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Abstract
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Today grave dangers threaten the individual rights of the people. Their rights are menaced from many directions. The most fierce assault is the erosion of rights by legal processes, a procedure most dangerous because it is so effective.
Those who don't own guns, as well as those who do, have become alarmed by the realization that an erosion of the individual right to have arms under Second Amendment spells dire peril for our other constitutional rights.
Their fears are well-founded by virtue of existing legal principles and historical precedents.
One of the favorite arguments disparaging the Second Amendment is that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is merely a collective right referring only to the people collectively as a common body.
In the consideration of the proposal for inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Senate in 1789 soundly rejected a motion on the floor to add the restrictive words "for the common defense" after the words "to keep and bear arms." (As the British Parliament earlier had rejected an identical attempt to restrict the right to "have arms" in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.)
This article is a revised version of an earlier essay by the author that appeared in the American Rifleman magazine. |