Taking a page from Piers Morgan’s book, the British Independent published an editorial Wednesday claiming the framers of the U.S. Constitution “could not have foreseen the destructive power of modern weaponry,” lecturing that “something is deeply and damagingly entrenched in the culture of the United States,” and bemoaning, falsely, that “a weapon that can fire 2kg of ammunition in a five-second burst” (huh?) would be legal in the United States.
While space doesn’t permit us to address all the falsehoods in the Independent’s editorial, we will say that we also doubt the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen television, computers, email or the Internet—let alone the abuse of those technologies to spread lies—when they wrote the First Amendment right of free speech. But if they had, they would have said the answer to false speech is more speech, not less.
If anything should be clear from the experience of Great Britain and Europe—where lawful citizens are largely disarmed and defenseless against the terrorist attacks that come with increasing frequency and ferocity—it’s that disarming good people costs innocent lives. And Americans will never accept that surrender.
