“In an autobiography published last year, [Texas Senator Ted] Cruz recounts how after he moved to Austin in 2003 to serve as the state’s appointed solicitor general, he became concerned about leaving his wife Heidi at home alone while he traveled,” the AP reports [via usnews.com]. “The couple had previously lived in Washington, where each had jobs in the administration of President George W. Bush.” Here’s the relevant bit from Cruz’s book . . .
Worried that an intruder might come through the window, I placed a hatchet beneath our bed, and started to tell her to grab the hatchet if anything happened. As I was saying this, it struck me … this was stupid. Heidi is five-foot-two. The last thing I wanted was for my beautiful, petite wife to be trying to swing a hatchet at a large, menacing robber coming through the window.
So Senator Cruz bought his beloved a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver for a bedside gun — at the age of 42. And? And it appears that the Smith was Mr. Cruz’s first self-defense firearm. It may be his first ever firearm. And? And that means he’s a Johnny-come-lately to gun rights, apparently. But wait! There’s more!
According to his campaign, Cruz also owns a 12-gauge Beretta Silver Pigeon shotgun for bird hunting, though a spokeswoman declined to disclose when he bought the weapon. The campaign also declined to say whether he holds a permit to carry a concealed firearm.
So Senator Cruz may have taken up hunting in his middle age — the article researched his hunting license applications and discovered them all recent. And? And maybe he did so as a sop to the pro-gun, pro-hunting part of the population. I mean, Ted may not even carry! But wait! There’s more! Sherman set the Wayback Machine to 2008.
As solicitor general, Cruz helped file a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Texas and 30 other states in support of Dick Heller, a Washington resident who challenged the city’s gun ban. In his book, Cruz details the case at length and slams the Bush administration for arguing in court that reasonable restrictions on gun ownership are constitutional if they protect “important regulatory interests.”
“I was dismayed with the Bush administration’s attempt to water down the Second Amendment and incensed with D.C.’s attempt to write the Second Amendment entirely out of the Constitution,” Cruz recounts. “… Unlike the Bush administration, we did not believe that laws infringing Americans’ right to ‘keep and bear arms’ become constitutional whenever a federal judge finds them ‘reasonable.’ That’s not what the Constitution says; instead, it says ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ In my view, ‘shall not be infringed’ means exactly that.”
In his written argument to the justices, however, Cruz took a more nuanced legal position. Responding to concerns expressed by the government that striking down DC’s gun ban could jeopardize other gun control laws across the country, Cruz listed numerous “reasonable regulations” on guns he argued were constitutional, including state prohibitions on felons possessing firearms, as well as bans on owning machine guns and sawed-off shotguns.
I guess that’s all meant to prove that Senator Cruz isn’t as pro-gun as he seems. Or . . . it could prove that Senator Cruz was positioning his amicus brief to have maximum impact on the Supreme Court, to help the Second Amendment Foundation win the Heller decision, which established the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right.
Cruz’s firearms-related political theater — cooking bacon on the end of an AR-15 (mistaking it for a machine gun), hanging out with Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, etc. — may seem cynical to some. But the Texas Senator has always been pro-gun rights. Hit pieces like this only prove that Senator Cruz has gone from rank outsider to serious contender. I reckon Ted is a friend of ours. You?