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#
anada "Firearms and How They Relate #
209 To Basic Human Rights" +### +### +#### +###
# # # # # # # # # #
by # # # ## # # # # # #
06 Keith Milligan # .# ## # # .# # .# # .#
nov (keith@discordia.org) *### * # * *### * *### * *### *
2000 .+#################################################################.net
By any measure, our society today today is wealthier, more
prosperous, and safer than at any other time in our nation's history.
Because this enormous prosperity has allowed us to increasingly insulate
ourselves from risk and danger, our society has reached a critical apex;
where most people live in a world completely devoid the crime and violence.
Crimes of violence are increasingly being restricted to smaller and smaller
areas, and being perpetrated by an ever shrinking portion of the population.
For the first time in our nation's history, the people of the United States
are faced with the question of whether or not to remove firearms from the
hands of its citizens.
In a way, we're lucky we live in a society that's safe enough that we
can question such a thing. Most of the people reading this no doubt are
quite happy to leave their protection up to the armed forces and the police,
and feel no need own, much less carry a gun. In a free society, this is
certainly a valid and acceptable choice, and not one that should be
questioned. However, not all people accept that the police or armed forces
are always going to protect them. These people feel that self-defense is a
personal issue, and choose to arm themselves. In a free society, this must
also be a choice, and not one that should be questioned.
It's a pretty bold statement to some people today to suggest that any
peaceable citizen of a free country ought to be allowed to arm himself, and
employ his arms in defense of his life, or in the defense of his liberty.
This was not, however, a bold statement up until fairly recently in our
nation's history.
In the Constitution of the United States is the recognition of our
right to own firearms is embodied in the Second Amendment to the Bill of
Rights:
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.
It's hard to believe that so few words could cause such a large
controversy in our society today. Were our founding fathers crazy? Were
they nuts? Did James Madison have one too many beers when he put this
amendment to paper? A lot of people today seem to think so, or they simply
dismiss his intent outright and read the amendment out of the constitution.
Often you'll hear from people in the gun control movement "The Second
Amendment is obsolete. It was meant only to apply to state militias."
While this argument has gotten a lot of support from a few intellectuals and
even from some federal courts, it is unfortunately an incorrect
interpretation that fails to grasp the true meaning of the amendment and the
natural right which it protects; the right to self-defense.
When one talks about natural rights, one is talking about rights that
precede government, and that exist without the structure of government.
Most of your basic rights are derived from this concept. You can speak
freely, because obviously, absent a government, you could do so. You can
think and worship any way you see fit, you can associate with whoever you
want to, and you can be entitled to the fruits of your labor by having what
you consider to be your property. Human nature being what it is, there will
always be people who will want to deny you what you consider your rights.
People who will want to steal from you, who will want to hurt you, and who
will want to tell you how to think. Man, in his natural state, is
permitted to defend himself against these kinds of misdeeds in order to
preserve rights.
The natural state from which our natural rights are derived would be
considered anarchy by modern humans. And indeed, it's difficult to develop
an advanced technological society if you're too busy having to worry about
your neighbor coming over and clubbing you over the head so he can steal the
deer you just killed for dinner. Because of this, humans have established
government for most of what we would think of as modern times.
Historically, the role of government has been to organize people into
groups to offer protection against other groups of people who also call
themselves governments. These governments historically were lead by one
person, or by a small group of people, and were largely run for their own
benefit. In return for the protection they offered, the masses often had to
give up the very natural rights they might have enjoyed in pre-history.
In the United States, our founding fathers noticed this horrible
track record of abuses and misdeeds carried out by the governments of Europe
on its own citizens. European monarchies enjoyed this kind of power
because they, and they alone, had a monopoly on the use of force to
accomplish their goals. The subjects of an autocratic monarch were
powerless to resist his will, having long ago been stripped of any means by
which to resist.
The framers of the constitution were well educated in the many types
of government they had at their disposal. They had just fought and won a
revolution against the British monarchy and wanted to experiment with
a democratically elected central government. Despite this, they were very
skeptical of too much democracy, believing that the mob would be no better
at protecting individual rights than an autocratic monarch was. The form
our federal government eventually took was that of a constitutional
republic. A government made up of elected representatives, a chief
executive, and courts, all possessing checks against the other to prevent
one branch from becoming too strong. This whole system was limited by a
written constitution which gave the federal government only specific
enumerated powers, and restricted the government from infringing upon basic
human rights. One of these such limitations was quoted above.
Why did the founders put such a limitation on our government?
Couldn't they see that the system they created works? Couldn't they see the
people would have nothing to fear from their new government? Well, in
short, no. They didn't trust it. They may have believed in it, but human
nature is human nature. It's the nature of men to want power, and to try to
consolidate it. It's the nature of men to willingly surrender their rights
in exchange for safety. History teaches us that more often than not, even
with democratically elected governments, this kind of thing happens.
The constitution is the social contract with our government. It is
the document that we have agreed to be governed by, and the document that
all our elected federal officials take an oath to uphold. Our founding
fathers chose to forbid our government from interfering with our right to
arm ourselves so that we, as citizens, may have a means at our disposal by
which to enforce the social contract of the constitution against our
government.
Today it seems almost crazy to assume that our government would ever
do anything to hurt us. Indeed, we as a people feel pretty secure in our
ability to control our government through the electoral process. But
history has shown us that the kind of peace, prosperity, and stability we
are experiencing now is generally short lived. We're only a natural
disaster, another great depression, or a world war away from once again
needing that basic natural right to defend ourselves. No government that
claims to govern by the consent of a free people should interfere with the
right of peaceable, law abiding citizens from possessing their own arms for
their own protection. It's a right that's older than governments, and one
we ought to respect just as much as all the others. The others are, after
all, only promises on a two hundred and thirteen year old piece of paper,
without the ability to force our government to keep them.
.+##########################################################################
anada209 by Keith Milligan (keith@discordia.org) (c) 2000
###################################################################anada.net