                                                                  #
 anada   "Firearms and How They Relate                            #          
 209         To Basic Human Rights"    +###           +###    +####    +###  
                                      #    #  #  #   #    #  #    #   #    # 
                                by   #     #  # ##  #     #  #    #  #     # 
 06                 Keith Milligan   #    .#  ## #  #    .#  #   .#  #    .# 
 nov         (keith@discordia.org)    *###  * #   *  *###  * *###  *  *###  *
 2000 .+#################################################################.net

        By any measure, our society today today is wealthier, more
 prosperous, and safer than at any other time in our nation's history.
 Because this enormous prosperity has allowed us to increasingly insulate
 ourselves from risk and danger, our society has reached a critical apex;
 where most people live in a world completely devoid the crime and violence.
 Crimes of violence are increasingly being restricted to smaller and smaller
 areas, and being perpetrated by an ever shrinking portion of the population.
 For the first time in our nation's history, the people of the United States
 are faced with the question of whether or not to remove firearms from the
 hands of its citizens.

        In a way, we're lucky we live in a society that's safe enough that we
 can question such a thing.  Most of the people reading this no doubt are
 quite happy to leave their protection up to the armed forces and the police,
 and feel no need own, much less carry a gun.  In a free society, this is
 certainly a valid and acceptable choice, and not one that should be
 questioned.  However, not all people accept that the police or armed forces
 are always going to protect them.  These people feel that self-defense is a
 personal issue, and choose to arm themselves.  In a free society, this must
 also be a choice, and not one that should be questioned.

        It's a pretty bold statement to some people today to suggest that any
 peaceable citizen of a free country ought to be allowed to arm himself, and
 employ his arms in defense of his life, or in the defense of his liberty.
 This was not, however, a bold statement up until fairly recently in our
 nation's history.

        In the Constitution of the United States is the recognition of our
 right to own firearms is embodied in the Second Amendment to the Bill of 
 Rights:

	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's hard to believe that so few words could cause such a large
 controversy in our society today.  Were our founding fathers crazy?  Were
 they nuts?  Did James Madison have one too many beers when he put this
 amendment to paper?  A lot of people today seem to think so, or they simply
 dismiss his intent outright and read the amendment out of the constitution.
 Often you'll hear from people in the gun control movement "The Second
 Amendment is obsolete.  It was meant only to apply to state militias."
 While this argument has gotten a lot of support from a few intellectuals and
 even from some federal courts, it is unfortunately an incorrect
 interpretation that fails to grasp the true meaning of the amendment and the
 natural right which it protects; the right to self-defense.

        When one talks about natural rights, one is talking about rights that
 precede government, and that exist without the structure of government.
 Most of your basic rights are derived from this concept.  You can speak
 freely, because obviously, absent a government, you could do so.  You can
 think and worship any way you see fit, you can associate with whoever you
 want to, and you can be entitled to the fruits of your labor by having what
 you consider to be your property.  Human nature being what it is, there will
 always be people who will want to deny you what you consider your rights.
 People who will want to steal from you, who will want to hurt you, and who
 will want to tell you how to think.   Man, in his natural state, is
 permitted to defend himself against these kinds of misdeeds in order to
 preserve rights.

        The natural state from which our natural rights are derived would be
 considered anarchy by modern humans.  And indeed, it's difficult to develop
 an advanced technological society if you're too busy having to worry about
 your neighbor coming over and clubbing you over the head so he can steal the
 deer you just killed for dinner.  Because of this, humans have established
 government for most of what we would think of as modern times.

        Historically, the role of government has been to organize people into
 groups to offer protection against other groups of people who also call
 themselves governments.  These governments historically were lead by one
 person, or by a small group of people, and were largely run for their own
 benefit.  In return for the protection they offered, the masses often had to
 give up the very natural rights they might have enjoyed in pre-history.   

        In the United States, our founding fathers noticed this horrible
 track record of abuses and misdeeds carried out by the governments of Europe
 on its own citizens.   European monarchies enjoyed this kind of power
 because they, and they alone, had a monopoly on the use of force to
 accomplish their goals.  The subjects of an autocratic monarch were
 powerless to resist his will, having long ago been stripped of any means by
 which to resist.

        The framers of the constitution were well educated in the many types
 of government they had at their disposal.  They had just fought and won a 
 revolution against the British monarchy and wanted to experiment with 
 a democratically elected central government.  Despite this, they were very
 skeptical of too much democracy, believing that the mob would be no better 
 at protecting individual rights than an autocratic monarch was.  The form
 our federal government eventually took was that of a constitutional
 republic.  A government made up of elected representatives, a chief
 executive, and courts, all possessing checks against the other to prevent
 one branch from becoming too strong.  This whole system was limited by a
 written constitution which gave the federal government only specific
 enumerated powers, and restricted the government from infringing upon basic
 human rights.  One of these such limitations was quoted above.

        Why did the founders put such a limitation on our government?
 Couldn't they see that the system they created works?  Couldn't they see the
 people would have nothing to fear from their new government?  Well, in
 short, no.  They didn't trust it.  They may have believed in it, but human
 nature is human nature.  It's the nature of men to want power, and to try to
 consolidate it.  It's the nature of men to willingly surrender their rights
 in exchange for safety.  History teaches us that more often than not, even
 with democratically elected governments, this kind of thing happens.  

        The constitution is the social contract with our government.  It is
 the document that we have agreed to be governed by, and the document that
 all our elected federal officials take an oath to uphold.  Our founding
 fathers chose to forbid our government from interfering with our right to
 arm ourselves so that we, as citizens, may have a means at our disposal by
 which to enforce the social contract of the constitution against our
 government.

        Today it seems almost crazy to assume that our government would ever
 do anything to hurt us.  Indeed, we as a people feel pretty secure in our
 ability to control our government through the electoral process.  But
 history has shown us that the kind of peace, prosperity, and stability we
 are experiencing now is generally short lived.  We're only a natural
 disaster, another great depression, or a world war away from once again
 needing that basic natural right to defend ourselves.  No government that
 claims to govern by the consent of a free people should interfere with the
 right of peaceable, law abiding citizens from possessing their own arms for
 their own protection.  It's a right that's older than governments, and one
 we ought to respect just as much as all the others.  The others are, after
 all, only promises on a two hundred and thirteen year old piece of paper,
 without the ability to force our government to keep them.

 .+##########################################################################

 anada209 by Keith Milligan (keith@discordia.org)                    (c) 2000
 ###################################################################anada.net
