David Z. on District of Columbia vs. Heller, Second Amendment
July 1, 2008 – 6:00 pm by JohnDavid Z. at No Third Solution had some excellent commentary on the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that (as I understand) Washington, D.C.’s gun-control laws were unconstitutional. It is the type of in-depth and thoughtful commentary that has been missing from our web page for a few weeks, which I hope to remedy soon.
I particularly enjoyed the passage he quoted from Lysander Spooner, which explains that any arguments concerning guns and self-defense against criminals or hunting are completely irrelevant in an discussion about Constitutional law—in a discussion about what the Second Amendment really means.
[T]he object of all bills of rights is to assert the rights of individuals and the people, as against the government, and not as against private persons. It would be a matter of ridiculous supererogation … [I]t would be unnecessary and silly indeed to assert, in a constitution of government, the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers…The legal effect of these constitutional recognitions of the right of individuals to defend their property, liberties, and lives, against the government, is to legalize resistance to all injustice and oppression, of every name and nature whatsoever, on the part of the government.
“It would be unnecessary and silly [for a constitution] to assert…the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers.” It would be unnecessary and silly for a constitution to do that because it isn’t the remotest concern of a constitution to talk about crimes and criminals and the particulars of criminal law. The purpose of a constitution is to elucidate the relationship (contract, if you want to think of it that way, which I don’t and neither did Spooner) between a government and its subjects. Is murder outlawed by the U.S. Constitution? Is embezzlement? Is rape? Is armed robbery? No. Those things don’t belong in a constitution any more than poetry or sheet music.
Furthermore, consider the content and the purpose of the other 9 amendments of the Bill of Rights. They all specifically and unequivocally restrict the permissible actions of the central government toward its citizens. Their purpose is to restrict the government even further and more specifically than the rest of the Constitution does. But, gun-hating liberal Republocrats would have us believe that one out of the ten, which James Madison and the other Framers ranked as the second most important, gives a power to governments (state militias) and limits the power of individuals (by claiming it is a collective and state-approved “right”).
Therefore, since it is not possible that the U.S. Constitution has this one clause concerning our right to defend ourselves against criminals, and it is wilfully ignorant or maliciously dishonest to assert that only the Second Amendment out of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights gives a power to government and limits the power of individuals, we can conclude what everyone before about 1960 already knew, viz., that the entire purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individual citizens to defend themselves against their governments. Not to hunt with, not to store on shelves, not to defend against armed robbers. To shoot, injure, and kill despotic politicians and their armed agents. The only justification anyone ever needs for unrestricted gun ownership among the American populace is that the government will always have guns.
