Time to Stop Confusing Real Meaning of 2nd Amendment

Opponents confuse the Founders original intent to argue that they never intended to allow citizens to be armed with semi-automatic rifles. This common error in constitutional interpretation is failing to examine the Constitution according to its original meaning.

James Wilson, one of only six founders to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was nominated by President George Washington as an original Justice on the Supreme Court, exhorted: “The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.”

The Founders framed the Second Amendment as a certification to protect what was frequently called “the first law of nature”—the right of self-protection, an inalienable right—guaranteed to every citizen individually.

Understanding the Second Amendment’s intention that secures the right “to keep and bear arms”, it is important to establish the source of inalienable rights constitutionally. 

Constitution signer John Dickenson, like many of the others in his day, defined an inalienable right as a right “which God gave to you and which no inferior power has a right to take away.”

Our Founders believed that it was the duty of government (an inferior power) to protect inalienable rights from encroachment or usurpation. This was made clear by Justice Wilson, while a serving Justice on the Supreme Court; he taught his law students that the specific protections found in our government documents did not create new rights, rather secured old rights – that our documents were merely “…to acquire a new security for the possession or the recovery of those rights…which we were previously entitled by the immediate gift or by the unerring law of our all-wise and all-beneficent Creator.”

Justice Wilson asserted that “…every government which has not this in view as its principal object is not a government of the legitimate kind.”

The Founders understood the basic concept that government is not the source of rights; that self defense is an inalienable right the Second Amendment guarantees; that each citizen is guaranteed the tools necessary to defend their life, family, or property from aggression, whether from an individual or a government.

Posted via email from Global Politics