Position Paper 4: The Second Amendment, Guarantor of all other Liberties

"All too many of the other great tragedies of history -- Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few -- were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed -- where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees*. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once."

-- Judge Alex Kozinski

No one before or since has said it better than Judge Kozinski as to the purpose of the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The right to keep and bear arms is the teeth of the Bill of Rights, the provision that guarantees the American people their indispensable and inalienable right to preserve their constitutionally-mandated republican form of self-government.

Our right to keep and bear arms is, like much everything else we hold dear, under constant assault by the liberal establishment. They claim that the Second Amendment guarantees only the right for state militias to exist and bear arms, and that it's not an individual right. Even a second grader can look at the Bill of Rights and see that its purpose is to guarantee individual, and not collective, rights, and the Second Amendment is no different. Liberal constitutional scholars have even come around to the notion that an individual right is secured, but that doesn't stop the fringe radicals who seize on any chance they get to strip us of yet another constitutional right.

There are many arguments made in favor of strict gun-control laws and there are many arguments made in favor of an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment. At the end of the day, while we can talk all we want about hunting or ask why a regular Joe would need to own an AK-47, the Second Amendment at its very heart is a provision designed to give Americans the tools they need to exercise their right to self-government, to protect themselves, their families, their property. It is also designed to protect Americans from their government should Judge Kozinski's doomsday ever come to fruition. Whether I believe that such a doomsday would ever come is beside the point. The Germans didn't think so either until Hitler took away their guns and sent a few million Jews to the ovens and gas chambers. So, I'd rather err on the side of caution rather than just blindly trust our government.

The smoke had barely cleared and the stench of gunpowder was still in the air at Virginia Tech when liberals began their predictable assault on gun ownership rights. They screeched that if only there were stricter gun laws, the tragedy wouldn't have happened. They couldn't have been more wrong! Virginia Tech was decreed by the legislature of the commonwealth to be a gun-free zone. Gun-free, that is, for everyone who obeys the law, but not for those who would carry a firearm onto the campus and shoot up the student body.

The old saying goes: Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. We are consistently having to relearn lessons as old as humanity, and our liberal friends insist on being the ones to remind us. Their tightly-held belief system is a mish-mosh of completely discredited and dangerous theories about placing individuals into the service of their government, instead of the Founding Fathers' belief that government serves the people, and only with and by their consent. Can we please learn these lessons once and for all and stop rehashing the same old failed liberal nonsense over and over? The Supreme Court will rule soon on whether or not the Second Amendment is an individual right. Let us hope at least five members of the Court have the courage to reject the failed lessons of the past and embrace the Constitutional ideals of liberty and self-government, and enshrine in our jurisprudence the fundamental American ideal of self-defense. For without that, we should prepare ourselves to be herded into the cattle cars.