When the Framers put the Bill of Rights into place, they did so assuming that Americans were a fundamentally moral people, as presented by American Thinker. John Adams stated that explicitly, saying, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
One element of this assumption was that the people could be trusted with firearms.
Now, though, those in charge of the government presumptively assess Americans as immoral and untrustworthy.
Immediately after the Framers created the Union, they passed the ten constitutional amendments that we call the Bill of Rights. The Framers understood these to be inalienable rights from our Creator. They forbade the new government to infringe on these rights.
Image: High school rifle team; origin unknown. The good ol’ days.
The First Amendment is a moral people’s right to communicate to the government a proper course of action. The Founders knew that government has no morality in and of itself and would depend on moral people to speak and write to redress the errors of government. To be moral, a government must trust the people to develop and guard their moral principles.
The Second Amendment embodies the implied trust that the government should have in the people. There is no greater trust than the trust required when people can possess the means of lethal force without regulation. The people should be trusted because they could be trusted.
The Framers knew that not all people would act morally. To constrain their worst behaviors, they created a judicial system by which the people could judge each other through a jury of their peers.
It has been said that the Second Amendment is necessary to protect the other amendments. That is quite true.
However, the First Amendment also protects the Second. The Founders expected that people would seek the moral teachings of their religious institutions and act upon them — and not just in their speech and in the redress of grievances. They believed that a moral people would handle lethal force in a moral way, whether hunting for food, self-defense, or defending the nation against enemies both foreign and domestic.
The framers had built a system in which free moral people could be trusted to govern themselves. It is the definition of liberty.
Removing liberty from those who prove that they do not have the moral guidance to be trusted is the regulating force to compel people to seek morality. This is compelled moral behavior.
The people could be free except when they proved by their own actions that they should not be completely free. There is a delicate balance here.
The government now seeks to take away people’s liberty first and then force them to prove their morality before they have the government’s permission to be trusted.
The government is making it increasingly difficult to prove morality.
It has been a slow and subtle change, but now the government defines morality.
In theory, since a person might act immorally in the future, a person can never be trusted.
In the past, the left would decry laws made based on morality. “You can’t legislate morality,” they would scream. They were wrong.
A government can define morality based on the demands of a moral people. That is not the government determining morality; it is the government reflecting the morality of the people in its laws.
Today we are increasingly upside-down from the Framers’ intentions.
The government defines morality — it does not reflect it — and the people can never meet the government’s constantly changing definition of morality because the government doesn’t trust the people.
Now a person is guilty until proven innocent.
We do not have permission to speak certain things, and we cannot approach the government with a moral argument to redress grievances.
To make certain that we do not get uppity, they have shown that they are willing to use government force to deny us access to moral teaching which are not from the government.
The greatest example of trust given to the people — the right to bear arms — remains precariously fragile.
The government’s trust in the people, and perhaps soon too the people’s right to bear arms, hangs by a thin thread that can seemingly be severed in a moment.
Maybe the people who back the Second Amendment are correct when they say the Second Amendment protects the rest, but the rest may very well be gone as quickly as the Democrat Communist government wants them gone.
The Second Amendment may be protecting only itself.
What say you Def-Con readers? I found this article and as well as frightening me, it reminds me of the precarious situation we Americans are presently facing–not just we conservative deplorable patriots, but all Americans. Perhaps it is time for a Constitutional Convention to address these and many other issues. Or perhaps reinstatement of conservative leadership and the diminishment of the Democrat Communist party in America will suffice. I can imagine outlawing communism/socialism in America as a good start. These times certainly are becoming “curiouser and curiouser.”
