Mar 10, 2018 3 min read

I have never owned a gun, I have no plans to, and I support sensible restrictions on gun ownership, especially mandatory background checks.

That said, there are justifiable reasons why the founders created the Second Amendment, and why its language doesn’t give us the right to arm ourselves, but acknowledges that we have always had that right. The language doesn’t say, “The People have a right to keep and bear arms.” It says, “The people’s (long established) right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed (by the government).”

While the main reason the founders created the Second Amendment was to protect us against an oppressive government. Its justification goes back to the Declaration of Independence, which says that the people are “endowed by their Creator” with certain unalienable rights. Chief among those God-given rights is the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and, they being God-given, if anyone tries to forcefully take away our life, liberty or those things we have acquired to achieve “happiness” – family, property, wealth, etc. – we have the right to forcefully defend ourselves, including using whatever “arms” – knife, sword, club, gun – we possess.

Since the beginning of time, before there were governments, people did whatever it took to survive, including robbing and killing others. Thus, it was the right of those “others” to defend themselves however they could. And even when governments were created, they had little power to prevent crimes, only punish them once committed.

This prompted the great English jurist, William Blackstone, to write that individual self-defense was immune “to the laws of society,” especially if the crime was heinous. By that he meant that if the crime was murder, or resulted in irreparable brain damage, or blindness, or other life-altering injuries, then “the laws of society” (the legal process) will be of little after-the-fact help to the seriously injured citizen, and none whatsoever to the dead one. Thus, self-defense – “to oppose one violence with another,” as Blackstone put it – sensibly took priority over punishment.

But regardless of the crime, most all of us would do anything, using any weapon, to protect ourselves, our family and loved ones from harm, and the Second Amendment acknowledges that.

Which is not at all to minimize the pain of our many horrific mass murders, including the most recent in Parkland, Fla. But it is to say that, whatever governmental actions are taken in response, the only way to significantly reduce gun ownership (you will never completely eliminate it) is to pass a constitutional amendment repealing the Second Amendment, and given the reality outlined in this lesson, whether you agree with it or not, that is highly unlikely.

Kauffmann’s e-mail address is bruce@historylessons.net.