The Second Amendment does not create a right to keep and bear arms, rather, it protects a pre-existing, God-given right to do so.
As I have covered in weeks gone by, our Creator endowed us with the right to keep and bear arms. Keeping and bearing arms is one of the intrinsic, natural rights James Madison fleshed out via his contributions to the Bill of Rights.
Madison wrote the Second Amendment, which says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The Amendment was put in place to protect a right that pre-dated the discovery of the New World, the commitment to colonize that New World, the birth of America (via the American Revolution), and the years of the Early Republic.
Thomas Jefferson alluded to the agelessness of this and other natural rights when he wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are overarching categories of natural rights which were fleshed out, by not limited by, the many amendments contained in the Bill of Rights.
File/Register Communists, Not Firearms, a Vietnam War era bumper sticker in opposition to American communists and in favor of Second Amendment gun rights, 1965. (Photo by Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty Images).
Since the right to keep and bear arms existed before America did, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to prevent an overreaching U.S. Government from interfering with it or somehow infringing it.
It is worth noting that Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 84, recognized our natural rights as so certain and obvious that he believed no Bill of Rights was necessary and that adding one could be dangerous.
Hamilton wrote: “I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”
The bottom line: Our right to keep and bear arms pre-dates America and America’s Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment protects rather than creates such a right and that right would exist whether the Second Amendment existed or not (see Hamilton).
If we can regain and retain this knowledge, we the people can determine that we shall never give up our guns.
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:
