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Second Amendment

-- written December 30, 2011

"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."

-The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

In the Southeast, most men are split into two categories: fishermen who hunt in the off-season and hunters who fish in the off-season. I won't lie. I fall into the first category. Fishing is my first love; for me, hunting is secondary, a way to enjoy the outdoors when it's too cold to enjoy fishing. Thus, my support for the Second Amendment does not merely result from my love of hunting. (Though, one of my great triumphs was a hard-fought "design" victory I won over my lovely and tasteful wife when she allowed me to put the rack of a 10-point white-tailed buck that I shot in Missouri on the most prominent wall in the most prominent room of our house.)

Still, my love for the Second Amendment is deeper than my love of hunting and has the same source as my love for the other nine Amendments in the Bill of Rights and for the Constitution as a whole. I support the Second Amendment because it is a part of the Constitution itself—the document that founded this great nation. Protecting our Constitution is essential to protecting our own freedom. And, as George Washington himself famously said, "a free people ought… to be armed."

Like the Constitution itself, all of the amendments to the Constitution are sacrosanct and worth defending. In recent times, many have suggested that in order to protect the safety of our citizenry against "new" threats (e.g., gang violence), we must give up some of these rights as if the founding fathers hadn't considered whether safety might incline us to disregard them. These people forget that the founding fathers themselves had nearly complete safety before they rebelled, and deliberately made an enemy of the most powerful military that the world had ever known in order to secure their own individual freedoms— freedoms which they forever enshrined in our sacred Bill of Rights.

One of our Founders (some think it was Franklin) famously said the following: "He who would sacrifice an essential liberty to gain security deserves neither and will lose both." So to those who say that the dangers we face today are "novel" or "unprecedented," I would suggest to them that they reconsider their revisionism. Do we face any threat that even plausibly compares to the threat face by our Founding Fathers, who the British outnumbered more than four to one? Of course not. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment enshrines one of our essential liberties in the Constitutional text. And for that reason, if we want to remain free, we must uphold it even if it could be proven that doing so makes us less safe.

With this in mind, of course, we also must never forget Thomas Jefferson's sound counsel: The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until the government tries to take it away.

Finally, a completely pointless argument:

People who support gun control point out that, among wealthy countries not at war, we're often the world's leader in murders and gun deaths per capita and that we're even ahead of some countries in active states of civil war. People who support our right to bear arms point to statistics suggesting that the localities in the U.S. with the harshest gun laws often have the most gun-related deaths and that localities with liberal gun rights have fewer gun-related deaths. The rights advocates claim that increased gun ownership deters crime, and the gun control crowd claims that the deterrence data are flawed. And around and around they go.

But if we believe in Franklin's maxim, we ought to be deeply troubled by the terms of this debate. Both sides have made a mistake. They're arguing whether gun control laws make us safer. Franklin's maxim says that some liberties, i.e., the essential ones, are more important than safety. I would add that the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights are among those "essential liberties" that Franklin is talking about. Thus, all the breath spent on these arguments is wasted.

The safety issue commonly debated is irrelevant to the central question: is the liberty being discussed essential? Once that question about a liberty is answered in the affirmative, incremental changes in safety are completely irrelevant to the issue of whether that liberty must be defended. Our second amendment right is an essential liberty. Thus, it is our duty as law-makers to defend it.