THE STRAIGHT DOPE ON THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS: Just ran across this post from Cecil Adams in 1995. Concise and accurate. Excerpt:

In almost every other aspect of law the Bill of Rights has been broadly construed to restrain the states as well as the federal government. Few today would argue that states can abrogate the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yet many are prepared to let them gut the second, on the grounds that the framers did not foresee urban violence on the scale we face now. Maybe they didn’t, but so what? Civil-liberties advocates don’t accept urban violence as an excuse to curtail other constitutional rights, such as the protection against unlawful search and seizure.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has a long post on the Stephen Hunter / sniper column from the Washington Post that’s worth reading for the comments he interjects amid snatches of Hunter’s piece. It’s a sort of reverse-Fisking.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, in Britain. . . .

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Clayton Cramer has more on Britain. Gun crime is the highest in a century, despite a ban so comprehensive that the British shooting team can’t practice in Britain. Law enforcement blames “easy availability of guns” to criminals. What — you mean criminals will break gun control laws, too?