A Right, Not a Privilege: Why Every Gun Law Is an Infringement
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From [HERE] Let’s be clear: the Second Amendment doesn’t say, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed… unless the government says otherwise.” It doesn’t carve out exceptions for background checks, waiting periods, or fees. The right to bear arms is exactly that. It’s a right. Not a privilege, not a maybe, and not a “we’ll see.” ‘Keep’ means you can have them, and ‘bear’ means there’s probably at least one on me right now.
Yet here we are, so conditioned to government overreach that we jump through hoops just to exercise something that was never the government’s to regulate in the first place.
We’ve allowed politicians and bureaucrats, many who have never even held a gun, to place a chokehold on our Second Amendment rights. From red flag laws to magazine capacity restrictions, gun-free zones, and mandatory background checks, the list of infringements keeps growing. And somehow, we’ve accepted this. We’ve let them turn a God-given right into a permission slip. Isn’t the government supposed to serve us? Isn’t government overreach and slimy bureaucrats the reason the 2nd Amendment was written in the first place? Now they regulate it?
Take Hawaii, for instance. Here’s a state that says we recognize the 2nd Amendment, we just don’t allow it in our state. They say, “the right of the people to keep and bear shall not be infringed, except for every privately owned public space in the state.”
Let’s revisit the reason we have the 2nd Amendment to begin with. It wasn’t written for deer hunters. It wasn’t about paper targets. The Founders drafted it to ensure that “We the People” had the means to keep a tyrannical government in check. That’s right, to override it if necessary. So how is it that today, we let the very institution the 2nd Amendment was meant to restrain decide how much of it we’re allowed to keep?
It didn’t happen all at once. It was one small restriction after another. A background check here, a magazine capacity limit there. “Common sense” gun laws, they told us. And we gun owners, patriots, citizens, too often just went along with it. Now, we live in a culture where these infringements have become normal, if not expected. That’s the real danger. We’re no longer throwing the tyrants in jail; we’re debating with them about how much of our rights we have to give up.
Imagine James Madison walking into a modern gun shop. He watches an American citizen fill out forms, hand over ID, and wait for government approval to buy a firearm. What do you think he’d say? He’d be furious and he’d be embarrassed that we squandered such an important component of our freedom.
And yet, we barely flinch. In some states, we even need permission to buy ammunition. We obediently wait days or even months to find out if we’re “allowed” to take home a firearm. In too many cases, that delay becomes a death sentence. [MORE]
