http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds154.html
Ptooey! on the 2nd Amendment
by Brad Edmonds
The Constitution of the United States of America was in some ways a good idea: Put in writing some specified powers and limitations of a central government, a government created only to preserve the liberty to which we have rights by virtue of being human, and do this by making the states play fair with each other economically, speak with one voice internationally, and pool their resources should the need arise for defense. In other senses, the Constitution was a bad idea: The same founders who reserved the right to overthrow a government that didn’t suit them turned around and instituted one in a Constitution that in principle limited the liberty and bound the loyalty of subsequent generations who didn’t have the option to sign it or vote on it before being bound by it. The 19th-century attorney Lysander Spooner – a yankee, of all things – has made this point already.
The basic idea the founders shared, or so they said, was that there were human rights that could be discovered through reason and the Bible. These rights were ordained by nature and/or God, and it would be a moral wrong for anyone to infringe on the natural rights of anyone else. That the founders considered the existence of government secondary to those rights – that is, whenever a government violates them, or merely does a bad job of protecting them, the government is therefore invalid and needs to be abolished – was proven by their engineering of, and for many of them dying during, the Revolution.
Hence, the wording of the 2nd amendment: "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." That amendment, in its specific wording, was the embodiment of the notion that the right to self-defense was one of the natural rights no government has the moral standing to infringe. Several of the Federalist Papers – propaganda pieces written to convince the man in the street that the Constitution was a good thing – made it explicit that government should not try to come between a man and his guns.
Walter Williams proposed a year or two ago that we’d have been better off without the 2nd amendment – indeed, without all of the first ten. His reasoning was that the Bill of Rights, by enumerating certain inalienable rights over which Congress had no power, left the door open for the government to erode all other rights not mentioned in the first 10 amendments. As he put it, if you are granted by your government the right to play hopscotch, that means you have no particular right to play jacks. Then again, whether we’d have been better off without the Bill of Rights is debatable, since Congress has sorely abridged even the right to keep arms. We’re allowed to own only those weapons Congressmen and state legislators want us to have.
At this time, it is obvious that all levels of government in the US view individual rights as things that exist only because government says so. Our government today has no interest in what "natural rights" are, or what people morally ought to be allowed to do for themselves. Those cities that have strict gun-control laws believe their low level of government has the right to abridge our most fundamental right of self-defense.
As if principles weren’t enough, there is ample precedence for insistence on what is morally right regardless what the government says. Acts 5:29 shows Peter, in the act of defying the authorities, saying, "We must obey God rather than any human authority." Many US federal laws have been changed because us ordinary folks insisted, or because we simply wouldn’t obey. Prohibition, the national speed limit, and Jim Crow laws come to mind. Our Revolution itself was an example of putting principle ahead of government.
So, lest any of us put the cart before the horse, it’s not the 2nd amendment that gives us a right to own weapons and be proficient in their use – our status as human beings gives us the right to own guns. Rather, the amendment should merely encourage gun ownership and prohibit interference with it. Put another way, the only good the 2nd amendment could ever do is win lawsuits on behalf of you and me whenever the government tries to pass a gun law. And since the government routinely passes gun laws, the 2nd amendment isn’t good for much. Rely instead on your natural right to self-defense, and when California (or whoever) tells you to start registering weapons so they can come back in two years and confiscate them, the first thing to do is to go live somewhere else.
Ptooey! on the 2nd Amendment
by Brad Edmonds
The Constitution of the United States of America was in some ways a good idea: Put in writing some specified powers and limitations of a central government, a government created only to preserve the liberty to which we have rights by virtue of being human, and do this by making the states play fair with each other economically, speak with one voice internationally, and pool their resources should the need arise for defense. In other senses, the Constitution was a bad idea: The same founders who reserved the right to overthrow a government that didn’t suit them turned around and instituted one in a Constitution that in principle limited the liberty and bound the loyalty of subsequent generations who didn’t have the option to sign it or vote on it before being bound by it. The 19th-century attorney Lysander Spooner – a yankee, of all things – has made this point already.
The basic idea the founders shared, or so they said, was that there were human rights that could be discovered through reason and the Bible. These rights were ordained by nature and/or God, and it would be a moral wrong for anyone to infringe on the natural rights of anyone else. That the founders considered the existence of government secondary to those rights – that is, whenever a government violates them, or merely does a bad job of protecting them, the government is therefore invalid and needs to be abolished – was proven by their engineering of, and for many of them dying during, the Revolution.
Hence, the wording of the 2nd amendment: "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." That amendment, in its specific wording, was the embodiment of the notion that the right to self-defense was one of the natural rights no government has the moral standing to infringe. Several of the Federalist Papers – propaganda pieces written to convince the man in the street that the Constitution was a good thing – made it explicit that government should not try to come between a man and his guns.
Walter Williams proposed a year or two ago that we’d have been better off without the 2nd amendment – indeed, without all of the first ten. His reasoning was that the Bill of Rights, by enumerating certain inalienable rights over which Congress had no power, left the door open for the government to erode all other rights not mentioned in the first 10 amendments. As he put it, if you are granted by your government the right to play hopscotch, that means you have no particular right to play jacks. Then again, whether we’d have been better off without the Bill of Rights is debatable, since Congress has sorely abridged even the right to keep arms. We’re allowed to own only those weapons Congressmen and state legislators want us to have.
At this time, it is obvious that all levels of government in the US view individual rights as things that exist only because government says so. Our government today has no interest in what "natural rights" are, or what people morally ought to be allowed to do for themselves. Those cities that have strict gun-control laws believe their low level of government has the right to abridge our most fundamental right of self-defense.
As if principles weren’t enough, there is ample precedence for insistence on what is morally right regardless what the government says. Acts 5:29 shows Peter, in the act of defying the authorities, saying, "We must obey God rather than any human authority." Many US federal laws have been changed because us ordinary folks insisted, or because we simply wouldn’t obey. Prohibition, the national speed limit, and Jim Crow laws come to mind. Our Revolution itself was an example of putting principle ahead of government.
So, lest any of us put the cart before the horse, it’s not the 2nd amendment that gives us a right to own weapons and be proficient in their use – our status as human beings gives us the right to own guns. Rather, the amendment should merely encourage gun ownership and prohibit interference with it. Put another way, the only good the 2nd amendment could ever do is win lawsuits on behalf of you and me whenever the government tries to pass a gun law. And since the government routinely passes gun laws, the 2nd amendment isn’t good for much. Rely instead on your natural right to self-defense, and when California (or whoever) tells you to start registering weapons so they can come back in two years and confiscate them, the first thing to do is to go live somewhere else.
