Re: A Liberal's View of the Right to Bear Arms

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

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> The British may have been responsible for the 2nd Amendment in the first
> place, but you can hardly blame them for it's perpetuation beyond it's
> historical sell-by date. It is a 'right' that sat very comfortably with

Natural rights do not have a sell-by date.  The Bill of Rights is not a 
grant of rights to the people: it is an acknowledgment that certain things 
are *natural* rights, belong to all people.

If, fifty years hence, a horde of Anglican evangelism has seized the globe 
and laws are passed requiring all people to pray in an Anglican church, 
would we be proper in saying that religious freedom--the freedom to 
worship or not worship in the manner you wish--is "beyond its historical 
sell-by date"?

What most Europeans don't understand about the Constitution is that the 
Bill of Rights is entirely unlike every other government charter in the 
world.  It's often been imitated, but to my knowledge no other country has 
ever accepted the most fundamental principle: namely, that natural rights 
exist independent of whether or not the government wants to acknowledge 
them, and this government is explicitly forbidden from ever intruding upon 
a natural right.

Again, this political and judicial principle was given to us by the 
English.  American colonists were free people, lawful subjects of the 
Crown, and they thought they should enjoy all the rights of Englishmen 
back home.  But since the Colonies were established under charter from the 
Crown, King George casually stripped the Colonists of their right to 
worship (Crown v Penn), their right to speak freely (Crown v Zenger), 
their English right to possess arms, their English right to not have 
soldiers quartered in their homes, their English right to be secure in 
their persons, papers and effects...

... The Bill of Rights is not an American invention.  It's an *English* 
one.  It's a partial enumeration of the natural rights which all free 
Englishmen possess, and a recognition that any law the government passes 
which abridges the natural rights of a free Englishman is automatically 
null and void.

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