Is your right to "keep and bear arms" determined by the existence of the Second Amendment? If a majority of Supreme Court Justices ruled 'the Second Amendment does not protect an individual's right to possess firearms,' would you surrender your weapons -your personal property- to the nearest police station for immediate destruction? Or would refuse and fight to the death any attempt to confiscate your guns?
Many in the gun culture believe that any effort by federal or state government to confiscate our constitutionally-protected right to own firearms would result in an organized and violent resistance. Gun owners, after all, have the Supreme Law on our side.1 But what if the Bill of Rights was written out of existence? Do human rights no longer "legal" mean we no longer have human rights? Can we be jailed, abused, and murdered by a government that simply legislates away our rights? That would entirely depend on our compliance with or refusal to obey such laws. Moreover, it would depends on the ability to prevent such government abuse from ever occurring via possession of firearms.
Earlier this week I was in a meeting when the issue of Obama's "Executive Amnesty for Crime and Terrorism" (gun control) came up for discussion. An elected official in attendance remarked how Obama is attempting to expand definitions of mental illness so more Americans, e.g. veterans being treated for PTSD, can be denied their legally-protected access to firearms.2 Another person followed up with the comment that "such executive orders are violations of the Second Amendment," to which most agreed.
Of course, I kindly reminded everyone that our ownership and possession of firearms is legally protected by the Second Amendment, but our right to guns is bestowed by virtue of our humanity. Total silence ensued. People looked at me as if I had publicly endorsed Hillary for president. For a moment I was confused by all the blank stares, but soon realized why the perplexed looks.
Generations of Americans have been conditioned, through years of government engineering, to believe that a civil right cannot exist unless written into law, and would cease to exist if repealed by a legislature or court.
To the contrary, human civil rights, such as the right to protect yourself from criminal deadly force with firearms (only firearms can defend against firearms), can never cease to exist simply because a government removes it from the document on which it was written. The Bill of Rights to the US Constitution are legal protections of your rights but it is not the reason your rights exist. Your human civil rights are either endowed by your creator (if you believe in creationism) or bestowed upon you, and absolute, by virtue of your humanity.
Although your legal right to keep and bear arms can, as the disastrous history of gun control demonstrates, be legislated out of existence, the human civil right to own and possess firearms, however, is unalienable and inalienable regardless of what laws exist to guarantee that right or are imposed to remove it.
Before "President Hillary" or a government of Yale University grads petition away your legally-protected rights, understand, and teach others to understand, that laws created by a legal or political process can never obviate natural laws regarding our human civil rights to life, liberty, and property; notably the ownership of firearms for protection from criminal deadly force.
1. As liberal anti-gun states like California and New York demonstrate, firearms do not need to be confiscated when constituents allow ownership of and access to guns legislated out of existence.
2. Currently there is no nationally accepted clinical definition of what it means to be "mentally ill." Regarding legislation and public policy "mentally ill" is a political term with different meanings referencing state case laws. The progressive left, rest assured, would expand the definition of "mentally ill" to mean "any private citizen whom feels the need to own a gun."