The Second Amendment isn't about hunting or target shooting. It's about the right of the individual to defend him or herself against attacks from aggressors both foreign and domestic. When it was written, the young country had just won freedom from England, and many of the provisions of the Bill of Rights are specific to the rights of citizens to be free of oppression by a government grown overly controlling.

The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press, things that the British government had sought to control. The Second Amendment guaranteed that the situation that precipitated the Revolutionary War, the attempt by British soldiers to confiscate the privately owned arms of the men of Concord, could never happen in the United States. Thomas Jefferson again: "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms".

The argument that a citizenry with privately owned arms is a relic of a frontier past and that we can trust our government to protect us is patently false. Governments change, but a people disarmed are forever disarmed. The German Jews of the 1930s thought of themselves as Germans. After all, their families had been in Germany for hundreds of years. Then the Nazis came to power and required the registration of all firearms, shortly followed by their confiscation. When the Nazis came to cart people off to the death camps, there was no way to resist. George Washington stated: "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence".

There is currently a bill being debated in the Ohio legislature that would allow adult Ohioans to carry a concealed weapon. Felons and persons judged to be mentally compromised would be excepted. A lot of people react to this with horror, with visions of shoot-outs in the streets running through their heads. What you may not know is that 31 states already have similar laws in effect. John R. Lott, Jr. and David B. Mustard, sociology researchers at the University of Chicago, have found that "allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crime and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths". Their study, a county-by-county analysis of violent crimes in the United States, found that murders fell 8.5%, rapes by 5%, and assaults by 7% in counties in which concealed-carry permits were issued on demand. They concluded that if all states adopted these laws, 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and 60,000 aggravated assaults would be avoided each year. The economic savings from this policy would be $6.2 billion dollars a year.

The Founding Fathers were right. Americans are capable of the responsibility and right to keep and bear arms. We don't flip out and start shooting each other randomly. We use firearms wisely to prevent crimes at least four times as often as guns are used to perpetrate crimes, usually without shots being fired. And it's time that we defend this right before we suffer the fate of the British and Australians, who have seen their firearms confiscated and destroyed in the last decade. Criminals, of course, never register their guns and so continue to be armed in any event.

An alarmist media, for whom good news is no news, amplify the negative effects of firearms ownership completely out of proportion to its benefits. Don't let them convince you without taking a closer look at the underlying realities. The Second Amendment preserves all of the rest of the Bill of Rights.

With a commentary for WCPN, this is Marc Myers.

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