The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed litigation on Wednesday in an attempt to undermine the Second Amendment Preservation Act that passed by the Kansas legislature in April 2013. It hopes to overturn the law, leaving the firearm rights of Kansans in jeopardy.

The Kansas Second Amendment Preservation Act was a historically significant defense of gun rights. It remains the most comprehensive nullification of federal gun control ever passed through a state legislature and signed into law. It nullifies a wide range of federal attacks on the right to keep and bear arms in the State of Kansas. It states, in part:

Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.

The law goes on to reiterate that the true meaning of the Second Amendment is to protect individual gun rights, exempts all firearms and firearm accessories made within Kansas state lines from federal regulation under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, and impose felony criminal charges upon any government official who attempts to implement federal gun control regulations in the state.

The Brady Center sees this development as a threat to their ultimate goal –  the mass disarmament of the American people.

“This Kansas law despite its name does not protect the Second Amendment. The courts protect the Second Amendment and interpret the Second Amendment,” Jonathan Lowy, director of the Brady Center’s legal action project, said in a Wichita Eagle article.

Lowy continued with his defense of federal supremacy by saying, “That is the way our legal system operates. It would lead to constitutional anarchy to have 50 state legislatures and governors deciding what they think the Second Amendment or any other constitutional provision means.”

To Lowy and others like him, only an employee of the federal government can possess the know-how and expertise to determine the meaning of ‘shall not be infringed.’ In their world, the little people have no recourse but to sit on their hands and obey the dictates of their robed masters, no matter what. The Founding Fathers would not have agreed with nullification deniers like Lowy and their backwards interpretation of the Constitution.

For instance, James Madison’s words in Federalist #46 sound far more like the so-called ‘constitutional anarchists’ here at the Tenth Amendment Center than the authoritarians at the Brady Center. Read them for yourself:

Should an unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrantable measure be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.

The founders intended the federal government to remain limited. The populace was never meant to roll over and accept any infringements upon their natural rights under any circumstances, and they were meant take whatever measures deemed necessary to prevent their sacred freedoms from being ripped away from them.

Nullification is one of those measures, and we are seeing it re-emerge today. The idea of state-level resistance to federal tyranny is more relevant than ever before, and that isn’t bitter changing.

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