This lie is particularly believable because of how often it gets an unwitting assist from anyone who entertains a debate about the precise meaning and placement of the Second Amendment’s words. The widely misunderstood concept behind the first four amendments is that they do not grant rights, but merely emphasize that the Constitution does not grant the federal government any power to violate pre-existing rights. The Founders all agreed there should be no federal interference in these areas, but the faction known as Federalists opposed a written Bill of Rights precisely because they knew that any specific wording would one day be twisted to subvert their intentions. Nobody expressed this concern more eloquently than Alexander Hamilton:

 

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The fiercely anti-slavery Rep. Edward Wade put it more succinctly in 1856:

[The First Congress]…proposed diverse amendments, the chief objects of  

which were to negative all power in Congress, which bad men might claim

to be implied in the original Constitution, to make oppressive laws, or to

wrest from men their inalienable rights. (p. 6, bottom of 2nd col.)

 

Neither Hamilton nor Wade could predict the names of these “bad men” or exactly when they would launch their shameless assault on the Constitution, but they now urge with a semblance of reason that the phrase “well regulated militia” affords a clear implication that the provision against infringing the right to keep and bear arms was intended to vest the national government with power to prescribe regulations concerning that right. The Federalists and opposing Anti-Federalists fought intensely about whether to commit the protection of arms rights to parchment, but their fundamental agreement about the existence of these rights is accepted by academics who aren’t authoritarian frauds. As acknowledged by Professor Adam Winkler, perhaps the most frequently cited expert on this subject (and an exclusively Democratic donor), “implicit in the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists” was the shared assumption that “the federal government should not have any authority at all to disarm the citizenry.”

 

So does this principle result in the “absolute” freedom of schizophrenic minors to carry nuclear weapons into the White House? Of course not. Unworkable chaos as the sole alternative to “common sense gun control” is a strawman, and it’s unfounded for a few reasons. First, weapons of mass destruction are objectively in a class by themselves. Unlike tubes that expel inert projectiles—even rapid-firing, multi-shot versions—WMDs did not exist in the time of the Founders, could not have been imagined by them, and don’t fall remotely within the spirit of any “arms” they could have had in mind for the general population. It is instructive on this point to understand why revered libertarian intellectual Murray Rothbard believed that such weapons “cannot be used in a libertarian manner,” as well as the position expressed by the Cato Institute (through its related site libertarianism.org) that “some restrictions on civilian access to weapons are manifestly necessary.” No sane person has a problem with federal regulation of WMDs under one or more constitutionally granted powers, and the issue regardless falls under the generally accepted idea that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Above all else, someone wealthy and evil enough to obtain and misuse such weapons won’t be deterred by the threat of legal consequences.

 

Second is the key difference between the exercise of a right and its abuse, best understood by the analogy of arms to speech. Just as no serious person complains about being restrained from committing defamation, none complains about being restrained from indiscriminately firing a gun in public—yet gun control extremists almost always contrast “collective right” not with the genuine alternative of “individual right” but instead with what they and they alone refer to as an “absolute individual right” or “unfettered individual right.” In a particularly extreme instance of such intellectual dishonesty, Prof. Saul Cornell supports his declaration that “no right is absolute” as follows:

 

You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, nor can you fire a gun in one.
And most Americans—including those who own guns—are open to reasonable

gun regulation. The only people who oppose such policies are the NRA, extreme

gun-rights advocates, and the craven politicians who do their bidding.

 

The NRA doesn’t merely support the ability of any person to carry any weapon at any place and time, it is so “absolutist” that it even supports the freedom to randomly blast away in a crowd! The organization’s former head Wayne LaPierre appeared to be unaware of all this when he testified under oath,

 

We think it is reasonable to provide mandatory, instant criminal background

checks for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone…

I have been on the record on this point consistently…We think it is reasonable

to prevent all juveniles convicted of violent felonies from owning guns for life…

We think it is reasonable to support the Federal Gun Free School Zones Act…

[and] we support Project Exile, the fierce prosecution of Federal gun laws. 

 

Naturally, this set of polices is known by professional gun control groups as “the ‘guns everywhere’ agenda.” Many arms rights proponents admittedly do reject some or all of the measures endorsed by the NRA, but it’s safe to say that none of them advocate anything like the cartoonish insanity that Cornell and his ilk need you to think they do. Like “collective right” itself, such related lies do nothing but harden gun owners’ resolve against proposals which some might otherwise be open to. So who is it that’s actually derailing good-faith discussion?

 

The last reason it’s unnecessary to fear “absolutism” is that while federal authority to restrict the keeping or bearing of arms never existed at all (unless related to a constitutionally authorized function like suppressing insurrections), the states were originally free to enact any law that didn’t conflict with federal powers. Former slave states used this police power to target Blacks after the Civil War, however, which led to the gradual incorporation of the first eight amendments. Once it was finally the Second Amendment’s turn, the states still had their police power but were now theoretically just as barred from infringing arms rights as the federal government always was. Much confusion naturally ensued from this bizarre situation unanticipated by the Founders, eventually prompting the Supreme Court to issue the guidance that a modern regulation is unconstitutional unless similar “analogues” existed early in American history. 

 

Though not said explicitly, this can be viewed as a method of determining whether a law permissibly targets abuse—if some version of it was passed in or near a time when the Founders were alive and respect for the Constitution was presumably still vibrant, then it is unlikely to be an intrusion on valid exercise of the right. Americans may never fully agree about the proper categorization of all arms-related laws, but respecting historical truth can only increase consensus on how to maximize both freedom and safety. The bottom line is that at least in theory, it is fully constitutional for the abuse of arms rights to be restricted by the states—and if a genuine regulation of abuse can truly be effective only at the federal level, then it will have enough popular support to be legitimized as a new amendment.​​​