Second Amendment: It Is What It Says. Nothing More and Nothing Less!

By Rich Kozlovich  

Originally I published this in 2012, and then again in 2016, 2017 and 2019, but its become clear events will make it necessary to bring it back out and publish it over and over again with updates, and this time, a lot of updates.  Remember, this is a dated piece. 

Normally when I get those “please pass this along” e-mails I read them, and even when I think they are interesting I don’t usually send them along. However, this was sent and I was asked to pass it along, and quite frankly it seems a worthwhile effort considering the wider ramifications of this kind of thinking. 

The e-mail starts out saying;

“Attorney General Holder says, "We have no right to possess guns!”’ So, what does a person who believes that we shouldn’t “need” guns to do?"  "Well, that depends if that person believes that we shouldn’t “have” guns or not. There is a substantial difference between “having” and “needing”, but in this case the "having" is based on the "needing"'.

The fact of the matter is we live in a dangerous world, and when the general population is armed the world is substantially less dangerous because crime goes down when gun ownership goes up. Clearly that, at the very least, is the "need" to justify this "having".

Most importantly we really do need to get this. The second amendment was deliberately inserted in the Constitution for two reasons. One, to make sure you can defend yourself, your loved ones and your property, and two, to give the citizenry the ability defend the Constitution against a government gone wild and is based on English natural law as codified in the English Bill of Rights. 

In this June 5th article, The Unspoken Wisdom of the Second Amendment, Anthony Matoria notes:

The founders of the country and drafters of the Constitution knew that not only would we occasionally have to suffer scoundrels, doofuses, and demagogues in positions of power, but human nature is a stubborn thing.  They understood that concentrated authority and policies of repression, even if they did initially appear to achieve their stated purpose, would over time be abused, with disastrous results.  The temptation to overreach, to expand the regime of authoritarianism and repression for partisan ends, is irresistible to the craven, mediocre, and dishonest professional politicians whose view of public good begins and ends with their own interest.

The drafters of the Second Amendment understood these things, and that is why they codified liberties within the Constitution.  They did so because they knew that occasionally, corrupt, stupid, and incompetent people would hold temporary positions of authority in government.  They wrote the Second Amendment not because they necessarily liked guns, but because they knew what tradeoffs were necessary to a free state, and that political fads are sometimes hostile to it.... 

The English Bill of Rights became law after a politically difficult time (actually it was more religious than political, or if you will, the religious issues generated the political issues) in English history where the common people overthrew King James and forced he and his successors, William III and Mary II in to accepting the English Bill of Rights. This was done for three reasons. There was a fight over the authority or the King to govern without consent of Parliament and the King’s (who was Catholic) desire to disarm his Protestant subjects and maintain a “permanent standing army”, against the wishes of Parliament; clearly and attempt to keep them in line with no way to defend themselves.

It might be noted that this wasn’t a new right being demanded by Parliament from the ruling authorities. This was merely codifying what was always considered a ‘the natural right’ of all Englishmen, and the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) agreed by saying this regarding the English Bill of Rights: "clearly an individual right, having nothing whatsoever to do with service in the militia". Furthermore, this was not a “granting of a new right”, but codifying forevermore a right they held without permission of the King, nor did the King have the right to disarm them.

The Second Amendment says: 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.  So, who does everyone think this "well regulated militia" is made up of? The general population! The term “well regulated” merely defines the difference between legal and criminal behavior. Otherwise they would be a mob bent of murder, mayhem, destruction.

When the Constitution was written a militia was not anything but the general population fighting as a civilian army, organized to their own likings and purposes. And they could go back to their regular lives and take their arms with them because they might be called upon to stand up to defend their community once again. And from where did this right originate? If this is a natural right then it didn’t originate with the King in England, not is it a “granting” to be given or to be taken away by the Government of the United States.

This e-mail went on to say:

"I Guess they were not happy with the poll results the first time, so USA today ran another one (no longer available online) Attorney General Eric Holder, has already said this is one of his major issues. He does not believe the 2nd Amendment gives individuals the right to bear arms. Whether a person is a gun person or a non-gun person it is impossible to avoid seeing the implications of this. The number one law enforcement agent in the nation is advocating overturning the second amendment based on his opinion. Even the Supreme Court agrees  individuals have the right to own arms."

According to “Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote the opinion for the court's dominant conservatives, said: "It is clear that the Framers . . . counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty." However Justice Scalia says; “that there are limitations on the individual right to keep and bear arms, but the Supreme Court will have to decide what exactly those limitations are.” 

That statement has huge implications, and that was from a conservative justice.  In no way should this be under the purview of the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court.  If clarification is needed on the Second Amendment, then "that is a legislative branch issue" requiring an amendment to the Constitution, not a judicial branch proclamation.  A branch of government that's clearly out of control.

We need to pay attention to the verbiage in this discussion.  I keep hearing how the Second Amendment "grants" the right to bear arms.  Wrong!!!! The Second Amendment does not "grant" the right to bear arms, it "affirms" that right.  The Founding Fathers deemed these rights as unalienable, meaning these were rights "endowed by their Creator", not by Congress, and certainly not by any permutation of the federal, state or local governments. 

As the e-mail went on to say:

“Scalia is saying is what every constitutional lawyer in the country knows: No constitutional right is absolute; there are burdens on each right that do not violate that right. It can give the wrong impression to refer to “limitations” on any right; it says that certain things are either beyond the definition of that right, or are a burden that the Constitution allows. For example, certain types of speech—such as perjury, fraud, impersonating a federal agent, and inciting people to engage in violence—are not protected by the First Amendment.”

That's a logical fallacy.  These aren't limitations to these rights.  These are consequences for actions taken under these rights.  

The most frequently heard argument for limitations of these freedoms is about the Freedom of Speech.  Freedom of Speech does not permit you yell "fire" in a crowed theater.  Well, that's not so, you're just not "permitted" to get away with it, as you will be punished for doing so, and rightly so.  However, being punished for irresponsible, and/or criminal behaviour is not a limitation of that right!  Punishment is a consequence of a misuse of those rights, including the right be bear arms.

If one misuses these rights, they're punished, that doesn't justify any attempt to abridge those rights.   Both the First and Second Amendments "affirm" rights the left works diligently to destroy.  

• Nothing is more dangerous to the left and their goal to impose tyranny on the nation than the freedom of speech and the right to bear arms..  
• Nothing is more insidious that the corruption of thought, language and facts used by the left to do so.
  

This article by Daniel Jia,  Gun control vs. gun rights: A look at the numbers, as upsetting as they may be, are largely hyperbole, and when it comes to these mass killings of so many young children, it's highly emotional hyperbole.  Nothing is going to outrage the public more than doing terrible things to children, and rightly so, but we have to brace our minds and bring our emotions under control and see what this is really all about.  In this piece the author asks "Do you want to protect kids? Or do you want to disarm Americans?"  He also asks the questions that's been posed by by e-mail group:

 

How can a poor 18-year-old kid afford not one, but two AR-15s? ........... I don’t think I could duplicate that setup for much less than $4,000. Who paid for the Uvalde shooter’s guns? And who trained him in their use? The AR-15 is easy to shoot, but it’s not intuitive......... Some person unknown to us bought this kid an AR-15, and taught him how to use it—and probably encouraged him to shoot up the school.  And oddly enough, there is a similar unknown person in the Buffalo shooting.........  Could there be a pattern here?

The argument from the left is all about eliminating the Second Amendment, and that's really the goal here, not fighting crime or preventing murders.  This idea their "common sense" approach to gun control will make the world safer is horsepucky!  Disarming victims is a dumb way to fight crime.  Cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., Detroit, all cities run by left wing Democrats, also cities with the strictest gun laws, are among the worst shooting galleries in the nation, not to mention the huge upsurge in crime.  The stricter the gun laws, the more gun violence there will be, and the more crimes will be committed.  That's fundamental, and is almost as absolute as the law of gravity.

What we have here isn't a gun problem, it's a culture problem.  What's the most common demonstrator in all this?  Fatherless families.  And who bears the bulk of the blame for that?  The federal government and the leftists who promote illegitimacy with their welfare programs, which has reached 70% in black America, who commit most of the crime in America per ratio, but illegitimacy is surging among every group in America, and instability has followed, and this whole problem was mostly created by the left.

It's been noted that in times past there were more guns per ratio than modern times, and far less murders.  At least that was true until very recently, because people are afraid, and they're buying guns, a lot of guns.  Why? Because the left has generated so much hate and violence crime is skyrocketing, and with their refusal to punish criminals, they've made the world around us far more dangerous than it was in the past.  So if they created this mess, and they did, why would anyone want to trust them to fix it?

It's not the guns that kill; it's culture-fueled anger:  It is not the guns; it is the anger.  It is a refusal to prosecute and jail angry, violent offenders.  It's a deliberate, angry, race-based leniency and a cynical, angry, deliberate theft of our peace and tranquility to allow such people to walk. Instead of abridging gun rights, how about abridging the freedom of angry criminals to walk free?

Clearly this next paragraph is dated going back ten years, but I left it in the article because the fact it's dated doesn't change the reality and danger of the leftist worldwide agenda to abolish the Second Amendment. Which is just one more effort to undermine and destroy the U.S. Constitution

Does anyone find it interesting that this has become an issue since the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty was rejected by Congress? Is this all about a movement by powerful forces in the world to impose a worldwide government under the auspices of the United Nations, The most incompetent and corrupt organization the world has ever known?  

There are four things that stand between freedom and that worldwide socialist government.  The American identity, The American culture, the American economy and the United States Constitution. And they're all under severe attack daily by the left and their cats paws in the deep state, academia, government and the media.