With critics of the Second Amendment continuing to try to find new ways of limiting the rights of Americans, West Virginia is taking a more proactive approach to defending the right to keep and bear arms. The state’s legislature has sent a bevy of proposals to protect this liberty to the desk of Gov. Patrick Morrisey.

While we will stop short of endorsing all the specific details of every piece of legislation in this package, we commend our neighboring state for attempting to clarify that, for 234 years, the Second Amendment and its protections of firearms ownership and the industries and businesses necessary for Americans to exercise this right are sacrosanct.

As we said in December of 2022, “we hope that our conservative lawmakers can be an effective check and balance when critics of our rights are themselves emboldened.”

We find West Virginia’s zeal for confronting the threat to the Second Amendment reassuring.

As we have previously editorialized, the erosion of the Second Amendment is almost always intertwined with the erosion of other rights — the right to due process, the right to freely speak and assemble and others. For this reason we continue to believe that is vitally important, even for Americans who choose not to exercise their right to keep and bear arms to defend that right.

We applaud West Virginia for seeking to further codify protections for this unalienable right from underhanded tactics, ranging from absurd lawsuits to undue economic pressure campaigns. The efforts of state leaders truly capture the spirit of liberty and individual rights that have and will continue to make America the land of the free.