Next to the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment might well be the most momentous Amendment to the Constitution. Here’s the most interesting chunk of it:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Before this amendment, adopted after the Civil War (mainly to keep white southerners from tyrannizing ex-slaves), the Bill of Rights had applied to individuals only against the federal government. After it, states were required to follow the Bill of Rights, too.

This week, in McDonald v. City of Chicago, five of nine members of the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own guns against prohibitive regulation by states. In Heller, two years ago, the Supreme Court had applied the Second Amendment to individuals only against federal government regulation.

McDonald is a major advance for gun ownership rights. But the most interesting thing about the case is Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate concurrence. Four of the Justices decided that the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause applied. Thomas argued, instead, that it is the “privileges and immunities” clause that matters.

Why care? Well, “privileges and immunities” is just a fancy way of saying “rights.”

That’s why we have courts. To protect our rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tyrants don’t like an armed populace. The extent tyrannies will go to make sure citizens are disarmed can boggle the mind.

Take England. Please.

In Great Britain, private gun ownership is now illegal. This is not just a policy of trying to reduce concealed carrying of firearms — it’s a complete and utter prohibition, with no leniency.

Consider the recent case of 27-year-old Paul Clarke, a former soldier. He spied a garbage bag in the wrong place, went to look, and found a shotgun with ammo inside. He new guns were illegal, so he made an appointment with the local Chief Superintendent, and took it to the police station in the morning.

He was then arrested and imprisoned for possessing a firearm. He didn’t know that the law was so stringent as to make even touching a firearm, with the intention of giving it to the police, a no-no. But he was prosecuted and convicted for doing just that. By the time you hear/read this, he’ll have been sentenced.  I’m hoping the judge is lenient. The five years minimum, which is how the law reads, is idiotic in the extreme.

The law is more than just dumb, it’s tyrannical. There’s no excuse for such nonsense.

Free Paul Clarke! And weep for Britain, where some say liberty was born. Liberty sure seems dead there now — as is common sense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Call me a literalist. If I see a sign saying “Keep Off the Grass,” I assume that instruction applies to you, and me, and everybody but the lawn’s gardener.

If my dog Bugsy is on leash, I’ll keep him off the lawn, too.

Same for the Bill of Rights. Even the notoriously controversial Second Amendment seems fairly clear: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

What part of “shall not be infringed” is hard to understand?

I just received a fascinating short article from the Cascade Policy Institute in Portland, Oregon, by Karla Kay Edwards. Ms. Edwards writes about current court cases regarding gun regulation. She explains that “in June 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies directly to an individual’s right to bear arms. However, the decision did not clarify whether states and other government entities can limit those rights.”

She states it well. But, still, oddly. Don’t you find it a tad strange that rights listed in the Constitution as not to “be infringed” can, in the next breath, be spoken of as limitable?

Ms Edwards believes that such issues should be decided by the courts. I agree. But I’d prefer it if legislatures would simply not infringe on our rights in the first place.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Dear Reader: This “BEST of Common Sense” comment originally aired on September 20, 2007. The growing use of zero-tolerance policies — especially having anything to do with guns — is the opposite of common sense. Mass insanity may be more popular these days, but I still prefer common sense. —PJ

There’s the real world, and there are representations of it.

I draw a picture of, say, a gun. That picture is of a gun; it is not itself an actual gun. It’s just, well, a doodle.

This being the case — that doodles differ from real threats — then why was a 13-year-old boy near Mesa, Arizona, suspended from school?

He drew a gun . . . on a piece of paper. He didn’t point it at anybody. He made no hit list. He didn’t say “Bang.” No one even got a paper cut.

But school officials treated it as a threat, lectured his poor father on the shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, and suspended the lad.

The district spokesman insisted that the doodle was “absolutely considered a threat.” But somehow, knowing that this student was suspended, I’m not feeling any safer.

If our teachers and administrators can’t distinguish real threats from doodles — doodles most boys do, doodles I drew when I was a boy — then what are they teaching the kids? To overreact to everything? To not be able to distinguish small problems from big ones? To treat every symbol or representation as the real thing?

It’s elementary: The map is not the actual territory; the representation is not the thing represented.

You’d think, then, that teachers would be trying to impart (not erase) that notion from the minds of students.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Out in the countryside, seeing men carry around rifles and knives and such excites the nerves of no one except (maybe) some ungulates. In urban and suburban areas, though, most five-toe-per-foot folk have become used to not seeing people dressed to kill, so to speak.

That’s one reason for conceal carry laws, allowing people to carry guns legally, but concealed. Very civilized, and it makes criminals think twice.

But here’s a wrinkle: Openly carrying weapons is perfectly legal in all sorts of places. Wisconsin’s Attorney General wrote a memorandum, not long ago, saying that residents may indeed openly carry guns on Wisconsin streets.

Oddly, the state prohibits concealed carry by citizens.

Worse yet, some local police have no intention of abiding by the law. Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Harris made the news, saying, “My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we’ll put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether [they] have a right to carry it.”

Harris is worried about his city’s murder rate. So, he’s willing to commit crimes to prevent murder.

We all know where he’s coming from. But, I wonder. Has Harris thought this through? I bet that most murders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were committed by people illegally carrying guns, concealed, not by those openly carrying them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.