This week, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated a Second Amendment repeal. And we, as Americans (both gun-owning and non-gun owning), must remember and cherish the moral underpinnings of our right to arms. I tire of Second Amendment advocates relying on hunting to provide the basis for our right. Hunting is a fun activity and provides a palatable, unobjectionable-at-a-dinner-party rationale for our right to arms, but it is entirely inadequate as a justification for private gun ownership.

Our right to bear arms is a basic human right, not one granted to us by the Constitution. The Constitution, n its face, accepts this: the Second Amendment does not grant us the right to bear arms, instead the Second Amendment (as all of the Bill of Rights) mandates that the government not infringe on that right. The right predates and supersedes the Constitution, our government, politicians, etc.

“[T]he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”

Jeffrey R. Snyder’s A Nation of Cowards (link to full text, apparently with author’s consent) provides a wonderful primer on these ideas. Below I provide some excerpts. Here is a link to a complete audio reading by one of my favorite podcasters.

Gun control is a moral crusade against a benighted, barbaric citizenry. This is demonstrated not only by the ineffectualness of gun control in preventing crime, and by the fact that it focuses on restricting the behavior of the law-abiding rather than apprehending and punishing the guilty, but also by the execration that gun control proponents heap on gun owners and their evil instrumentality, the NRA. Gun owners are routinely portrayed as uneducated, paranoid rednecks fascinated by and prone to violence, i.e., exactly the type of person who opposes the liberal agenda and whose moral and social “re-education” is the object of liberal social policies.

. . .

Conservatives must understand that the antipathy many liberals have for gun owners arises in good measure from their statist utopianism. This habit of mind has nowhere been better explored than in The Republic. There, Plato argues that the perfectly just society is one in which an unarmed people exhibit virtue by minding their own business in the performance of their assigned functions, while the government of philosopher-kings, above the law and protected by armed guardians unquestioning in their loyalty to the state, engineers, implements, and fine-tunes the creation of that society, aided and abetted by myths that both hide and justify their totalitarian manipulation.

. . .

The liberal elite know that they are philosopher-kings. They know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable — and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way.

The private ownership of firearms is a rebuke to this utopian zeal. To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state’s totalitarian reach.

. . .

The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only with the consent of the governed. As Kates has shown, the Second Amendment is as much a product of this political philosophy as it is of the American experience in the Revolutionary War. Yet our conservative elite has abandoned this aspect of republican theory. Although our conservative pundits recognize and embrace gun owners as allies in other arenas, their battle for gun rights is desultory. The problem here is not a statist utopianism, although goodness knows that liberals are not alone in the confidence they have in the state’s ability to solve society’s problems. Rather, the problem seems to lie in certain cultural traits shared by our conservative and liberal elites.

One such trait is an abounding faith in the power of the word. The failure of our conservative elite to defend the Second Amendment stems in great measure from an overestimation of the power of the rights set forth in the First Amendment, and a general undervaluation of action. Implicit in calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment is the assumption that our First Amendment rights are sufficient to preserve our liberty. The belief is that liberty can be preserved as long as men freely speak their minds; that there is no tyranny or abuse that can survive being exposed in the press; and that the truth need only be disclosed for the culprits to be shamed. The people will act, and the truth shall set us, and keep us, free.

. . .

Our society suffers greatly from the beliefs that only official action is legitimate and that the state is the source of our earthly salvation. Both liberal and conservative prescriptions for violent crime suffer from the “not in my job description” school of thought regarding the responsibilities of the law-abiding citizen, and from an overestimation of the ability of the state to provide society’s moral moorings. As long as law-abiding citizens assume no personal responsibility for combatting crime, liberal and conservative programs will fail to contain it.

. . .

What we certainly do not need is more gun control. Those who call for the repeal of the Second Amendment so that we can really begin controlling firearms betray a serious misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people.

At one time this was even understood by the Supreme Court. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the first case in which the Court had an opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment, it stated that the right confirmed by the Second Amendment “is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” The repeal of the Second Amendment would no more render the outlawing of firearms legitimate than the repeal of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment would authorize the government to imprison and kill people at will. A government that abrogates any of the Bill of Rights, with or without majoritarian approval, forever acts illegitimately, becomes tyrannical, and loses the moral right to govern.

This is the uncompromising understanding reflected in the warning that America’s gun owners will not go gently into that good, utopian night: “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” While liberals take this statement as evidence of the retrograde, violent nature of gun owners, we gun owners hope that liberals hold equally strong sentiments about their printing presses, word processors, and television cameras. The republic depends upon fervent devotion to all our fundamental rights.

As an outdoorsman, I like guns for fun. As an American, I require the Second Amendment to protect my God-given rights. As a human, I require that any state governing over me protect my primary, God-given rights or–as the Supreme Court of the United States has said–I will consider that government to “forever act[] illegitimately . . . and lose[] the moral right to govern” over me and my family.

These are not idle feelings. These are promises.

Update: As noted above, Justice Stevens calls for a repeal. March For Our Lives students vow to “take a mile” on gun control when given an inch because there are so many “steps” to take. And then on my walk this morning I saw a home in my neighborhood with a simple painting of a gun crossed out with the words “enough is enough”:

At least the anti-Second Amendment folks are being honest about their actual intent for once.