Forgive the delay, but we’ve been meaning to comment on the remarks by Secretary of State Rice last week on CNN’s Larry King Live in respect of guns and the Constitution. She recalled how her father and other men in her neighborhood formed a “little brigade” each night, guns in hand, to protect themselves and their families from racist night riders. This has left Ms. Rice willing to consider some restrictions on gun ownership, such as mandatory background checks on gun buyers, but reluctant to consider much more than that. “We have to be very careful when we start abridging rights that our Founding Fathers thought very important.”

In civil rights-era Birmingham, Ala., thugs, themselves armed, operated with a wink and a nod from law enforcement. Gun control only kept guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, persons who, like Ms. Rice’s father, needed the weapons to protect their right to life and property. Ms. Rice pointed out that if the segregationist authorities had possessed a list of registered gun owners, the neighborhood might have been left defenseless.

One of the important changes the Bush administration has made in respect of the amendment that Joseph Story has called the palladium of our liberties is to adopt, as official United States policy, the position that the right to keep and bear belongs not to the militias, or any state that maintains a militia, but to the people. The right to keep and bear is, as the amendment says, “the right of the people to keep and bear …” What impressed us about Ms. Rice’s remarks is her point that the Second is as important as the First or the Fifth or any of the other great amendments. It is a point that is made all too rarely by our public figures. The fact is that it is the entire Bill of Rights that is the foundation of our freedom.