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In re: California body armor ban will not stop mass shootings

It’s already a crime under California law for felons to possess body armor and for anyone committing a violent offense while wearing it. Seeing as how vests are owned by a variety of citizens including merchants, jewelers, delivery drivers and the like, that makes fair the questions “Why do proponents of the bill want to make productive and law-abiding citizens more vulnerable?” followed by “Is it Damon Connelly’s grand purpose in life to tell you what he will allow you to have – and especially what he won’t?”

“In common use at the time” was the benchmark the Supreme Court used in recognizing protected arms for the citizen soldiers. The militia did not assemble on the green bearing torches and pitchforks. They came with the intent to match and best an equipped military threat. To suggest the Framers of the Constitution meant anything else is to accuse them of being insane, and of codifying into the supreme Law of the Land that sending an ill-equipped citizenry to their slaughter was “necessary to the security of a free State.”

“Who are the militia?” George Mason asked in the Virginia Ratifying Convention debate. “They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.”

Banning citizens while exempting state-sanctioned agents and professions doesn’t just turn the Founders’ intent completely around, it spits on it, on them, and on us.