Tommy, if you honestly believe that terrorism isn’t a criminal offense, then you had better get word to the president, the Justice Department, and many federal judges across the land because they continue to treat terrorism as a crime, not an act of war. I’m referring, of course, to the criminal prosecutions and convictions of Zacharias Moussaoui, Jose Padilla, Ali al-Mari, Timothy McVeigh, Ramzi Yousef, and dozens of other terrorists.

Believe it or not, every one of those terrorists were accorded all the rights and guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The undeniable fact—one that you yourself cannot deny—is that terrorism is a crime under the U.S. criminal code. That’s precisely why the federal judges in every one of those cases either accepted a conviction in such cases.

What conservatives did is create a new-fangled judicial system run by the Pentagon for prosecuting terrorists. It is a system designed to compete against our constitutional system. And the reason that conservatives did that is that they can’t stand the constitutional protections for suspected criminals that were set forth in the Bill of Rights.

Your belief, which is the belief of most conservatives, is that because the military is playing the role of international cop, that converts a crime into an act of war. Not so. It remains a crime. Just ask any of those federal judges who presiding over those terrorism cases. In fact, why do you think the Pentagon is prosecuting terrorists in its new-fangled “judicial” system? It’s because terrorism is a crime, not an act of war, even when the Pentagon is using military force to bring the suspected criminals to justice.

By the way, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if conservatives attempt to shift drug suspects into the Pentagon system, especially if conservatives get their wish to send troops to the border to fight the drug war. As you no doubt know, the drug war has been conservatives’ (and liberals’) favorite excuse for infringing civil liberties and privacy for decades.

You might well be right about the technical reasons for Sotomayor’s rulings in those gun cases. But I remain skeptical about her philosophy regarding gun rights, in large part because liberals generally are notorious for supporting gun control. Surely you won’t deny that.

The Presser decision that you say Sotomayor relied on in rendering her decision that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to the states was decided in 1886. Pardon me, but wasn’t that before the Supreme Court began holding that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated provisions of the Bill of Rights and applied them to the states? Why shouldn’t the Second Amendment receive the same treatment? The fact that Sotomayor ruled the way she did doesn’t surprise me. Liberals will usually look for any excuse at all to uphold gun control.

The gun-rights issue is of critical importance to libertarians because we understand that the right to keep and bear arms is key to a free society, in that it gives people to ability to resist tyranny through force. This is what most liberals and all too many conservatives fail to recognize. They think that gun ownership is all about the right to hunt deer.