The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of
the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal
sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental
interference by the Constitution and has historically been the
linchpin of resistance to tyranny. Yet the progressives in both
political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the
government to interfere with the exercise of that right by
law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by
some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of
Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain
unalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to
the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the
Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have
operated as a brake on all governments that recognize them by
enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the
Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural
law teaches that our freedoms are
pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the
government. As our humanity is
ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority
vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural
right is an area of individual human behavior — like thought,
speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and
use of property, consensual personal intimacy — immune from
government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t
need the government’s permission.
The essence of humanity is freedom. Government — whether voted
in peacefully or thrust upon us by force — is essentially the
negation of freedom. Throughout the history of the world, people
have achieved freedom when those in power have begrudgingly
given it up. From the assassination of Julius Caesar to King
John’s forced signing of the Magna Carta, from the English
Civil War to the triumph of the allies at the end of World War
II, from the fall of communism to the Arab Spring, governments
have permitted so-called nobles and everyday folk to exercise
more personal freedom as a result of their demands for it and
their fighting for it. This constitutes power permitting
liberty.
The American experience was the opposite. Here, each human being
is sovereign, as the colonists were after the Revolution. Here,
the delegation to the government of some sovereignty — the
personal dominion over self — by each American permitted the
government to have limited power in order to safeguard the
liberties we retained. Stated differently, Americans gave up
some limited personal freedom to the new government so it could
have the authority and resources to protect the freedoms we
retained. Individuals are sovereign in America, not the
government. This constitutes liberty permitting power.
Yet we did not give up any natural rights; rather, we retained
them. It is the choice of every individual whether to give them
up. Neither our neighbors nor the government can make those
choices for us, because we are all without the moral or legal
authority to interfere with anyone else’s natural rights. Since
the government derives all of its powers from the consent of the
governed, and since we each lack the power to interfere with the
natural rights of another, how could the government lawfully
have that power? It doesn’t. Were this not so, our rights would
not be natural; they would be subject to the government’s whims.
To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights
of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s
thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and,
with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As
recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this
when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home
is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign
Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from
us, absent our individual waiver.
There have been practical historical reasons for the near
universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of
this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century —
from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad
— have disarmed their people. Only because some of those people
resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the
dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.
The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution
is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision
to those of the British
government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows
that they had registered with the king's
government in London, while the British troops used
gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the
king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was
armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip
from the government
in order to exercise the right to self-defense. (Imagine the
howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition
to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on
the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only
violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal
sovereignties, they assure that a tyrant can more easily disarm
and overcome us.
The historical reality of the Second
Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not
that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right
to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them
effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.
If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and
ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed
free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.
Most people in government reject natural rights and personal
sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise
of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the
government. Most people in government believe that they can
write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the
natural law, not subject to the sovereignty of individuals, not
cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they
can get away with.
Did you empower the government to
impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of
a few?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a
former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior
judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. He is author of “It Is
Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for
Personal Freedom” (Thomas Nelson, 2011).
