Early in the primary season, I had checked candidates’ web sites, and been dismayed that the Second Amendment did not even rate as an Issue tab on most.  Ron Paul made his stance plain; Perry and Romney were no-shows. (Though Rick Perry did shoot a coyote.)  Even now, the Romney site is embarrassingly scant of substance: “Jobs, Healthcare, Foreign Policy” are the listed issue links.  You will not find Mitt expressing his passion for the liberty to keep and bear arms, on his campaign site.

In stark contrast, here is the Santorum web statement recounting Senator Santorum’s record on Second Amendment issues, and here is his answer to the GOA survey (GOA notes the Romney campaign still won’t answer.)

And, click on “Read the rest of this entry” if you want to see MJM’s ideal, model candidate position statement on the Second Amendment (repeated here from an earlier post).  This is what I would like to see the candidates stating they believe about the right to keep and bear arms.

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

• The Second Amendment states a personal guarantee to the “fundamental” right to keep and bear arms.
• The states may regulate the citizen’s right to keep and bear arms only under the “strict scrutiny” test, not under the weaker tests which are now the fallback position of more liberal judges and politicians.
• The guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms includes at least:
• the right to own any weapon that a person could “bear” that could be considered as “arms”;
• the right to carry or “bear” that weapon;
• the right to use that weapon in self-defense, or defense of others, when confronted by deadly force;
• the right to use that weapon to defend the home or business with the presumption that people breaking in intend deadly force (the essentials of the Castle Doctrine);
• the restoration of the right to people convicted of crimes that did not involve a robbery, a burglary, an attack, or other threat of violence;
• the strict scrutiny of a government’s effort to impose a gun-ban zone;
• the protection of those ancillary, practical rights necessary to give practical effect to the right to keep and bear arms, such as
• buying ammunition
• building and operating ranges
• offering the public the use of ranges built with taxpayer money
• using accessories, such as sound-suppressors
• shooting on private property
• selling Americans surplus supplies of weapons instead of destroying those weapons, such as M-1 rifles sent back from South Korea
• trading and selling weapons, to include at trade shows (gun shows)
• hunting
• carrying concealed, or openly
• limitations on civil liability for the lawfully exercised right to defend
• all of the above, without the requirement of a permit (constitutional carry).
• (Commenters, please add to this list.)

Because gun control is closely linked to crime control, I would add this position: support for harsh criminal penalties for using a deadly weapon to rob and murder.  To me, that means the restoration of the states’ authority to exact the death penalty for intent-to-kill murder, without the Supreme Court-imposed limits placed on states requiring them to find that aggravating factors outweigh mitigating circumstances.  We should be able to rid our streets of murderers whose crimes fall short of Hannibal Lecter’s tortures.