South Dakota Lawmakers Push Bill for Mandatory Gun Ownership

Americans feel strongly about protecting the right to own a gun, and many feel equally strongly about their right to forgo health insurance. One doesn't necessarily follow the other, but there's enough of a correlation that in South Dakota five legislators have introduced legislation that would make it mandatory for anyone who reaches the age of 21 to purchase a firearm that they would then use for their self-defense.

It's known as the "Act to provide for an individual mandate to adult citizens to provide for the self-defense of themselves and others." In political terms, it's a smackdown to the "Affordable Care Act." Republican Hal Wick from Sioux Falls is sponsoring the bill and concedes it is unlikely to pass, but he's using it to illustrate what many critics of the health care law believe -- that the requirement for individuals to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

"Do I or the other cosponsors believe that the State of South Dakota can require citizens to buy firearms? Of course not," he told the Argus Leader. "But at the same time, we do not believe the federal government can order every citizen to buy health insurance."

It's hard to believe South Dakota legislators will spend too much time on this, but then it's the kind of pro-gun mischief that gins up votes. The bill encourages freedom of choice as to which firearm people would be made to acquire, so long as it is "suitable to their temperament, physical capacity, and preference." People who have been barred from owning a firearm would be exempt. Whew!

The bill reads like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch except it's a very real part of the disrupt-and-dismantle strategy that critics of the health care law are using, and it's making people fearful of losing benefits from insurance reforms that have already gone into effect. Fighting through the courts is a long and difficult road, so opponents are turning to this kind of legislative spamming to make their point. It's a terrible waste of the public's hard-won democracy, and not that different from the repeal effort that the GOP is waging in Congress.

The confrontation over the constitutionality of the health care mandate is headed to the Supreme Court, where it probably won't be resolved until 2012. A federal court judge in Florida this week ruled the mandate unconstitutional, and concluded that without the mandate the law can't stand, so he ruled the whole thing unconstitutional. Administration officials talking without attribution to reporters called the case "an outlier," pointing to the hortatory rhetoric the judge used in his opinion, referencing the Boston Tea Party and envisioning a government with unlimited power to force the public to buy something it decides is good for them that they don't like or want, a country where people are mandated to drink tea, or eat broccoli or consume bread.

An administration official dismissed the rhetorical flourishes as "a mark of weakness" in the case the judge built, explaining that health care is a very defined market in a way that broccoli isn't. The Florida case was brought by 25 governors and attorneys general, all Republican but one, and the ruling evens the score between supporters and critics of the law, with two federal judges so far upholding the Affordable Care Act, and two ruling part or all of the law unconstitutional.