Sigh.
It was oppressive local and state law that kept Rosa and the Nine down. It was federal court case law that rescued and lifted them. It was localized violent resistance to federal case law that left deep scars — on them and all of us.
We don’t need to wound ourselves all over again.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.