Now New York demonstrates link between Second Amendment, other liberties

Last Tuesday, we criticized developments in Flagstaff, Arizona, where local officials seem to be allergic to the idea that gun shop owners, gun owners and people who champion the Second Amendment deserve to be afforded equality before the law and before the practices of the government entrusted to serve the interests of all its constituents.

Instead, leaders of Flagstaff were walking away from advertising revenue for displays at the city’s airport because of fears the courts might expect them to allow a gun shop the same opportunity to advertise as any other business.

Unfortunately a similar case has popped up closer to home — the American Civil Liberties Union will represent the National Rifle Association in a lawsuit contesting New York state’s Department of Financial Services is targeting the lobbying group with a campaign of harassment, discouraging banks and insurers from doing business with the NRA to punish the NRA for its advocacy.

“The government can’t blacklist an advocacy group because of its viewpoint,” the ACLU correctly notes, according to an article in The Hill.com, a Washington, D.C.-based newspaper.

As we alluded to about a week ago, many advocates for the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms explicitly cite fears that without an armed populace, the government will trample the broader array of rights individuals are given by God.

We understand many people feel these fears are overblown, perhaps even paranoid.

But we also cannot think of any way advocates could make the case that these fears are not overblown and are in fact quite reasonable better themselves than what the governments of Flagstaff and now New York state are doing.

In Flagstaff and throughout New York state, people who presumably wish the broader public to believe that the debate over the right to own firearms is about public safety and not about liberty are conspiring to deny their skeptics the right to advertise in a forum available to other constituents and to orchestrate punishment for exercising First Amendment rights in tandem with the banking and insurance sectors.

As much as some people may wish we could cordon off the Second Amendment from the more comprehensive need to preserve individual right, it is the very actions of those people who demonstrate that the violation of the Second Amendment will require violations of nearly all of our cherished, God-given liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights.