Check out this article about Ashcroft’s “new interpretation” of the Second Amendment. Here’s a quote:

“The current position of the United States … is that the Second Amendment more broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to possess and bear their own firearms,” Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote in two court filings this week.
That right, however, is “subject to reasonable restrictions designed to prevent possession by unfit persons or to restrict the possession of types of firearms that are particularly suited to criminal misuse.”

Then, there’s this quote from Michael Barnes, who is the president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence:

“This action is proof positive that the worst fears about Attorney General Ashcroft have come true: his extreme ideology on guns has now become government policy”

“Extreme ideology?” That ideology not only sounds pretty rational to me, but I think most people would actually agree with it. The number of individuals who legally own firearms would seem to support that idea, too. For anti-gun people to call this line of thinking “extreme” just makes me tune them out even more than usual.