The original theory is that Americans enjoy a fundamental right to self-defense, in order to preserve one’s person and property against any neighbors or government agents who might act against one’s individual liberty. This is a natural right that predates our government’s formation, and was therefore enshrined in the Constitution by some very forward-thinking liberals of their time. In the words of the Second Amendment:
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
It should not be difficult for anyone with a passing grasp of the English language to understand that it is the “right of the People” that is protected in that sentence, and it is clearly not the expression of a peculiar power owned by the newly-founded centralized government created by our Constitution. Such straightforward, simple language in our Bill of Rights was actually suggested by Samuel Adams and John Hancock to accommodate the antifederalists at the Massachusetts Convention of 1788 and to avoid confusion about the new government’s limited powers, meant to guarantee that “the Constitution shall never be construed… to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”
Adams thought far too much of future generations, clearly, because a second, competing theory has emerged within the last 100 years which suggests that gun ownership is not a right, but a privilege granted by the government, and the kinds of firearms allowed to peaceable citizens depends on what neighbors and government agents would deem allowable at any particular point in time.
The latter is entirely incoherent when contextualized with the words the Second Amendment, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s the position that is broadly recognized as truth for most Americans. Today, it’s just natural to assume that the federal government has the right to curtail gun ownership of this gun or that one among “peaceable citizens” if the federal government feels that some guns are too dangerous for law-abiding citizens to own.
This is the progressives’ magic trick, and some Americans fall for it due to a simple deficiency in human nature. For example, Chris Cuomo of CNN recently tweeted that “[t]here was no individual right” in the Second Amendment even “contemplated” until Antonin Scalia inferred the “individual right” in the Heller v. District of Columbia decision.
Winston Churchill once observed the reason why Chris Cuomo would say something so patently stupid, and why such stupidity might so commonly be...
