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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 805, January 18, 2015 If everybody carried a gun, then society would be a lot more more peaceful, a lot less violent, and virtually crime-free.
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise The Second Amendment is unnecessary. This is because the right to keep and bear arms is also protected by the Ninth Amendment (The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.) The Ninth Amendment admits that the Bill of Rights is not creating rights but simply listing some of the rights of the people the US Government is notionally bound to respect and protect. Perhaps the most fundamental and essential of these rights is the absolute right of a person to protect their life and/or the lives of their loved ones from criminal threat, up to and including violently destroying such threat. Logically, this includes the right to possess the tools necessary to achieve this end and to keep these tools to hand in case of need. Therefor the Second Amendment guarantee of the individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms is redundant. Not all the other rights enumerated by the rest of the Bill of Rights are so clearly clearly assured by logic and reason. For example, arguably the "need" for the people to pray to the right god in the right way is so great that Congress needs to define this god and style of prayer by establishing a state religion. Yet in spite of the above described redundancy the Founding Fathers decided it was necessary to spell out the right of the people to arm themselves. Perhaps this right is important indeed, so important that the Author (s) of the Amendment, the Congress that passed it, and the state legislators who ratified did not want to risk any misunderstanding. They chose to specifically guarantee the right of people to arm themselves in defense of their lives, liberty and property. The right to keep and bear arms is a basic extension of the right to self defense. It is logically and obviously so. A reasonable man might claim that there is no need to redundantly affirm it with its own article in a Bill of Rights. Yet some of the greatest political geniuses ever assembled found it necessary to in fact do this very thing. Perhaps we who share their ideals should never cease our struggle to protect this right and have it enshrined as part of the highest law of the land. A just, free, and secure society can not be created by disarming honest and free people.
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