Gun rights don't come from the second amendment

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Whenever there is a gun massacre, statists inevitably respond that it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment. The idea is that if the Second Amendment is gone, so will be the right to own guns in the United States. There is just one big problem with that position: It’s wrong. The Second Amendment, like the First Amendment, doesn’t give anyone any rights. Instead, it prohibits the federal government from infringing on rights that are natural and God-given and that preexist government. The Declaration of Independence sets forth the essential principles. Every person (i.e., not just American citizens) is endowed by nature or God with fundamental rights. These include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, given that people’s rights are natural and God-given, they preexist government. The rights come first and the government comes second. What is the purpose of government? The Declaration answers the question: The purpose of government is to protect the existence and exercise of people’s natural, God-given rights.

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The American people finally decided to go along with the deal. The biggest argument that finally sold it to them was that the U.S. Constitution, which called the federal government into existence, strictly limited the powers of the federal government to those few powers that were enumerated in the document. Those enumerated powers did not include the power to infringe or destroy people’s natural, God-given rights — rights, again, that preexisted the federal government. Thus, even without the Bill of Rights, the federal government had no legitimate authority to control what people read or what people owned, including books and guns. That’s because these rights preexisted the government and because the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to infringe on these preexisting rights.

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In fact, some people even argued that by enumerating some rights in the Bill of Rights, that might be construed to mean that those were the only rights that were being protected. That’s why the Ninth Amendment was enacted — to point out that that was not the intention. The reason the Bill of Rights was enacted was because of the deep concern that our American ancestors had about the threat that the new federal government would pose to their rights and liberties. They believed that this government — their government — would inevitably end up doing what every other government in history has done — destroy there rights. That’s why they enacted the Bill of Rights — to hammer the message home that the American people were expressly prohibiting the federal government from traveling the road to tyranny that all other governments in history had travelled.

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