Before the 2nd Amendment -- GOD

By AWR Hawkins - May 6, 2012

A recent article in The New Yorker titled “American Battleground,” by Harvard’s Jill Lepore, has been gnawing at me ever since I critiqued it last week for The Daily Caller.

As I wrote then, it is a convoluted piece of quasi-academic work that is intended to make gun owners question the founders’ position on private gun ownership and, if possible, open 21st-century American minds to the idea of more gun control.

Lepore does this via subtle and not-so-subtle attacks on the Second Amendment throughout the article. By attacking the Second Amendment, she hopes to somehow convince us that we really don’t have an individual right to keep and bear arms. Rather, we were only intended to have a right to form militias to use guns in that capacity when emergencies arise.
In an attempt to prove her point, she quotes FDR’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson:

[The Second Amendment] is restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security, [and that right] is not one which may be utilized for private purposes but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.
This brings me to what has been gnawing at me so badly for the past week. Lepore has made a mistake that’s all too common with anti-gunners and even with some staunch defenders of the Second Amendment.

That mistake is to look at the Second Amendment as the source of our right to keep and bear arms. You see, in Lepore’s mind, if she can just disprove the “perceived meaning” of the Second Amendment, gun owners across the country will sell their gun safes, throw away their ammo and let Obama collect all the guns so we can have safer streets. But in reality, the Second Amendment is only a reflection of the dictates “of nature and of nature’s God.”

Ultimately, we don’t have rights because the Bill of Rights says so. Rather, the Bill of Rights says so because we have rights intrinsic to our very beings: rights with which we were endowed by our Creator.

One of the reasons Lepore and her fellow academics don’t teach students about natural law anymore is that they don’t want students to understand that long before the U.S. government existed, God had endowed his creatures with rights.

These rights were explained and defended at length by men like John Locke and William Blackstone long before ideas like the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights were even passing thoughts.

From the Free Republic