Liberty Maven

Based on then-Senator Obama’s voting record regarding gun rights, our current president could arguably be considered the most anti-gun president in our nation’s history. That, along with an anti-gun Congress, the United States could be headed for more tyranny.

As Scott McPherson of The Future of Freedom Foundation pointed out, similar to the right expressed in our Second Amendment, the English have a right to bear arms as expressed in English Declaration of Rights (1688).  Nonetheless, in 1997, handgun ownership was completely banned.

Given the leftist atmosphere in U.S. politics currently, alongside the wiggle room that Justice Scalia left in the Heller decision (”Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”), we could be in trouble.  As McPherson puts it,

Don’t bet your life, or your children’s or grandchildren’s freedom, that 50 or a 100 years from now a sufficiently reconstituted and “progressive” Court won’t consider it a “reasonable restriction” of your “not unlimited” right to make firearms so difficult to obtain that armed self-defense becomes a thing of the past.

Government will become more arbitrary, restrained only by good sense and decency — virtues not commonly found in those holding great power. At that point, the American citizen becomes a subject — one step removed from a serf — then a slave. Whatever verbal calisthenics or contortions legislators or judges may employ to convince you otherwise, that was the greatest fear of the Founding Fathers, and the very reason early American statesmen demanded that the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed” — period, end of discussion.

McPherson also explains our natural right to gun ownership in a way I’d not heard it before: we don’t need the 2nd Amendment to deem all federal gun restrictions illegal.

Freedom of speech, of the press, of the right to peacefully assemble, to petition for redress of grievances, to trial by jury, and to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure, and even a statement protecting rights not listed — all are found in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Even if there were no Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms would fall under the Ninth Amendment’s protection of unenumerated rights, but gun ownership was considered so important that it too was mentioned specifically.

Read all of Scott McPherson’s article here.