The Natural Right to Arms

Bob Barr has a piece at Full Mag News entitled The Second Amendment Is a Natural Right of Man, Not of Government. The article is a follow up to a previous article in which he argues that the current defense of the Second Amendment on the basis of needs is not sufficient. I could not agree more, and have said so many times. The needs argument is basically a utilitarian argument.  And while utilitarian arguments, such as John Lott provides, may be useful in shoring up our position, the main thrust has always been based on rights.

Now, I have argued that the Second Amendment is based on rights granted to mankind in general, specifically the right to life. These rights were granted by our Creator. In granting us life, he also thereby granted us a right to defend that life by the most effective means available: what David Codrea refers to as "any chair in a bar fight." I have argued this way because I am a Christian, and the Declaration of Independence supports the notion these rights come from God and are thus inalienable.  Inalienable means that government can not legitimately take them away.

But, what if you do not believe in God? Can you participate in rights granted to you by a Creator in whom you do not believe? Fortunately whether you believe in Him of not, the Creator believes in you, and so you carry these rights anyway. But note that these rights have also been described as natural rights. The natural rights of man can be ascertained by simple observation. Man obviously is alive. Men also act to defend their lives. Men can speak and reason. Men make tools and implements.

The part that is not so clear is that these rights, if defined as natural rights, are inalienable. So, while a man has a right to speak, you can shut him up. But just because you shut him up, does not mean you change his mind, does it? And if he feels strongly enough, he will find a way to speak. He will speak to his neighbors, he will speak to others, and he will act on his beliefs. So I would argue that again, by observation, that natural rights exist, and they can not be separated from the individual.

It is on the basis, then, of Natural Rights that Barr goes on to discuss the rights acknowledged by the Second Amendment. Being a lawyer, Barr is grounded in our Founding Documents:

The only lasting, effective way to defend the Second Amendment is to view it as our Founding Fathers did; not as a utilitarian concept, which it necessarily becomes when considered as a “needs-based” right, but as a God-given, natural right of all mankind. Framing the Second Amendment in this original context completely changes the playing field from that on which the debate rages today, according to which it is the responsibility of citizens to prove why they need firearms in the face of government restrictions. Instead, when considered in its proper and historic context, it is the government that should be required to show verifiable cause to justify taking firearms away. This distinction makes all the difference, and clearly undergirded the crafting of our founding documents.

John Adams, one of the brightest luminaries of America’s Founding, stated that “resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature.” Samuel Adams then defined this “duty of self-preservation” as the “right to support and defend them in the best manner [the colonists] can.” Without question, the Founders believed self-preservation as one of man’s most sacred natural rights, and the Second Amendment was designed and purposed to ensure government does not encroach on it. For many decades following our independence, the Amendment did just that.

I have long felt, and I have said that the movement toward concealed carry that started with Florida in 1987 was always a good first step. The gun rights community has born the progressive notion of compromise too heavily. The progressive notion is that they take, and we give, and its a good first step. When they come back for more of our rights, the part we have given up is assumed, of course. So my notion has always been a return to what is called Constitutional Carry, that is if you can own a gun, you can bear it anywhere. After all, crimes do not happen only in certain areas.  You may have to defend your life anywhere at any time.

The fact of the matter is that the restriction of our right to arms began in the later half of the 19th Century as a way to disarm freed slaves. As such, it is a distasteful idea perpetrated on the United States by Democrats, fearful of what their former slaves would do to them. They needn't worry, for their former slaves had more Christian Charity than did the Democrats.  Indeed, I would argue that this lack of Christian Charity still exists today in the Democrats continued attempts to disarm us.

Tragically, the notion of government restricting citizens’ access to firearms (“gun control”) originating in the mid-19th Century as a means to disarm freed black citizens, exploded in the latter decades of the 20th Century as Democrats came to see exploiting gun violence as an effective tool for gaining political capital. Other cultural factors as well played a part in the surge of gun control legislation and regulations, such as pressure from police departments unwilling to share the burden of public safety with responsibly armed citizens, the “war on drugs” launched in the late 1960s, and the three-decades-long crime wave starting in that same decade. More recently, a spate of mass shootings, which understandably shock our sensibilities as humans, has made gun rights more vulnerable than ever.

These cultural factors have been made all the worse by society’s weakened understanding of gun rights as a fundamental natural right, which opened the door to so-called “common sense” restrictions that increasingly conditioned citizens to believe such encroachments were not just tolerable but were the responsibility of government to make in the first place. There was no way a needs-based defense of the Second Amendment could survive this changing cultural perception of gun rights, especially with the emotional manipulation of gun violence having been mastered by Democrats across all sectors of our society — in government, in the media, and in education.

Fighting these challenges is where the natural rights defense of the Second Amendment proves its worth. Not only is this defense more philosophically consistent with the origins of gun rights in America, but using it actually helps educate Americans on the Second Amendment’s origins. By reawakening citizens to their natural right of self-preservation, and reminding them the Second Amendment ensures, as Sam Adams described, that citizens can protect themselves “in the best manner” they believe, conservatives will find new allies to bolster their efforts to reject the Left’s gun control gambits, and in so doing begin to reclaim freedoms stolen from them by government over the past century.

I urge you, gentle readers, to go read Barr's article, and if you have not yet, check out the article that precedes it. You can find it hyperlinked in the article.

 Bob Barr was a Congressman from Georgia from 1995 to 2003.  He currently writes on gun rights and other matters.