What We Believe: gun rights and the 2nd amendment
In part five of his series on what American conservatives believe, Bill Whittle looks at the right of a free people to bear arms, how that is an essential part of our democratic republic, and pokes holes in the arguments of the gun-control lobby:
He’s missing some historical context for the Second Amendment, how it arose from a provision of the English Bill of Rights that itself was a reaction to the attempts by the Stuarts to ban firearms (for a good discussion, see Levy, Origin of the Bill of Rights, chapter six), but he’s spot on about the right to own guns being a sign of trust between citizens and their government. Suppress that right, and the bonds of trust are severely weakened as only agents of the State may bear arms while the people must rely on them for protection – and on their goodwill. The citizen, in other words, is a citizen no more, but a servant.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)