Last week, a New Jersey editorial board decided to voice their feelings about the Second Amendment. As an entity protected by the First Amendment, one would imagine they’d have some degree of sympathy.

They didn’t.

Instead, in their anti-gun editorial, they referred to it as a “curse.”

Well, it seems Amy Swearer at the Heritage Foundation was as unamused as the rest of us were.

The editorial board of a major New Jersey newspaper started the year off with an anti-Second Amendment screed, decrying the right to keep and bear arms as a “curse” perpetuated by a “fanatical” interpretation created by the Supreme Court in 2008.

Among other things, editors at the Newark-based Star-Ledger bemoaned that the Second Amendment keeps the nation from enacting “rational” gun control along the lines of Canada—which is a hair’s breadth away from banning all firearm sales—and called for readers to imagine the possibilities if the Supreme Court would just reinterpret the Constitution according to the justices’ personal perceptions of “reasonable” public policy.

The editorial, unsurprisingly, gets many things wrong.

For example, far from “suddenly siding” with the National Rifle Association in 2008 about the meaning of the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller merely affirmed the long-established interpretation of the right, universally held by stalwarts of constitutional law such as William Rawle and Joseph Story.

But the most egregious aspect of the editorial is its air of disdain for peaceable Americans who want to protect themselves with firearms in such unimaginable public places as “restaurants” and “nursing homes.”

Perhaps these editors should spend less time pontificating about other countries and more time investigating the reality of defensive gun use in this one.

Swearer then goes on to list a number of defensive gun uses that undermine the anti-gun editorial’s very premise.

I recommend you go read them.

What’s troubling to me is that the editors in question even dared to think such a thing. I get that folks in that position in most major papers tend to be anti-gun to some degree or another, but the Second Amendment is anything but a curse. It’s an insurance policy.

If the Second Amendment were to disappear, how long before the First Amendment, and its protections for freedom of the press, go with it?

While anti-gunners don’t like to hear it, the Second Amendment is the insurance policy for the Bill of Rights. It’s the guarantee that tyrants won’t dare to go too far with restricting what we can or can’t do. They know that if they try it, they’ll face armed citizens who aren’t interested in giving up their rights.

That includes the freedom of the press because while the press has been preoccupied with sucking up to power lately, there are dissenting voices. That freedom protects those voices, like us here at Bearing Arms and our sister sites of Hot Air, Townhall, PJ Media, and Twitchy, as well as numerous other places.

Of course, editorial boards tend to be incredibly short-sighted on such issues. Instead, they think that eradicating private gun ownership won’t have any impact on them at all.

I pray they never get to find out just how wrong they are.