Someone is Misguided...
On May 23rd, Jan Bosman wrote a letter to the editor of the Northwest Herald which essentially mocked the fact that McHenry County passed the Illinois Pro-2nd Amendment Resolution. I won't reprint it here, but Bosman argues that since the Supreme Court is deciding whether the 2nd Amendment was a collective vs. individual right, we shouldn't have passed anything.
Regardless of how the Supreme Court will decide, Bosman's argument ignores the Illinois State Constitution, where the right to keep and bear arms is clearly protected as an individual right:
ARTICLE 1, SECTION 22: RIGHT TO ARMSIn addition, Bosman implies that the ability of law abiding folks to use firearms in self defense is somehow wrong because any death was wrong - punctuating this idea with a few lines of John Donne's famous meditation, "For Whom the Bell Tolls."
Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
What strikes me is that Bosman would use lines of debatable poetry - was John Donne referring to our own sense of mortality or the collective human race? - as a concrete illustration, but would disallow us to lobby for a right, which is clearly recognized by our state and will probably be recognized by the Federal Government.
Jan Bosman, the law isn't poetry.
Posted 10:42PM May 27, 2008 by MCSA
