Conservative fears about gun confiscation are way overblown

In your Thursday editorial, “Confiscating weapons,” you feed into the fear that some bogeyman is out to take away citizens’ guns. The editorial offers “that prominent national Democrats are openly calling for gun confiscation.” Really? Which prominent national Democrats? What do you mean by gun confiscation? All guns? Some guns? More specificity, please.

I mention this because two recent landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings have established national law to the contrary. In the cases of District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, the justices established the right of an individual to “keep and bear arms” as protected under the Second Amendment. End of argument. No national confiscation will happen. Period.

What the Supreme Court has also said in these landmark cases and subsequent gun rights cases is that individual states can enact reasonable gun regulations. The court has established that while citizens have an absolute right to own and keep firearms, it does not mean that citizens have the right to own certain firearms such as a fully automatic gun. This is not new, as laws relating to these weapons were established in 1934 and since then Congress has strictly regulated the manufacture, transfer and possession of machine guns.

What the Review-Journal should have clearly addressed is a concern about gun regulations in the Nevada, absent the deceiving rhetoric that there is a serious possibility of confiscation of guns by the federal government. In fact, states are prohibited from any wholesale gun confiscation as well. The Supreme Court showed wisdom in allowing states to establish reasonable gun regulations because gun ownership is not a one-size-fits-all issue.

Clearly, there are differences in sentiment about guns in states with large urban populations such as California or New York as opposed to states such as Montana. What the editorial is insinuating is that there should be no regulations concerning firearms. Unfortunately, the Review-Journal felt the need to juice up its argument using the fear of national gun confiscation instead of focusing on what, if any, gun regulations are being proposed in Nevada.