Founders and Guns

            The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This discussion is critical in view of the increasing numbers of liberals calling for more gun control. Why did the Founders consider the “right to keep and bear arms” as being so important as to enshrine it in the Constitution?

            Jimmy Kimmel suggested that the Founders did not anticipate the new technology that makes guns more lethal in our day. However, Jarrett Stepman at The Daily Signal calls the idea a “straw man.”

The Founders did not design the Constitution so that it would only be applicable in their own day. The rights they aimed to protect weren’t tied to a specific time or era, but were timeless and universal.

The Second Amendment was not made up out of thin air. The Founders saw it as a legal expression of a citizen’s natural right to self-defense and preservation, and his ability to resist governmental tyranny.

            Stepman did not stop at the above explanation, but he continued a discussion about the fundamental right to defend oneself.

Self-defense is among the “God-given rights” that the Declaration of Independence refers to. These principles are grounded in Western tradition and are at the cornerstone of our civilization – though they are increasingly dismissed as radical and “fundamentalist” by some in the modern media.

If one believes “rights” come from government, not God or nature, it is easy to see why those like Kimmel believe this ever-evolving set of rights simply needs to be legally updated from time to time.

But this is not how the Founders thought, nor is it what they conceived when they decided to protect the blessings of liberty for themselves or their posterity….

This logic of self-defense has been at the heart of recent Supreme Court rulings that have sided with the right to bear arms.

            Stepman continues his discussion with an explanation about technology and why more gun control will not make Americans safer. He closes his post by explaining that more gun control has done little to decrease gun crime.

Americans are simply unwilling to surrender their God-given rights based on dubious claims that the government can make us perfectly safe from evil-doers…. So while those on the left … make passionate pleas for this country to “do something,” like pass gun control to stop violence, few besides the already-converted are going to buy it.

            Even though liberals are slow to realize it, Americans are not stupid. We can read the news reports about the many gun deaths in Chicago even though there is strict gun control there. We can read about the relative safety of Switzerland where every citizen carries a gun. We can read of the atrocities that have taken place in nations after their governments took “control” of all the guns. No, Americans are not stupid. More and more of us want our guns and the right to use them in self-defense.