I think we need to make favorable laws forbidding unconstitutional activity; after all, the anti's keep pass unconstitutional laws restricting us, and they are more recent than the Bill of Rights. Even though the Bill trumps mere law, it is ancient history, and therefore simply not as relevant as the garbage signed yesterday. If we periodically passed bills essentially affirming the Bill of Rights provisions and what we think they stand for, we wouldn't have to reach all the way back to the Federalist Papers or other court rulings for precedent, every time.
Think about it; if you passed/ratified a straight copy of the 2nd as the latest Amendment, it's strict language, as understood today, would be law of the land --not hundreds of years of axe-grinding interpretations. But we've been scared to affirm what we know it means, for fear that could be exploited. Well, as we've seen some 28,000 times, now, if we don't pass laws affirming the Constitution, someone else will pass laws defying with it, and we'll have pitifully slow and ineffective recourse through the courts to undo them.
I think I-591 was on to something; passing laws to limit unconstitutional government behavior, rather than laws restricting the actions of the citizens, is where we should have been directing our legislator's efforts for the last 200-some-odd years. I think a federal law against maintaining a functional registry or other list of gunowners, as defined by it's ability to link any random American to firearms ownership at some level of success (which would encompass data-mining absent an official registry file, btw) would be a very powerful tool in our favor. After all, the registry itself is not what we oppose --it's just a document-- but the fact it allows the government to easily determine who has the guns (not what guns; that's worthless info) --why not make a law against that?
TCB
