This year, when we celebrate the 250th year of American liberty, it's a good time to take a look back at the wisdom of the Founders. These committed, brave, and brilliant men not only declared their independence from Great Britain, at the time the most powerful empire on the planet, but they fought and won that independence. A few years later, many of the same brilliant and committed men came up with our Constitution, the most profound and effective governing document in human history.
And with that came the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. One of them is, still, to this day, something unique among the nations of the world: The Second Amendment. The drafters of the Bill of Rights gave the ultimate coercive power not to the government, but to the citizens, in recognizing their fundamental natural right to protect themselves, their homes, their property, their families, and their communities. They did that by guaranteeing their right to the means to do so - guns.
Now, the Second Amendment has been under attack, almost from the outset. Many people have claimed many things about that guarantee of a fundamental natural right; so, here's what I think.
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I’m a Second Amendment absolutist. What does that mean? Exactly what it sounds like. “…shall not be infringed,” to me, seems to be pretty clear. It means I should be able to walk into any gun store, buy a Thompson submachine gun or an M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle. I should be able to plunk down the cash and walk out with my purchases. That's what that means.
Here’s that groundbreaking amendment:
Second 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.
I read “…shall not be infringed” as in “keep your filthy hands off.” And no, “well-regulated militia” doesn’t mean the National Guard. There was no National Guard when the Second Amendment was written and ratified, and the primary clause is pretty clear when it says, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” There is nowhere in the Bill of Rights where “the people” can be taken to mean “Oh, just kidding, we meant some branch of government that may be invented at some point in the future.” It means the people. Us. Every law-abiding citizen of the United States. No infringement.
The Supreme Court has said just this, that the 2nd Amendment refers to the people, to an individual right to keep and bear arms, no less than three times: District of Columbia v. Heller, McDonald v. City of Chicago, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. So tough noogies, gun-grabbers.
S, yes, that means I should be able to walk into my local gun shop and buy an M2 Browning .50 caliber machine gun. Oh, I suppose you could make the argument for exempting crew-served weapons, in that you can’t really “bear” a Ma Deuce, in the sense of carrying it around. But a select-fire M16 or M4 carbine? I should be able to buy one. I’m a law-abiding taxpayer. The Second Amendment says I should be able to do this. Maybe, in a world where the Second Amendment was recognized for what it is, someone would start making a true-to-life replica of the 1927 Thompson, the famous Chicago Typewriter. That would be fun.
Having a tank might be fun, too. People may ask, “Where the heck are you going to park a tank?” To which I would reply, “Wherever I want. It’s a tank.” I hear that surplus T-55s are surprisingly cheap.
Here’s where reality bites: I can’t have that. Not the tank, the repeal of all those gun control laws. Oh, I can have a tank now, just not one with a working main gun, and without that, what’s the point?
It’s just not in the cards. As much as I would love to see every gun-control law back to and including the 1934 National Firearms Act repealed, that’s just not going to happen. Too many people apparently don’t understand plain English, and too many of those people just love proposing and passing gun control laws.
We have, in recent years, made some great strides in the pro-Second Amendment cause. Aside from the SCOTUS decisions noted above, we have also had an explosion of states passing "shall-issue" concealed carry laws, and the Bruen decision extended that as a requirement, although some blue states and localities are resisting with all their might. We now even have 29 constitutional carry states, where if you can own a gun, you can carry it, no permit required; my own beloved Alaska is among these states. In many ways, the Second Amendment is stronger than it has been in many years.
But this is a fight that will never end. The problem is that the same people who would remove that right, who would ban our guns, are the people who know the least about firearms in general.
In this 250th year of American liberty, those of us who advocate for the Second Amendment have some cause for satisfaction. No, I'll never see a return to the pre-1934 world, back to what I see as the ideal for a Second Amendment absolutist. But then, the world has no shortage of windmills to tilt at.
