Right to keep and bear Arms

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.

For decades, the Second Amendment was consigned to constitutional exile, all but erased from constitutional law textbooks and effectively banished from the nation's courts. But no more. Recent developments in the law and in political culture have begun the process of returning the amendment to its proper place in our constitutional pantheon. Congress now has a historic opportunity, not simply to stave off new gun-control proposals, but to begin restoring Americans' right to keep and bear arms.

His 1994 non-fiction book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns dealt with the right to keep and bear arms. Charlton Heston called it "the most cogent explanation of the gun issue I have yet read." Self-Control, Not Gun Control (1995) is a collection of essays on a wide variety of libertarian ... topics. Walter Williams said "His ideas are precisely those that helped make our country the destination of those seeking liberty." In 1993 he was awarded James Madison Award by the Second Amendment Foundation for his Los Angeles Times article, "If Gun Laws Work, Why Are We Afraid?"

From the right of personal self-defense against a criminal, a collective right of self-defense against criminal governments necessarily followed. To be subject to a tyrant was little different from being under the power of a pirate ... Thus, "those arms were just and pious that were necessary, and necessary when there was no hope of safety by any other way ..." ... The necessary corollary of the right of self-defense against tyrants was the possession of arms: "he is a fool who knows not that swords were given to men, that none might be slaves, but such as know not how to use them."

The Second amendment is not about hunting deer or keeping a pistol in your nightstand. It is not about protecting oneself against common criminals. It is about preventing tyranny ... Tortured interpretations of the Second amendment cannot change the fact that both the letter of the amendment itself and the legislative history conclusively show that the Founders intended ordinary citizens to be armed. The notion that the Second amendment confers rights only upon organized state-run militias is preposterous; the amendment is meaningless unless it protects the gun rights of individuals.

Once guns are banned, crime will explode. Households and vulnerable members of society will lose the ability to defend, which will invite more intrusions and attacks ... Gun prohibition will create a new industry for criminals–gun running and black market sales. Police will conduct stings by posing as black market gun dealers ... Gun rights are constitutionally protected, because the Founding Fathers did not trust even the limited and constrained government that they created. To infringe this constitutional right makes it easier to infringe others.

It has long been maintained by Second Amendment supporters in the United States that guns are a valuable tool in the hands of the citizenry. Pro-gun activists have been arguing for years that passing laws that make it harder for law-abiding citizens to have access to guns for their own defense only encourages crime ... [Gary] Kleck has argued ... that there are actually more crimes thwarted in the United States by armed citizens than there are crimes committed ... Handguns are the best and cheapest means for the average person to defend himself against criminals who don't care about the law.

The Second Amendment is the American people's ultimate insurance policy against tyranny because government officials know that guns in the hands of the people provide the only practical means by which to resist tyranny. They know that a disarmed society almost always becomes an obedient society in the face of omnipotent, tyrannical government ... There's a corollary ...: Even though everyone in society might not choose to arm himself, the right to keep and bear arms makes everyone in society, including those who choose not to possess weapons, safer from the likes of murderers and rapists.

Let's assume ... that Congress enacts a law that states, "Any American of Muslim descent who is caught in possession of a gun shall be guilty of a felony, punishable by a term of 20 years in the penitentiary." Would federal law-enforcement officers enforce such a law? Would U.S. attorneys prosecute violators? Would federal judges impose punishments on people convicted of such laws? Might the Supreme Court uphold the constitutionality of such laws under the president's "wartime" powers as part of the "war on terrorism"? The answer is "Yes" to all those questions.

Judge Cummings's decision explained the historical origins of the Second Amendment. "The individual right to bear arms, a right recognized in both England and the colonies, was a crucial factor in the colonists' victory over the British Army in the Revolutionary War," he noted. If Americans in the founding generation had been as fearful of firearms as many contemporary liberals are, this country might still be kowtowing to a foreign king ... Cummings quoted George Mason's warning that England's efforts "to disarm the people ... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."

That firearms had been banned on the Virginia Tech campus before these atrocities ... apparently did not inform the judgments of this newspaper's editors. Nor have I seen ... any rethinking on the part of a Virginia Tech spokesman who, in 2006, following the Virginia legislature's enactment of a ban on guns on state university campuses, declared: "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus." This man might send such words of comfort to the families of these 32 victims!

Advocates of freedom barely dodged a bullet when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the right to keep and bear arms, the subject of the Second Amendment, is an individual not a collective right. Opponents of gun ownership have long maintained that the Amendment's reference to the militia indicates that the right does not apply to private individuals ... Even the dissenters did not deny that the right to own a gun is an individual right ... Justice Antonin Scalia said the Amendment's preface ... "announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia."

"Law-abiding citizens of the United States have the individual right to own a firearm," Dick Cheney told the National Rifle Association's annual convention on April 17 ... Democrats ... absurdly argue that the placement of a comma reflects the founders' original intent to limit gun ownership to members of 18th century militias ... Democrats, however, still need to make the libertarian case ... Accepting and promising to defend the Constitution as a whole, including the Second Amendment, could jumpstart the return of the American left from the fringe to the mainstream.

[L]ibertarians believe in the principle of self-ownership. You own your own body and mind ... Self-ownership implies the right to self-defense. Libertarians yield to no one in their support for our right as individuals to keep and bear arms. We wish only that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution said, "The right to self-defense being inalienable ..." instead of that stuff about a "well-regulated militia." Anyone who thinks that government—any government—has the right to disarm its citizens is NOT a libertarian!

These two events mark small but significant victories for America's gunowners and all supporters of individual freedom ... [W]hat does seem to be happening, at the very least, is that more and more Americans are rejecting the absurd, leftist, 20th-century invention of a "collective right" to own a gun (e.g., through a state agency such as the National Guard) in favor of an individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment more consistent with the intentions of the Framers. More important, a few state governments seem to be listening.

[I]n a free society we could better defend ourselves from violence. Citizens would have the indisputable right to keep and bear arms. And a gun is a wonderful deterrent to violence. In states that have "shall issue" laws (where people without criminal records or evidence of mental illness are permitted to carry guns), crime rates are much lower than in states where there are no such laws. A major study by University of Chicago law professor John Lott shows that these states reduced robbery by 3%, aggravated assaults by 7%, and murders by 8.5%.

The clause before you gives a power of direct taxation, unbounded and unlimited ... What resistance could be made? The attempt would be madness. You will find all the strength ... in the hands of your enemies ... Your militia is given up to Congress, also ...; they will therefore act as they think proper; all power will be in their own possession. You can not force them to receive their punishment: of what service would militia be to you, when, most probably, you will not have a single musket in the State? For, as arms are to be provided by Congress, they may or may not furnish them.

One congresswoman was railing that if only we still banned 15-round magazines, not as many people would have been killed at Virginia Tech ... [I]t's illogical. The operative fact in that shooting, as is usually the case, was that the only person with a gun was the killer ... It was ... a gun-control law that guaranteed all of the killer's victims would be unarmed. The law says that you can't have a firearm on a school campus. Well, as you can see, the killer paid no attention to the law ... What could have stopped the killings ... was another gun in the hands of a professor or a student.

There are those in society who want to ban handguns, rifles and other firearms, or at least have them tightly controlled and registered. Is there a crime problem? Don't worry. We can solve the murder and crime problem in this country, simply by passing a law taking away the weapons of murder. No guns, no killings. Simple. Thus they look to change outward appearances, but they show little interest in finding ways to discourage a person from becoming criminal or violent in the first place.

Of course, a three-inch toy rifle is not a firearm ... But try telling that to officials at Gatwick Airport ... Category errors are especially common at airports and schools ... [C]onsider New Jersey second-grader Kyle Walker, who was suspended from school for drawing a gun. By that, I don't mean he unholstered a Glock. No, he sketched on paper a stick figure holding a pistol. This ostensibly violated—ready for it?—his school's no-weapons policy. (There's no word of whether little Kyle's parents could pay their school tax by mailing in a picture of a stick figure handing over a sack of money.)

The handgun ... affords smaller, weaker people the chance to defend themselves against bigger, stronger people who threaten them. Handguns offer the otherwise defenseless a convenient, practical, inexpensive method of safeguarding themselves and their families. Banishing handguns—even if the big and the strong were also denied them—would leave the small and the weak defenseless. The ... aggressors have other tools of violence ...; the small and the weak do not have other effective means of self-defense ... [O]utlawing handguns is a denial of the right of self-defense and ... the right to life.

[Heinlein] wrote [to editor Dagliesh] in April 1949 that "I have one of my characters say that the right to bear arms is the basis of all human freedom. I strongly believe that, but you required me to blue-pencil it. The second point concerns licensing guns. I had such licensing in the story, but I had one character strongly object to it ... I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals, such as the Sullivan Act of the State of New York. I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating ..."

First, for some background: twenty years ago, the Second Amendment Foundation (the second-largest pro-Second Amendment group in the U.S.) began sponsoring an annual Gun Rights Policy Conference, in conjunction with other pro-gun groups, including the NRA. For a full working day on Saturday, and half a day on Sunday, the conference features 10-15 minute speeches by writers, radio hosts, group leaders, and other pro-2d Amendment activists ... The GRPC activists are very wary of politicians whose pro-gun positions are a matter of convenience or calculation, rather than sincere dedication to the Constitution.

Gun-rights advocate Reginald Jones used humor and a dynamic, informal speaking style to deliver his inflammatory message—"Gun control is racist"—at Ohio University ... Jones maintained that gun-control laws were used to keep blacks from defending themselves against the Ku Klux Klan in the old South and against the "criminal class" in the urban ghettos of today ... Jones noted that no one supports the banning of knives, which also can kill ... Jones argued that one cannot interpret the Second Amendment without seeing it as endorsing the unrestricted use of all firearms.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change ... The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent.

[Kohn] When the Department of Justice issues a public statement that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun, when 35 states pass nondiscretionary carry permit laws, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof declares that "gun control is dead," you know the gun debate is over. But somebody forgot to tell the San Francisco Board of Supervisors ... [D]iscretionary carry permit laws ... give police the authority to decide ... Such laws penalize the poor and disenfranchised, battered women, even gay activists—people whose applications police are likely to reject.

Eight years ago, I got into an argument with a nonlawyer acquaintance about the Second Amendment. The Amendment, [he] fervently announced, clearly protects an individual right. Not so, I argued ..., thinking him to be something of a blowhard and even a bit of a kook. Three years ago, I discovered ... that this supposed kook was entirely right. In preparing to teach a law school seminar on firearms regulation ..., I found that the historical evidence ... overwhelmingly points to one and only one conclusion: The Second Amendment does indeed secure an individual right to keep and bear arms.

18. The government can have my handgun ...
a) Any time the government chooses. I don't like guns ... [T]he founders were probably referring to militias having guns, not individuals.
b) I don't have a handgun to give ...
c) When a government official peels it from my cold, dead fingers. Gun ownership by individuals is specifically allowed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and it was one factor in winning the American Revolution. It would be sensible to learn firearms safety before buying one, although government mandates aren't the most useful way to encourage safety.

Notice that the quiz which usually accompanies the chart never says anything about gun rights, a very important issue. No mention at all. And mentioning it would complicate things, because although it is a "personal freedom" to keep and bear arms, and although liberals are supposed to be the ones who like "personal freedoms," I think it is fair to say that liberals are, on average, less libertarian on the gun issue than are conservatives. I asked David Nolan about this too, and he said it was the one issue that didn't fit the model. But I beg to differ.

Gun control laws ... have unintended, often unfortunate, consequences ... [The Founders] understood that point defense is better than area defense ... [G]un control has made point defense of every possible target difficult if not impossible. If citizens were free to procure whatever firearms they desired without interference from government, as they should be, then the owners and occupiers of homes and businesses could provide their own high level of security using whatever weapons they considered appropriate, such as submachine guns ... Point defense by armed citizens works very well.

What about the war against "illegal" guns? ... [G]un historian Clayton E. Cramer writes,

The historical record provides compelling evidence that racism underlies gun control laws—and not in any subtle way. Throughout much of American history, gun control was openly stated as a method for keeping blacks and Hispanics "in their place," ... It is not surprising that the first North American English colonies, then the states of the new republic, remained in dread fear of armed blacks, for slave revolts against slave owners often degenerated into less selective forms of racial warfare ...

Why does increased violence go hand-in-hand with gun-control laws? The reason is that a disarmed people make easy targets. If an armed criminal attacks you on the street or in your home, you cannot afford to wait ... even 10 minutes for police to arrive—assuming you even get the chance to call police ... Ten minutes is more than enough time for a thug to rob you, rape you, shoot you, or cripple you for life. If the government takes away your guns, you are at the criminal's mercy. Self-defense does work. According to Morgan Reynolds of Texas A&M University, armed citizens deter one million crimes each year.

Gun-control laws will make our streets safer for violent criminals. With an estimated 200-700 million guns now in the U.S., an unpoliceable 12,000 miles of borders and coastline, and the world's largest stock of precision machine tools, criminals will always be able to buy, steal, or make guns and ammunition ... [B]anning guns only disarms the law-abiding, not the predators. When you disarm peaceful citizens, crime and violence explode. Gun prohibition will foster a violent black market ... Millions consider gun ownership their inalienable right, and they will fight to preserve it.

Are we to believe that a gun is the only means of threatening a person with death or serious injury? People were killed by a variety of means before guns existed, including fists. So there is no prima facie case that a gun was used improperly merely because the person shot had no firearm ... even a guilty verdict would have been no grounds for gun control. No matter what gun laws are on the books, bad guys will always get firearms ... It is only the innocent who would be without guns, and that means more murders, more rapes, more assaults. The answer to gun violence is not to deprive the innocent of guns.

As much a history of the Holocaust as a story about Oskar Schindler ... Of course, libertarians rarely speak of the Holocaust, without mentioning the importance of private gun ownership. The "right to keep and bear arms" was included in the U.S. Constitution as a preventative to just such kind of atrocity. Schindler too understood the importance of guns and bought guns on the black market so his Jews could, in the worst case, protect themselves. But you don't see anything about that here. Hollywood doesn't like private gun ownership.

Reason: ... Does it bother you that people who support the right to keep and bear arms are apt to accept your conclusions at face value, while those who are inclined to support gun control will tend to reject your findings, even though few people ... are equipped to evaluate the evidence?
Lott: ... I don't think that most of the comments ... are really that difficult to understand. One of the claims ... is that I'm assuming that when these laws are passed there will be a one-time drop in violent crime rates, and it should be the same across all places that adopt these laws. That's absurd.

Tom: Please let me finish. Let me say just one thing. What you're really talking about ... at least what I'm talking about ... is are we a responsible enough society, in terms of television, in terms of guns, in terms of everything else, to be this free? That should frame the debate. My answer unfortunately, in this culture, is 'probably not'. But I'm going to go down with the Civil Liberties ship, and all the Bill of Rights, and apply them equally. That's the way I feel. You can ask me specific questions about anything, but it's simply stupid political rhetoric.