Recent events in Minnesota underscore a recurring and deeply troubling theme: Government officials and commentators treating natural rights as privileges.
As the Declaration of Independence puts it, “all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” We believe those rights include the rights to self-defense, freedom of speech, and to protest the government.
The Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, merely codified those pre-existing rights—it did not create them. Indeed, the Supreme Court has long recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is “not a right granted by the Constitution,” nor “in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” The Constitution put limits on the government, not the People.
There is no question that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense—including at protests. And people morally exercising their constitutionally protected natural rights do not obstruct justice. To be sure, no justice can exist without the ability of the People to exercise those rights in the first place.
The mere presence of a firearm does not erase a person’s rights, does not turn lawful conduct into wrongdoing, and does not make someone fair game to be arrested or killed for the government’s convenience. The government does not get to flip the legal or moral burden. The fact that one is armed is not a license for the government to shoot you, nor is the right to bear arms a license for any person to use unjust force.
Whether one agrees with our Constitution’s policy choice to protect the right to bear arms in public or not, “the very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”
President Trump and his Administration—much like the anti-carry states we fight every day—must remember that government exists only by the consent of the governed, and that our rights are not subordinate to their policy preferences. As President Trump learned in his first term, FPC will strongly oppose and fight any attempt to treat the right to bear arms as a government-granted privilege—regardless of who or where it comes from.
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