Americans Don't Have the Right to Bear Just Any Arms

[Nuclear Unicorn]

52. People also abuse the 1st Amendment; case in point gawker.com

The Geithner affair is not their first go-round in 1A abuses. They released Terry Hogan's sex tape, they accused actor James Franco of violent gay rape and other misdeeds. They have abused their 1A rights with malicious intent of hurting others for profit.

But abuses do not abolish the use.

The problem with much of the gun control movement is its insistence that the crimes of one are the guilt of all. Yet the justified uses of any count for none.

As far as the right to keep and bear arms being a self evident freedom, such as the others, no. Simply no. If you have to fall back on arguments about "trendy language" and the Rhode Island constitution of 1842, you're on shaky ground and you know it.

The reasons in 1842 were the same reasons as the even older Bill of Rights of 1789. Age doesn't make the rights less valid. In fact, for rights to have any real value they must be timeless. Rights do not come into being because of technology and they do not cease to be after a fashion. If they did they would cease to be rights and merely be allowances under the law.

We do not form governments to explain our rights to us. Government ought to protect our rights and provide recourse to healing transgressions against them. But governments can and often do abuse rights which displays fully for us the fact our rights transcend government, exist outside of it.

If this is true -- and God help us all if it isn't -- the the right to self-defense against man and government is beyond arguing to the year 1842. If Rhode Island and others had the good sense to codify this truth then we applaud them but even if they did not no person is obligated to tolerate the abuses of tyranny.

The framers were not being vague, trendy or anything else when they wrote the 2nd. It's a great amendment, a great freedom, something few other nations dare to allow, and I would not even say it's subordinate to the other freedoms, or less important, but it is distinguishable.

Distinguishable only in the fact that it is the one amendment that makes self-evident the penalty to be imposed upon the government if it lapses into the abuses inflicted by previous despots.