The Second Amendment Primer by Les Adams

Author:Les Adams
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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Again, however, one does not derive from these observations that each citizen has an uncircum-scribable personal constitutional right to acquire, to own, and to employ any and all such arms as one might desire so to do, or necessarily to carry them into any place one might wish. To the contrary, restrictions generally consistent merely with safe usage, for example, or restrictions even of a particular “Arms” kind, are not all per se precluded by the two constitutional amendments and provisions we have briefly reviewed. There is a “rule of reason” applicable to the First Amendment, for example, and its equivalent will also be pertinent here. It is not the case that one may say whatever one wants and however one wants, wherever one wants, and whenever one likes — location, time, and associated circumstances do make a difference, consistent even with a very strong view of the freedom of speech and press accurately reflected in conscientious decisions of the Supreme Court. The freedoms of speech and of the press, it has been correctly said, are not absolute.

But First and Second Amendment rights are not absolute

Neither is one’s right to keep and bear arms absolute. It may fairly be questionable, for example, whether the type of arms one may have a “right to keep” consistent with the Second Amendment extend to a howitzer.56 It may likewise be questionable whether the “arms” one does have a “right to keep” are necessarily arms one also may presume to “bear” wherever one wants, e.g., in courtrooms or in public schools. To be sure, each kind of example one might give will raise its own kind of question. And serious people are quite willing to confront serious problems in regulating “the right to keep and bear arms,” as they are equally willing to confront serious problems in regulating “the freedom of speech and of the press.”

The difference between these serious people and others, however, was a large difference in the very beginning of this country and it remains as a large difference in the end. The difference is that such serious people begin with a constitutional understanding that declines to trivialize the Second Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment, just as they likewise decline to trivialize any other right expressly identified elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. It is difficult to see why they are less than entirely right in this unremarkable view. That it has taken the NRA to speak for them, with respect to the Second Amendment, moreover, is merely interesting — perhaps far more as a comment on others, however, than on the NRA.

Serious people decline to trivialize any right expressly identified in the Bill of Rights

For the point to be made with respect to Congress and the Second Amendment58 is that the essential claim (certainly not every claim — but the essential claim) advanced by the NRA with respect to the Second Amendment is extremely strong. Indeed, one may fairly declare, it is at least as well anchored in the Constitution

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