The question of gun license reciprocity is back in the news in the wake of the massacre at Las Vegas. It’s the idea that a gun license, like a driving license, ought to be recognized across state borders. Senator Schumer on Sunday denounced proposed legislation to vouchsafe reciprocity. On Face the Nation today, John Dickerson asked the head of the National Rifle Association: “Why should the federal government come in and tell the states what to do?”

Imagine were that question asked about, say, federal laws on racial and religious discrimination. Imagine if that had been said while, say, George Wallace was standing in the schoolhouse door. One needn’t imagine, actually — it was said, and by every segregationist in the land. The great civil rights acts are precisely efforts by Congress, acting at the federal level, to block the abridgment by the states of constitutionally protected rights.

We’ve made this point before, including in “The Bill of Rights Watch List.” The left in this country seems to have a hard time with the idea that the right to keep and bear arms is one of the basic freedoms our governments are prohibited from infringing. The idea seems to be that the right to keep and bear arms — to protect oneself — is somehow less worthy of protection than the right to, say, speak or pray or keep and bear a printing press.

Our greatest constitutional sages have long comprehended the connectedness of the Second Amendment and the other markers of liberty. One of our favorites, the Virginia revolutionary St. George Tucker, wrote in his dissertation against slavery that civil rights “are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property.” It would be good reading for John Dickerson and other doubters of the authority of the Congress to enforce the Bill of Rights.