The Rest of the Second Amendment

Mark Smith at Ammoland provides some useful information about Second Amendment jurisprudence that, as a non-lawyer you may not realize. The report is entitled 2nd Amendment Guarantees Rights to Acquired and Train With Guns, Not Just RKBA. Smith talks about a principle of Constitutional jurisprudence called "ancillary" rights that applies not just to the First Amendment but to all of them, including the Second.

With the U.S. District Court decision in Colorado finding that Americans have no constitutional right to acquire firearms, and a major oral argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit about the right to train with firearms, we are presented with a perfect opportunity to discuss an often-overlooked fact about the right to bear arms.

Specifically, the Second Amendment protects a host of rights beyond the rights to possess and carry firearms.

These additional rights are unequivocally implied by the Second Amendment’s language. Ancillary rights, as we call them in constitutional law, don’t often get the same level of attention as those rights explicitly spelled out in the Bill of Rights, but they are equally important—and equally protected. These ancillary or implied rights are necessary to the practice and exercise of the rights and liberties laid out in our Constitution.

Essentially, you can't exercise the right to keep and bear arms if you can't acquire a firearm, if you can't buy one or build one. You can't exercise the right if you can't buy ammunition, or if the government so burdens the purchase as to make effectively impossible to obtain. Thus ancillary rights are a necessary part of the enumerated rights

To illustrate, one of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment’s text is the right of free speech. But that right also protects a host of other ancillary rights such as the right to paper and ink, the right to print and sell newspapers, and the right of access to the public square (or social media). Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court has found that the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment implies the right to pay for a lawyer, or to have counsel appointed in serious cases for indigents.

Gentle readers should go read the whole article for a better understanding of just why the numerous restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms are mostly Unconstitutional. The principle of ancillary rights does not just affect the Second Amendment, but aftects all the enumerated rights.