I am a strong supporter of the 2nd
Amendment. The 2nd Amendment is still in the Constitution of the United States, contrary to what some elites would like us to believe.
And the 2nd Amendment was not put
into the Constitution by the Founders merely to allow us to
intimidate burglars, or hunt rabbits to our hearts' content. This is
not to say that hunting rabbits and turkeys for the family dinner, or
defending against dangers, were not anticipated uses for firearms,
particularly on the frontier -this is true.
But above all, the Founders added the
2nd Amendment so that when, after a long train of abuses, a
government evinces a methodical design upon our natural rights, we
will have the means to protect and recover our rights. That is why
the right to keep and bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights.
In fact, if we make the judgment that
our rights are being systematically violated, we have not merely the
right, but the duty, to resist and overthrow the power responsible.
That duty requires that we maintain the material capacity to resist
tyranny, if necessary, something that it is very hard to do if the
government has all the weapons. A strong case can be made, therefore,
that it is a fundamental DUTY of the free citizen to keep and bear
arms.
In our time there have been many
folks who don't like to be reminded of all this. And they try, in
their painful way, to pretend that the word "people" in the
2nd Amendment means something there that it doesn't mean in any one
of the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights. They say that,
for some odd reason, the Founders had a lapse, and instead of putting
in "states" they put in "people." And so it
refers to a right inherent in the state government.
This position is incoherent, and has
been disproved by every piece of legitimate historical research. For
example, at one point in Jefferson's letters he is talking about the
militia, and he writes "militia, every able-bodied man in the
state . . . - (every man capable of carrying arms)." That was
the militia. It had nothing to do with the state government. The
words "well-regulated" had something to do with organizing
that militia and drilling it in the style of the 19th century, but
'militia' itself referred to the able-bodied citizens of the state or
commonwealth - not to the state government.
It would make no sense whatsoever to
restrict the right to keep and bear arms to state governments, since
the principle on which our policy is based, as stated in the
Declaration, recognizes that any government, at any level, can become
oppressive of our rights. And we must be prepared to defend ourselves
against its abuses.
But the movement against 2nd
Amendment rights is not just a threat to our capacity to defend
ourselves physically against tyranny. It is also part of the much
more general assault on the very notion that human beings are capable
of moral responsibility. Consider, for example, the phony assertion
that certain weapons should be banned because 'they have no purpose
except to kill people.' This debate is not about certain kinds of
weapons that kill people; all kinds of weapons can kill. It is people
that kill people, and they can use countless kinds of weapons to do
so, if killing is in their hearts.
So let's get down to the real issue:
are we grownups, or are we children? If we are grownups, then we have
the capacity to control our will even in the face of passion, and to
be responsible for the exercise of our natural rights. If we are only
children, then all the dangerous toys must be controlled by the
government. But this 'solution' implies that we can trust government
with a monopoly on guns, even though we cannot trust ourselves with
them. This is not a 'solution' I trust.
Advocates of banning guns substitute
things for people, but this approach won't wash. It is the human
moral will that saves us from violence, not the presence or absence
of weapons. We should reject utterly the absurd theory that weapons
are the cause of violence.
Anyone who is serious about
controlling violence must recognize that it can only be done by
rooting violence out of the human heart. That's why I don't
understand those who say 'save us from guns,' even while they cling
to the coldly violent doctrine that human life has no worth except
what they 'choose' to assign to it.
If we want to end violence in our
land, we must warm the hearts of this people with a renewed
dedication to the God-given equality of all human beings. We must
recapture the noble view of man as capable of moral responsibility,
and self-restraint. Purify the heart and we will not have to worry
about the misuse of weapons.
It is the business of the citizen to
preserve justice in his heart, and the material capacity, including
arms, to resist tyranny. These things constitute our character as a
free people, which it is our duty to maintain. If we want to hold on
to our heritage of liberty, we must first and foremost strengthen our
confidence in our own moral capacity, and encourage such confidence
in our fellow citizens. Only a people confident that it can behave
like grown-ups will be justified in asserting its right to keep and
bear arms, because it will be a people responsible to use them only
in defense of ourselves and our liberty.
But if we want that to be true, then
we shall have to return, as a people, to that same humble subjection
to the authority of true moral principle that characterized our
Founders, and that characterized every generation of Americans, until
now. We must regain control of ourselves.
Most deeply, then, the assertion of
2nd Amendment rights is the assertion that we intend to control
ourselves, and submit to the moral order that God has decreed must
govern our lives. And just as we have no right to shirk our duty to
submit to that moral order, so we have no right to shirk our duty to
preserve unto ourselves the material means to discipline our
government, if necessary, so that it remains a fit instrument for the
self-government of a free people.
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