Although Democrat and other leftist politicians will, from time to time, speak of the government’s ‘rights,’ we must never forget the government has no rights. Only the people have rights and the government, on the other hand, has powers.
Moreover, the government’s powers are delegatory rather than original. In other words, the powers possessed by the government are those which the people delegated to it via the framework of the U.S. Constitution, and those powers are neither ambiguous nor infinite.
This is most easily understood if you think about the U.S. Constitution establishing a compact between the people and the government, a compact best explained by Thomas Jefferson in the 1798 Kentucky Resolutions.
Jefferson wrote:
Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general Government for special purposes,—delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government…
Jefferson was strongly impacted John Locke, who had written, “The liberty of man, in society, is to be under no other legislative power, but that established, by consent, in the commonwealth.”
Jefferson and Locke are saying the same thing, just in a slightly different way. The lesson to be drawn is that the people enter into a “compact” (Jefferson) wherein they “consent” (Locke) to certain a degree of legislative power over their persons as they move about in society.
File/Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States who served from 1801 to 1809. (National Archive/Newsmakers)
However, the people retain authority because they possess rights. Thus Madison, in Federalist 46, observed that “ultimate authority…resides in the people alone.”
It is under this authority the people loan or delegate certain powers to the government via the U.S. Constitution and, with that same authority, the people added the Bill of Rights to hedge in certain, inalienable rights as being outside the government’s purview. Among these inalienable rights is the right to keep and bear arms.
As I highlighted last week, the right to keep and bear arms is not something we as Americans possess because of government benevolence, but something with which our Creator endowed us. It is one of the rights specifically enumerated by our Founding Fathers and hedged in by the Second Amendment. No where in the U.S. Constitution is the government given powers to regulate the ability of the American people to be armed.
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Regulation of this natural right is not part of the compact, rather, the complete opposite is true: The government is told in plain English that the rights protected by the Second Amendment “shall not be infringed.”
In summation: The people have rights and the government merely possesses powers. The people’s rights are theirs at birth while the government’s powers belong to it only as long, and in such a fashion, as the people decide they should.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio, a member of Gun Owners of America, a Pulsar Night Vision pro-staffer, and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010 and has a Ph.D. in Military History. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly:
