Sunday, April 14, 2013

Gun Control vs the US Constitution

If one forgets about exquisitly parsing every word and punctuation mark in the Constitution and Bill of Rights and instead looks at the surviving records of what the Framers and the ratifiers in the state legislatures said it meant, it is clear that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was to preserve the people's ability to engage in armed insurrection.

The Federalists claimed there was no need for a Bill of Rights, that in fact enumerating some rights endangered those not enumerated. They claimed that there was nothing to be gained by enumerating the rights protected by the Bill of Rights precisely because there was nothing in the Constitution which authorized the government to infringe those rights.

Imagine that: The very people who wrote the Constitution argued in writing, still preserved, that there was nothing in the Constitution they had written which empowered the government to prohibit ownership or carrying of military grade weapons.

So how can we be now arguing if weapons control of some kind is good policy or bad if it isn't even Constitutionally authorized?

The Founders had created a new country by armed insurrection. They explicitly wrote that they wanted and expected their descendents to engage in armed insurrection when necessary to preserve liberty, and said that they had delegated no power to the government to infringe the ownership of arms. Yet today we talk about good policy versus bad.

Allowing the conversation to continue on the topic of policy concedes the foundational issue: The Founders themselves said that gun control --and knife control-- are not authorized by the Constitution. Even repealing the 2nd Amendment would not empower the government to enact weapons control: it would take an amendment which explicitly empowered such acts. Even then, it is clear that the Founders believed that the inherent right to arms could not be taken away by government, only denied. The new tyrants don't want the Founders' writings to be discussed, and we are letting them get away with it.

The real issue about gun control is not whethor it is good or bad policy. The issue is that it is subversion of the Constitution: Gun control is treason.


(For numerous examples of the Founders' writings, see 'The Founders' Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms' by Stephen P. Halbrook.)

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