The following was published in the local paper The Conway Daily Sun over Thanksgiving weekend. It was written by Isaac Hadam, a 17-year old Madison, New Hampshire resident who is president of the Constitutional Awareness Pact, which encourages everyone to read and understand the U.S. Constitution.
In the wake of the horrific shootings in Las Vegas and Texas, some people are clamoring for classic “gun control” laws. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) have led the charge after this recent act of evil in Texas.
Others have been more radical by calling for the complete repeal of the Second Amendment. One of the most notable was Michael Moore, who, after the Las Vegas shooting called the Second Amendment “ancient and outdated.” In a Facebook post, Moore, called for the complete repeal of the Second Amendment. His proposed “28th Amendment” would allow people to get guns but, would make the process incredibly difficult.
The proposal would allow no weapon to hold more than six rounds and would not allow the weapon to be stored at the owner’s home. Instead the weapon would be stored at a licensed gun club or “government-regulated storage facility.”
But is the Second Amendment really out of date and in need of repealing? To answer that question we need to know what the Second Amendment was supposed to do, and to do that, we need not look further than what the Founders themselves said.
First, George Mason, a delegate from Virginia to the Constitutional Convention, said the following at the Virginia Ratification Convention, “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”
James Madison, often referred to as the ‘Father of the Constitution,’ said the following in Federalist Paper No. 46. “(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation… (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
Samuel Adams (the person, not the beer brand) said that the Constitution shouldn’t be construed to allow Congress to, “prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”
Now these first three quotes explain that the Second Amendment protects the right of individual citizens to own arms. This next quote, however, sums up why the Founders believed we needed the Second Amendment in our Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”
This quote makes perfect sense, because the Founders understood how important it was to allow citizens to own guns, considering that was how America became an independent nation.
There can obviously be restrictions on someone owning a gun if they are a criminal.
Samuel Adams’ quote sums it up well by saying that they should be “peaceable citizens.”
But the Founders didn’t give us the Second Amendment to protect hunting rights, because on the frontier states that was a given, seeing you would die if you couldn’t hunt. Rather, it was meant as a final safeguard from government tyranny. The Founders understood that sooner or later evil men who lust for power would attempt to seize it, and that was a major reason for the creation of the Second Amendment; to stop such seizures from happening.
If the truth is told, I would wager that the people of Venezuela really wish that they had a “right to keep and bear arms” at this point. Venezuela is a perfect example of why the Second Amendment is so important to our freedoms.
I think the case for not allowing people who are violent criminals to own guns is pretty substantial, and those laws are already on the books. Based on what we know now, the killer in Texas shouldn’t have even owned the weapons he used because of his violent past. However, just because he slips through the cracks doesn’t mean that we try to take away guns from law abiding citizens, considering the killer was stopped by a hero with a gun; an AR-15 no less.
Instead, we make sure that the laws on the books that prevent and punish violent criminals from owning guns, are faithfully executed.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, put there by our Founding Fathers, is there so that we can protect ourselves from evil men, like the one in Texas, and from a tyrannical government, like the one in Venezuela. That is why we have the Second Amendment.