Copyright © 2012 The Conservative Activist. Silver theme by c.bavota & Juan Gordillo. Powered by WordPress.
by: Jennifer III
I’ll Take Liberty
May 19, 2010
It’s time we cleared something up among all us ‘right wing extremists’. There are no such thing as “Second Amendment rights”. Now I’m not saying we don’t have a right to keep and bear arms. Quite the opposite. What I am saying is that when we call them “Second Amendment rights” we cheapen them. They are much more than that.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Notice it doesn’t say that the right to keep and bear arms ‘is hereby granted’, or anything to that effect. It’s talking about something that already exists, something that predates the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution’s preamble says the purpose of the whole document is to ‘secure the blessings of Liberty’.
Going back a bit further to the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Here again, they are talking about pre-existing rights, rights we are born with. The rights are not created by the document, if anything the government is created by the rights. The rights existed long before the government was formed and will continue to exist long after the government in question ends. Rights are forever, they are eternal.
To call our God-given (or natural) rights “Second Amendment rights” implies that the rights are dependent on the government to exist or be of any use. Really, the right to arms is something they can never take away. Attempts to take the right are of no moral force, and human beings are under no moral obligation to follow laws that attempt to infringe on this right.
Another important thing to understand about the Second Amendment is that it only applies to the federal government.
When the Constitution first came into force, several states had official religions. Many of them did other things not in harmony with the Bill of Rights. It was only later when the Supreme Court got into incorporating portions of the Bill of Rights against the states, that anything in those first ten amendments meant anything to state governments. And for some reason they still haven’t gotten around to incorporating the Second Amendment.
Fortunately, many of the same legal protections from the Bill of Rights exist in state constitutions, often with the same language as the Second Amendment, word for word. If the federal Second Amendment was meant to guarantee that states wouldn’t attempt to infringe on that right, why would the writers of the state constitutions have even bothered?
More importantly, is that the only layer of legal protection you want between the state and your arms? Keep in mind that DC v. Heller said the amendment guaranteed an individual right, but subjected it to restrictions such as licensing, registration, and restrictions on the types of weapons owned or where you can take them. If that’s all that’s stopping your state government from violating your rights, even the ‘conservative’ judges on the court give them quite a bit of leeway with your rights.
It’s important to keep in mind that our right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental human right, not something granted by benevolent politicians that can be retracted at a whim, or even ten million whims.
It’s also important to hold your state government to the standards set by your state Constitution. Work actively to repeal any law that infringes on your fundamental rights and then work to nullify the federal laws.
But most of all, don’t lend Leviathan any credibility by referring to your right to keep and bear arms as a “Second Amendment” right.