7/29/2019 Gun Rights vs Gun Laws.doc
1/2
Gun Rights vs. Gun LawsJanuary 10th 2013
By Eric Rauch
Judge Andrew Napolitano has done a great service with his recent
article, Guns andFreedom. While the American debate on guns and
governments continues, Napolitano makesthe case, by appealing to
the notion of natural law, that our individual right to
self-defensedoes not come from government, but from God. Napolitano
rightly states that:
Colonial Americans defeated the kings soldiers because they
didnt know who among us wasarmed, because there was no requirement
of a permission slip from the government in orderto exercise the
right to self-defense. (Imagine the howls of protest if permission
were requiredas a precondition to exercising the freedom of
speech.) Today, the limitations on the powerand precision of the
guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to
self-defenseand our personal sovereignties; they assure that a
tyrant can more easily disarm andovercome us.
Although there is much more often encapsulated in the modern use
of the term, natural lawis precisely what Thomas Jefferson was
appealing to when he wrote in the Declaration ofIndependence about
self-evident truths and certain unalienable rights. Napolitano
agrees:To assure that no government would infringe the natural
rights of anyone here, the Foundersincorporated Jeffersons thesis
underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, withrespect
to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two
years ago, theSupreme Court recognized this when it held that the
right to keep and bear arms in oneshome is a pre-political
individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and
thatthe government cannot take from us, absent our individual
waiver.
In other words, the Second Amendment doesnt grant the right to
self-defense; we already hadthese rights from God Himself. The
Second Amendment is nothing more than anacknowledgment of this
natural and divine fact. Conservatives and gun owners that
aretrying to stake their claim to gun rights by appealing to the
Second Amendment are on veryshaky ground indeed, because what the
government has granted can always be taken.
The historical reality of the Second Amendments protection of
the right to keep and beararms is not that it protects the right to
shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and itprotects
the right to shoot at them effectively, thus, with the same
instruments they would useupon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto
had had the firepower and ammunition that theNazis did, some of
Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived
theHolocaust.
1
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/10/guns-and-freedom/http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/10/guns-and-freedom/
7/29/2019 Gun Rights vs Gun Laws.doc
2/2
Notice what Napolitano is saying here and how he carefully
chooses his words: the SecondAmendments protection of the right to
keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment did notmake gun-owning a
right any more than the First Amendment made free speech a right.
Bothof these amendments to the Constitution were nothing more than
written admissions of theserights. And, it must be remembered,
these Amendments were added after the Constitution waswritten
because of the Anti-Federalists mistrust of centralized government.
It is also tellingthat these Amendments are referred to as the Bill
of Rights and state their reason forexistence as being to prevent
misconstruction or abuse of its the Constitution's powers,
thatfurther declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added:
and as extending the ground ofpublic confidence in the government,
will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.This means
that the Bill of Rights was not only an acknowledgment of certain
divine rights,but a restriction upon the government regarding them.
Napolitano makes the modernmisunderstanding of this historical fact
clear:
Most people in government reject natural rights and personal
sovereignty. Most people ingovernment believe that the exercise of
everyones rights is subject to the will of those in thegovernment.
Most people in government believe that they can write any law and
regulate anybehavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject
to the sovereignty of individuals, notcognizant of historys
tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.
Unfortunately, most people in America, not just those in
government, have this sameerroneous understanding of the
relationship between rights and laws.
2
