NWA EDITORIAL: Shooting blanks

An impotent measure in Crawford County

Just in case there was any doubt, the Quorum Court of Crawford County as of March 2021 is in favor of the Constitution.

Make it 0h-fish-ul. It's right there in the writing, an ordinance backed by the affirmative votes of 12 justices of the peace and no dissenters.

They're standing strong for the Constitution.

Well, maybe that description goes too far. The Quorum Court hasn't stepped up to say it specifically favors freedom of speech and, say, athletes kneeling during the National Anthem to draw attention to racial injustices.

The justices of the peace haven't formally articulated any detailed resistance to government keeping its nose out of religion by, say, declaring the Ten Commandments display on the state Capitol grounds contrary to such prohibitions.

They didn't say anything at all about standing up for the constitutional protections of the 14th Amendment, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, that requires all states to recognize and provide for same-sex marriages on the basis that government owes equal protection of the law to all Americans.

Nor did these elected county representatives express a strong desire to ensure criminal charges against individuals are thrown out of court when law enforcement officers engage in unconstitutional searches and seizures of property.

Maybe they mean all that, but it requires some dot-connecting to determine whether they do. No such effort is required for one particular amendment to the Constitution, the one so near and dear to their hearts and apparently so under threat of eradication that only an ordinance by the Crawford County, Arkansas, Quorum Court can stand in the gap.

Crawford County, according to the ordinance passed March 15, is for the first time since its founding in 1820 a "Second Amendment County." What took so long, and how did the Constitution survive before this month's ordinance?

Maybe the designation is a natural for a county named after former U.S. Treasury secretary and one time presidential candidate William H. Crawford, who once shot a man to death in a duel and was, a few years later, himself shot in the arm in another firearms face-off.

The measure details how the Quorum Court's members "want to be counted among those who stand for the right to keep and bear arms to preserve life and liberty -- not destroying it -- and do so with a firm reliance upon the origin of the right to keep and bear arms which is, first of all, the natural right and duty of preservation of self and others, and secondly, so that we may remain a government for the people and not subject to a government over the people."

The ordinance takes the ever-controversial stance that unconstitutional laws are void. The way it reads suggests the "official policy" of Crawford County will be to "treat as void and unenforceable" any act of any legislature that abrogates the Second Amendment. Exactly who gets to determine what's enforceable or not isn't really detailed.

The measure, which some residents of the county pressed for, will for all intents and purposes serve mostly as fodder when it comes round for re-election time. Imagine how good that'll look on a red, white and blue political push card, right?

Perhaps the Crawford County Quorum Court, in situations like this week's murder of 10 people in Boulder, Colo., or the recent shootings in Atlanta that left eight people dead, just wants to make sure anyone curious knows where they stand on any laws that might have diminished the firepower those shooters had access to.

It's no doubt popular to pretend a declaration of support for the Second Amendment is all that's needed to settle the whirlwind of questions that arise every time an assailant uses a gun as his weapon of mass destruction. It's not that simple though. It is possible to stand for the right to bear and keep arms without suggesting it's a license for every person to obtain any kind of firepower he or she wants. Do people have a right to have bazookas? A Howitzer? Automatic weapons that can fire hundreds of rounds a minute? Is that a right of self-protection or are there actually lines that ought to be drawn?

Like most Arkansans, we support the Second Amendment, but also the rights of people like those working and shopping at a grocery store in Colorado to stand a chance of not being gunned down by a man armed to the hilt with murder on his mind.

The Crawford County Quorum Court is no doubt helping the gun industry churn up gun sales with fears that "they" are coming to take all our firearms away. But if its members believe they've done anything substantive to solve the challenges of public safety in conjunction with Second Amendment rights, they're kidding themselves.

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What’s the point?

A declaration of Crawford County as a “Second Amendment County” solves nothing in the challenging area of public safety and preservation of the right to keep and bear arms.

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