The federal appeals court in Washington D.C. ruled Friday that the district’s 30-year-old ban on handguns in the home is unconstitutional. That’s a victory for common sense. What’s more important is that, for the first significant time since United States v. Miller, the courts have given an opinion regarding the question of individual firearms ownership.
Gun control advocates will try to sell you the idea that the Second Amendment is either: a) an antiquated throwback to the days of colonial resistance from King George or b) that it refers to the national guard and not individual citizens. Both assertions are patently false.
The Second Amendment guarantees the right of Americans to keep and bear arms in defense of liberty. Period.
That means that citizens, as individuals, have the freedom to defend ourselves from deprivation of life or property (which essentially defines liberty), whether such a threat comes from neighbors with criminal intent, from an invading force or even from our own government.
In essence, the Second Amendment is about the simple human right to self-defense against tyranny. Crime of any sort is an infringement of individual liberty and it’s tyranny, no matter what the nature of the culprit. We have the right to chart our own course in life, without the threat of harm or deprivation.
Don’t believe me? Read on.
“No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
— Thomas Jefferson
“The great object is, that every man be armed … Every one who is able may have a gun.”
— Patrick Henry
“(…)the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
— James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 46.
The founding fathers knew not only the practical utility of keeping guns, but the need for that right to be guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. They may not teach this in schools anymore, but the Bill of Rights does not grant rights, it guarantees them. Rights are given by higher agencies than human government, and the Bill of Rights simply enumerates them in specific language.
Why? Because they knew that the government confiscation of arms always precedes deprivation of other civil liberties. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and countless other dictators in history have known this. The first step in successfully subduing a people is disarming them. Without the physical means to preserve our rights, we cease to be citizens and become subjects. When we are subjects, our other rights can be easily stripped, and we can do nothing to prevent it.
Since the 1930s, our government has been trying to restrict and reduce our ability to keep arms. The National Firearms Act of 1934 not only criminalized certain types of weapons (most notably, machine guns), but it cleverly turned the matter over to the Department of Treasury to make this look like an issue of revenue collection and taxation rather than an infringement of rights.
Of course, the general public swallowed it without much protest. The only major legal challenge was United States v. Miller, which only made the debate foggier. On one hand, Eugene Miller was convicted because a sawed-off shotgun was ruled as having no utility in a well-regulated militia, and the court seemed to imply that individuals could own military-grade hardware. However, it did pave the slippery slope of implying that the government could control what kinds of firearms citizens were allowed to own.
This sort of logic lead to the blind passage of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, in which otherwise sensible lawmakers and citizens accepted the idea that “certain weapons” were more dangerous than others. As always, the government sold the bill based on the idea that it was being done to “protect” us. (In fact, the passage of the AWB did nothing to accelerate the downward trend already occuring in crime statistics, nor did its expiration cause any verifiable increase in crime.)
Ask yourself who is really protected when guns are banned. No, really. It’s not the criminals on the street. They can get guns easily through theft or the thriving black market that exists in most urban areas. The citizen is not protected, since his right and ability to defend himself are being removed.
No, it’s the government that benefits from gun control. Anyone who tells you they’ll make you safer by taking away your rights has no place in public office.
They’ll talk about the Second Amendment as a “collective” or “community” right. There are no such things in the Constitution. There are only the Powers of the government (which are specifically defined and limited) and the Rights or the individual. The courts have overwhelmingly ruled that the phrase “the people” in the First, Fourth and Ninth Amendments refers to the individual, so why should the same phrase in the Second Amendment refer to some mythical “community” right?
In the same breath, they’ll tell you that the “militia” in the Second Amendment refers to the National Guard. Wrong again. The National Guard was founded in 1903 under Congress’ power to raise limited standing armies in the main body of the Constitution. Despite the efforts of the Clinton administration to make it a dirty word, the “militia” does in fact refer to an ad-hoc military body formed by the citizens at their discretion. It worked just fine for two centuries, and we don’t need Hillary to redefine it for us.
Don’t forget: the Bill of Rights is about the rights of the individual. Why would something granting government power to create a standing army be shoehorned in there next to freedoms of assembly, speech, religion? Nope. The National Guard is a standing army, funded, armed and staffed by the Federal Government. It doesn’t qualify as a militia, and its very existence needs to be questioned.
So, does this mean the government is supposed to operate with a metaphorical gun to its head? Yes. People try to be honest. They try to be fair and just, but power corrupts. The easiest way to stay in power is to amass more power. This comes at the cost of the rights of the citizenry they’re supposed to be serving. It is not the place of a just government to take anything away from the individual. Somewhere down the line, things have gone fundamentally wrong.
Think hard about this the next time you vote. Who’s promising to “keep us safe” if we’ll accept a few more laws?
In any case, Friday’s ruling is very encouraging. It marks the first time in this century that the courts have addressed the issue directly, and they’ve found as follows:
“The amendment does not protect the right of militiamen to keep and bear arms, but rather the right of the people. If the competent drafters of the Second Amendment had meant the right to be limited to the protection of state militias, it is hard to imagine that they would have chosen the language they did.”
Exactly right. I won’t be so foolish as to expect more such common sense from our officials, but it’s still a big nail in the coffin of a debate that should have died a long time ago.