February 2008
“Privileges” Watch
David Codrea
They’re right, you know, if not in their percentages, then certainly in their assertion. If you believe the Constitution gives you the right to be armed, you’re simply and demonstrably wrong. If you think the Constitution should grant you that right, sorry, you’re wrong again.
What is this? Has an anti-gun sleeper cell awakened within the pages of GUNS Magazine? Has the “Rights Watch” column been hijacked by a Brady propagandist?
Some of you will know where I’m going with this, but you’d be surprised how many of our fellow gun owners and political leaders haven’t thought this through. The Bill of Rights grants no rights. To believe that it does reverses the proper role between government and the people.
The Founding Fathers believed in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. They believed “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
That is, the powers of government are defined by and derived from the people. There is no section in the Constitution where the power to grant rights is delegated to any branch of government. Rather than bestowing rights, the first 10 Amendments in effect, establish guarantees and boundaries where government abridgements are prohibited. In fact, one of the concerns the Federalists had against including a Bill of Rights was that future interpretations could view the list as exhaustive, the very thing we see happening when certain rights are politically disparaged as invalid because they aren’t specifically spelled out.
The true question, of course, is where does government get authority to infringe in this area or that?
So the Second Amendment didn’t create a right to keep and bear arms — it acknowledged a right that was already assumed and accepted. This, in turn, has not always worked to our advantage. For instance, in one of the rare Second Amendment-related cases heard by the Supreme Court, US vs. Cruikshank, where members of the Ku Klux Klan had deprived blacks of their right to assemble and to bear arms, the court maintained that these were matters of state, not federal jurisdiction, and specifically held that “The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.”
Since that time, much of the Bill of Rights has been incorporated, or applied, to the states through the 14th Amendment’s “Due Process” clause — much except the 2nd Amendment. Still, the underlying principle, that natural rights are inherent to the condition of being human, remains unchanged. It is our job to understand this, and to never allow these rights to be construed as mere grants or privileges — which, if they can be bestowed, can also be withheld or revoked.
Visit David Codrea’s online journal The War on Guns at waronguns.blogspot.com.
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