By Timothy Wheeler, MD
It is one of the great ironies of contemporary American politics that our nation’s capital is ground zero in the civil rights struggle of our time—the fight to exercise our right to keep and bear arms. At a meeting in the District of Columbia’s St. Augustine’s Catholic Church last week, newly elected D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser assured her audience:
Muriel Bowser.
“You have a mayor who hates guns. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t have any handguns in the District of Columbia. I swear to protect the Constitution and what the courts say, but I will do it in the most restrictive way as possible.”
Does the mayor of Washington, D.C. have any idea that she has just declared herself an enemy of one of our fundamental civil rights?
Which other items in the Bill of Rights does she consider disposable? Would she go down the line of enumerated rights in that great founding document, maybe something like this?
“You have a mayor who hates freedom of speech. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t have any freedom of speech in the District of Columbia. I swear to protect the Constitution and what the courts say, but I will do it in the most restrictive way as possible.”
We’re going to explore the implications of Mayor Bowser’s thoughtless disrespect in subsequent posts. Stay tuned.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.