The Right To Keep And Bear Arms

“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.”- The Second Amendment of the Constitution.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”- Declaration of Independence.

With all the talk about gun control and the “right to bear arms,” and because there is a renewed push to remove guns from law-abiding citizens, I feel the need to throw in my two cents on the topic.

To sum up my position, I believe that citizens (non-felons) should have no prohibitions whatsoever about what kind of weaponry they wish to acquire. If they can afford an Abrams tank, they should be allowed to buy one. If they want to buy a crate of Javelin missiles, let them have them. If they somehow can afford an F-22 Raptor, then more power to them.

Many gun control advocates love to point out that the Second Amendment specifically talks about a militia. They say that the National Guard is now our militia, and therefore the freedom granted by the Amendment doesn’t apply to average citizens. The reason they think this is because during the Revolutionary War the militia WAS in fact controlled by the American military, and thus under the control of the fledgling American government.

What they fail to realize though is that our government, military, and militia WERE THE REBELS; they were on the same side. They were the very ones revolting against the established British rule. They saw the British government becoming destructive to the people of they country, as they laid out in the Declaration of Independence, and they took up arms to remove themselves from that control.

I don’t believe that the Founder’s idea of a militia was simply a civilian army controlled by the government. I think the Founder’s idea of a militia was their solution to make their statements in the Declaration of Independence possible for all time. They knew that ANY government could become corrupt and become destructive to those who are governed. How would those under a corrupt and destructive government abolish such tyranny if the militia was controlled by that same corrupt system? They couldn’t. The only reason the militia was controlled by the US army during the Revolutionary War is because they were both on the side of overthrowing the existing, tyrannical form of government.

Back in the late 1700’s when the founding documents were written, they didn’t know about fighter planes, machine guns, tanks, armored personnel carriers, Predator drones, or satellite surveillance. The modern military at the time of the Founders had only muskets and cannons, and so for a militia to put up an honest fight against the army of a tyrannical government all they needed was muskets and cannons.

Today is rather different. Even IF average people were allowed to buy whatever weaponry they desire, normal people can’t deficit spend in order to get the bigger, more sophisticated toys that would be necessary in order to give the military a run for its money. Yet I believe that if you read the Second Amendment in the light of the Declaration of Independence, it is very clear that the purpose of the militia was to be a last-resort failsafe against our government becoming corrupt and destructive to the people, and the Second Amendment was to give the people the right to bear whatever arms necessary to put up an effective fight.

We should still have a militia today. We should have something much larger, more widespread, and better equipped than just the survivalist groups who live in the mountains. If it becomes necessary to have a second American Revolution in order to abolish a destructive form of government, we, the people, have no way to bring that about.

We are in the very same boat the German people were in before World War II when Adolph Hitler declared, “1935 will go down in history for the first time a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.” The only point to having gun registration is so that those requiring such registration know who has what, and the only point of that is so they know what they have to take from whom.

Many, if not most, people wouldn’t agree with my position on this subject. They would offer questions like, “Can you imagine how crime would run rampant if anyone could buy anything? What if gangs could buy bombers, or bank robbers could buy tanks?” Yet is that somehow a worse prospect than living under a system where we are offered only the illusion of freedom while our supposedly elected leaders bankrupt our economy, circumvent and destroy the very Constitution they swear to uphold, and set up a “Big Brother” surveillance system and send our military to war after war all under the guise of keeping us safe?

People, the corruption is there and it is real. While a political solution would be the preferred way to deal with it, such attempts would be as pointless as trying to throw stones at the moon. Yet the only other option has been taken away from us.

So what to do? I wish I knew. Then again, perhaps things are all just working out as planned.