May I first say I enjoy John Cole’s art and he is included often in my Sunday Toons and he isn’t always biased as he is here.

The above cartoonist mentions the following at his blog:

And I’m still waiting for a common sense explanation of how the convoluted grammar in the Second Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”) lays out the right for everyone (who isn’t a convicted felon, etc.) to own a gun.

I will supply him with some original intent:

1) There is no contrary evidence from the writings of the Founding Fathers, early American legal commentators, or pre-twentieth century Supreme Court decisions, indicating that the Second Amendment was intended to apply solely to active militia members.

2) In his popular edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1803), St. George Tucker (see also), a lawyer, Revolutionary War militia officer, legal scholar, and later a U.S. District Court judge (appointed by James Madison in 1813), wrote of the Second Amendment:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.

In the appendix to the Commentaries, Tucker elaborates further:

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty… The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

Not only are Tucker’s remarks solid evidence that the militia clause was not intended to restrict the right to keep arms to active militia members, but he speaks of a broad right – Tucker specifically mentions self-defense.

“Because ‘[g]reat weight has always been attached, and very rightly attached, to contemporaneous exposition,’ the Supreme Court has cited Tucker in over forty cases. One can find Tucker in the major cases of virtually every Supreme Court era.” (Source: The Second Amendment in the Nineteenth Century)

(William Blackstone was an English jurist who published Commentaries on the Laws of England, in four volumes between 1765 and 1769. Blackstone is credited with laying the foundation of modern English law and certainly influenced the thinking of the American Founders.)

There is much more here: Original Intent and Purpose of the Second Amendment

Take note there is another aspect to this cartoon that seems to go unnoticed in Mr. Cole’s creative mind. It is this:

• Forty children under age 5 die annually from drowning in water buckets at home.
• One hundred fifty children under age 5 die from fires they start with cigarette lighters.
• Mechanical locks diminish the effective value of guns because they require that a gun be unloaded, yet thousands of children are saved each year by adults who use loaded guns to defend themselves and their families against home intrusion.

(Dated Article, but point stands)

Here are some easy to understand points/faqs (many more available):

• Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
• As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse

Where is this in his cartoons? Which is why I wrote this on his blog:

Your drawing draws the slimmest of deaths. There are many more persons saved by the stopping of a criminal. So the drawing should be a tombstone with writing on it that would go something like this: “Here lies another criminal who was killed in the action of committing a crime against which an innocent person feared for her life.”

HotAir h/t – 90% OF Al Sharpton’s radio listeners applaud decision: